Silver Birch Class

2022-2023

Welcome to Silver Birch class. 

Our teachers are Mrs Jackson and Mrs Downs and and our class TA's are Mrs Bailey and Miss Peecock .  

Our class page will contain lots of information about things we are doing and learning about in Silver Birch.

In the event of self-isolation or further lockdown

In the event of your child needing to self isolate, please use the links above that your child can do in any of the subjects. In the event of our class bubble isolating or a school closure lockdown, we will be using Teams online. Your child will need their user name and password to access Teams. 

We started our new topic on The Circulatory System this week and in order to fully understand what our heart does and how it feels we had the opportunity to dissect one. The children found it fascinating and although you can see some funny expressions in the photos they all really enjoyed the chance to handle a heart and be able to physically locate the different parts.

We had a brilliant session skateboarding this morning where we learnt new skills and became so much more confident using a skateboard.

'I couldn't  keep my balance at the start but by the end I was wheeling all around the playground'  Ellie

'I have not been on a skateboard before and by the end I was so close to doing the flip trip. I didn't think I would ever be that good on a skateboard.' Nilah

'I hadn't ever really done skateboarding before so I improved my balancing and moving around on it' Tallulah

'I was nervous when I tried the flip trip as it was only my second time on a skateboard, but ended up demonstrating it to the whole class which made me feel very proud' Rosie

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Yesterday, we were very lucky to have an Egyptian expert come into our class. We were able to study a range of artefacts and use our detective skils to try and work out what the objects were, why they were important, who they might have belonged to and how might they have been used. 

 Our classroom turned into an 'Ibu' (embalming workshop) yesterday as a famous embalmer: Amunsiandowns - embalmer to the rich and famous - led a workshop on embalming. You'll be pleased to hear that all 28 students passed with flying colours and are now proficient in the art of mummification. They extracted the brain with precision and removed the inner organs with expertise. They will soon be releasing the Silver Birch guide to mummification, which is sure to top the best seller list!

It's vital to learn basic first aid because you never know when you might find yourself in an emergency situation. We learned an important acronym D.R.S.A.B.C to help us remember the steps if we ever find ourselves or someone near us needing help. We also learned what to do in a situation when someone is choking or if you scald yourself. Thank you to the I.M.P.S team for our informative session.

 We had a fantastic visit to the Ashmolean museum in Oxford recently. We loved exploring the Egyptian gallery and learned many new facts. Read our recounts below to find out more about our day.

 Silver Birch enjoyed making their versions of canopic jars using clay. We have been researching mummification and discovered that when the organs were removed from the body, they were placed into canopic jars, representing the four sons of Horus. The children were given a choice of using the coil technique or the thumb technique to sculpt their pots. Mrs Downs was really impressed with the variety of shapes that the children moulded. One of the hardest things to do was to blend any attachments that the children added to their pots - we realised it's much easier to carve into the clay. Who knew that Silver Birch were so practically smart? The level of detail is astounding - any pharaoh would be impressed with such professional looking clay canopic jars. 

 We are learning about 3D shape, particularly their properties (faces, edges and vertices). We were asked to be detectives to see how many different nets we could make for each 3D shape. Using visualization skills, we had to gauge whether our net would fold to make the shape we were investigating. We found plenty for the cube and Vi and Alesha found 6 for the triangular prism. Evie and Rosie could only find 3 for the triangular pyramid - tetrahedron and we think this is because this shape only has 4 faces. How many nets for a square based pyramid did Max, Angus and Finn find? Have a close look through the photos above to find this out.

This week 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

 The Dreidel game is a Hanukkah tradition that is played by families to win gelt (chocolate coins). It reminds the Jewish people of the time when they were forbidden to read the Torah, according to the evil tyrant, Antiochus 1V. Each side of the dreidel has a symbol: Nun, Hay, Shin and Gimmel which translates as: A great miracle happened here.  

 Hanukkah, which is the Jewish festival of light, is celebrated for eight days and eight nights. The Jewish people remember the victory of  the Macabees over the evil tyrant, Antiochus (the King of Syria). Here are a few examples of our story maps to help us recall the story behind this religious festival.

As part of our science project on light we looked at reflection and how it is used in everyday life. We looked at how the light ray, which is called the angle of Incidence hits the surface and bounces of at an angle of 45 degrees to create the angle of reflection. 

One of the ways that light angled in a certain way is used is to see over the top of a surface, such as in the trenches or in a submarine, is by having a perisocpe. The children worked in pairs to create their own periscopes which really helped them understand why the position of the mirrors is so important in order for them to work.

We have been working really hard in our maths lessons and have covered a wide variety of topics. Here are an example of some of the things we have been learning: The properties of quadrilaterals (such as parallel lines, diagonal lines and angles),  solving problems involving fractions - the children made their own posters to help them remember each of the rules and then moving on to finding percentages of amounts and that by knowing how to find a few of the main ones (1%, 10%, 50%) they can find the percentage of any amount. 

 After writing our non chronological reports, we read and analysed a range of WW1 themed poems. There was a collection of rhyming and non rhyming, some were well known e.g. 'In Flander's fields' and others were less well known. We worked collectively to create a class poem before working in pairs to write our own. 

 Using polystyrene tiles, we scored our poppy image onto it before painting. Some children chose to score one poppy image and others wanted to fill their tile with hundreds of poppies. After painting, we printed our tiles and we are pleased with how effective they look. We learned that we had to paint fairly quickly as the paint tended to dry before some of us could print. Some children wanted to paint their poppies red to commemorate those who sacrificed their lives in WW1 and some chose white (to promote peace) and purple (to remember the animals that have been victims of war). 

 We enjoyed using watercolours to create our sunset backgrounds. This gave us a great contrast for our silhouette art images of WW1. 

 We are loving our badminton session with our coach, Jamie. Jamie is one of the top 200 players in the country and he is so passionate about his sport that he travels around schools to share his love of badminton and introduce children to this amazing sport. Today, we worked on lunging because there's a lot of balance involved when playing badminton. We learned that there are two different types of hold and we practiced our backhand and forehand. Then, Jamie challenged us to hit the shuttlecock through the gaps in the chairs. Guess what...Vi, Alice and Cian managed to do this (they even beat Jamie! Shh!)

 Macbeth

We watched a rap to generate the S2S for writing our own. Then, we created a bank of rhyming words linked to the story of Macbeth. Working in small groups, we began to retell the story in a rap format and finally we got to perform it for our audience. 

Silver Birch had fun experimenting with different word cloud shapes to represent the story of Macbeth. We discussed character adjectives and came up with some super adjectives to describe Macbeth's character: power-crazed, greedy, ruthless, disloyal... we also talked about the main themes from the play - revenge, power, guilt, insanity, loyalty and betrayal. Above is one of our examples.

We had some important visitors into class last week - Banquo, Lady Macbeth, one of the guards and a minstrel were interviewed by some astute detectives, using a range of open questions, to see if we could unveil the truth about King Duncan's murder. Lady Macbeth put on an oscar winning performance and the poor guard didn't stand a chance! 

Of course we had to let the people of Scotland know that the King was dead and his sons had fled overseas. The guilty guards of Glamis were not given a chance to explain why they were covered in King Duncan's blood. We looked at a range of headline techniques including rhyme, word play (puns) and alliteration. We revisited the rules for punctuating direct speech so that we could punctuate our eyewitness statements perfectly. Watch out people of Dunsinane because as Rosie says in her article: It's Treason Season!

We stepped into Macbeth's shoes when we wrote our diaries, imagining what his inner thoughts might be. Should he commit treason to prove to his wife that he does not lack ambition; he is not 'lily-livered' as she proclaims. King Duncan is like a father-figure to Macbeth and his whole adult life has been spent protecting him...

Doubts tortured Macbeth like scorpion's stings - what will he do?

Today with Mel in the garden, group 3  planted a grenadine tree that was donated by Root 1. They had to work together to dig a hole, give the plant some food and plenty of water. Another group planted a Morello Cherry tree that Jenny bought for the bargain price of £2.50 from Wilko's - thanks Jenny for your kindness. Not only do you volunteer on a weekly basis but you also keep a look out for produce and materials that we can use in our school garden. After all the digging, everyone tried some sorrell - its bitter flavour was not a favourite with Silver Birch but well done everyone for trying something new.

Silver Birch started their new school year by learning about Paul Cezanne's painting: ' Still Life with Apples.' We learned that Cezanne used a particular type of brush stroke when painting and we tried to emulate this technique in our paintings. A Still Life picture shows us a collection of things that don't move, often flowers, fruit and other everyday objects. Cezanne painted a lot of Still Life paintings in his studio in France. This enabled him to experiment and find new ways of looking at familiar things.

Silver Birch decided to investigate apples and become experts. We have learned so many fascinating facts which we presented in non-chronological reports. In addition to this we taste-tested a variety of apples and discovered that the class favourite is...the Granny Smith - luckily this is the healthiest apple you can eat!

Finally, after conducting a fair test to discover how we could prevent the inside of the apple from turning brown, we made our own apple juice and pressed a grand total of 62 litres (enough for the whole school to taste!) Everyone agreed it was refreshingly delicious.

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