Welcome to Cherry Class 2022/23

Tag-Rugby : Cherry vs Silver Birch

On Friday17th March, Cherry and Silver Birch split into various teams to compete against each other in a mini tag-rugby tournament. There were two groups overall and each team played against teams in the same group. We learnt a lot about working as a team and showing rugby values in victory and in defeat. In the end, the Silver Birch Sharks won Group A and the Silver Birch Saints won Group B. Well done to the two Silver Birch sides - Cherry will be back stronger next time! 

On the 18th of January, we went to Wallingford School to participate in a Sportshall Athletics tournament. We competed incredibly well and truly excelled during the sprints. We had 6 different sprinting events against 4 other schools and we won every single one. The team encouraged one another and gave each other a huge boost throughout the duration of the afternoon. At the end of the afternoon, we were awarded 2nd place overall. We were a little disappointed as we felt we had done enough to win but it was so tight at the top, we missed out by the slimmest margin of points - no doubt this will make them all the hungrier at the next tournament! Myself, Mrs Bailey and Mrs Jackson were incredibly proud of the team - I believe it is one of the best athletics performances we've given and each member should be pleased with how they performed. 

As part of our project on Ancient Egypt, we went to the Ashmolean Museum for a day of exploring and learning how to be Egypt detectives! We began by doing a session with a specialist all about the Egyptians, we held artefacts and hunted for more information. After the session we had lunch and then set off again in smaller groups to explore the rest of the museum. We had an amazing day and thoroughly enjoyed the Egypt workshop.

On Wednesday the 18t of January, Cherry had their IMPs session. IMPs taught us how to look after ourselves in a safer way and what to do to minimize injuries and how to look out for others. We learnt all about what DRS ABC means and how to use that in an emergency situation. 

Hanukkah Cooking

In Cherry, we have been learning about traditions during the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. One of the most popular traditions is making oily foods. These foods are cooked in oil because of the story of oil outlasting its one-day capacity and burning for 8 days instead. The Jewish people therefore make sufganiyot (jam doughnuts) and latkes to remember this story. We decided to take this one step further by firstly designing our own doughnuts and then matching them to the designs. They then created packaging for their doughnuts and evaluated the process at the end of the mini-project. 

World War I Project

This term our project is World War I. We have been learning about the causes of the war and several of the crucial parts such as the trenches, women's roles, the Battle of the Somme, propaganda, and training for the war. 

In Cherry, we read poems such as 'In Flanders Fields' by John McCrae, 'Dulce et Decorum Est' by Wilfred Owen and 'The Owl' by Edward Thomas. We were amazed by how different they all were and the impact they each had on us as readers. Many felt the guilt and anguish in 'The Owl', almost everyone felt the shock and horror of 'Dulce et Decorum Est' and the sadness and longing of 'In Flanders Fields'. In response we wrote some poems of our own - I wonder if you can tell which of the three poems inspired this one the most. 

Macbeth Project

In our Shakespeare project, we have been stepping in a character's shoes as we’ve explored the murder of King Duncan from the perspective of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Banquo and the guards. We used drama and role play to imagine we were asking these characters questions and using their responses to inform our subsequent questions. We then put what we had recorded into a newspaper report and typed some of them up. 

As Macbeth is known as 'The Scottish Play', we dug a bit deeper into Scotland and explored some links to Scotland in more detail. One area we looked into was the national flower which is the thistle. We decided to use the thistle as inspiration for our artwork and did some detailed sketches - we focussed on tone and shading to try and bring a seemingly simple flower into life. We were very pleased with the results which you can see below. 

We have been doing double-page spreads on themes within Macbeth - we identified some common threads within the story and recorded the details underneath. We got the opportunity to choose the themes and present it in a way that would be visually pleasing.

Take One Picture

Over the last 2 weeks we have been looking at 'A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas' by  Claude-Joseph Vernet. We have been using this painting to inspire our writing work and our art. In writing, we wrote poems and descriptive pieces linking to the painting. See some examples below:

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