- Fir Tree Junior School
'Learning and Growing Together'
Home Page- Claire Archer
- Fir Tree Junior School, Radnor Road,
- Wallingford, England, OX10 0NY
- Email: office.2578@fir-tree.oxon.sch.uk
- Tel: (01491) 836341
- Headteacher: Mr M Knight
The Arts
Welcome to The Arts at Fir Tree
Music, Dance, Drama, Art, Craft, and Design Technology
We hope you enjoy sampling the range and variety of the Arts on offer at our school. We have a dedicated team of young Arts Ambassadors who coordinate and organise events and activities in school and in the wider community. There is a busy schedule of events for the year ahead which we will endeavour to capture on here!
Information for Parents about the Arts Curriculum
An 'Eggciting' Easter Competition - Decorate an egg either as a character, pattern, or represent the Easter story.
A festive themed competition - decorating a tree as a Christmas song
Class competition time! Give your classroom door an Autumn theme. Arts Ambassadors will be the judges.
Year 5 Djembe Drumming
Chestnut Class enjoyed their first Djembe drumming lesson with percussion teacher Mr Price; we focused on learning how to create a range of sounds from the drum by varying the part of hand we used and the place we struck the drum.
Mr Price helped us to practise 2 basic notes called the bass and the slap; the bass is the lowest pitch and the slap is the highest pitch. We discovered that when the drum is struck with our hand, the skin reverberated and the shape of the hollow drum acted as amplifier; the sound was projected out of the bottom of the shell.
Then, we investigated creating rhythms with a mixture of long and short beats. We divided into 3 groups, each with their own rhythm, and practised how to layer these on top of each other to play in an ensemble. The lesson ended with a fun echo game where we had to repeat the rhythm Mr Price gave us, as long as it wasn’t ‘Don’t Play This One Back’. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves can’t wait until the next session!
Just some of the exquisite crowns made to celebrate and mark the coronation
Collages of King Charles
Arts Ambassador's 3D Easter competition - the judges had a very tricky time choosing a winner! Well done to everyone who entered.
Arts Ambassadors Christmas Table Decoration Competition
Christmas Table Decoration
These are just some of the exquisite entries for the Christmas card competition to be judged by MP David Johnston. Spot the local theme that many of the cards have!
Year 6 War Silhouettes
Our Year 4 children learn cornets with an expert, Mr Browne, from the Oxfordshire County Music Service.
Book Characters Competition Winners - These pictures were turned into canvasses and are on display in the library. The competition was kindly judged by Mr Bowen, Head of Art at Wallingford School.
Our Year 5 children learn how to play the guitar with Julia Hogan, another expert musician.
In Design and Technology, we have been creating our own marble runs. We have had to think about how the construct large structures initially and how to ensure we created enough stability in the base. We then started to construct the first stage of our marble runs using the techniques we had practiced. The next stage was to consider how to form joins and progress into building bridges between towers. Next we looked at creating bends in bridges using a variety of techniques. Finally, we put all the elements of the marble run together and you can see our creations on the Cherry page of our website.
Year 5 - Body artwork showing movement
Year 6 - Sewing project to develop skills for making slippers
During our ‘Take One Tale’ project, Chestnut Class have enjoyed exploring one of the most famous Greek myths of all time – the tale of the Trojan Horse. To develop our knowledge of this fantastic story, we using storytelling techniques including drawing story maps to helps us recall the events of the story and stepping the story out to deepen our own re-telling.
To develop our DT skills, we had the idea of making our own Trojan Horses. To be as Nature Smart as we could, we re-used materials that had been thrown away at home (card boxes, rolls, plastic packaging).
We followed a clear process when making our horses:
- Plan – What are we making? What’s the purpose of it?
- Design – What will it look like? What materials will we use?
- Method – How will we make it? What steps will we take?
- Make – Use our measuring, cutting, attaching skills to construct our model.
- Evaluate – What went well? How well did we meet our purpose? What would we improve?
These were some of our learning reflections:
“I learned how to use a clamp to hold a tube l in place so that I could safely cut a roll to size using a junior hacksaw. It was fun to use a real saw!”
“I was really pleased I got my horse to roll using sticks and bottle tops – it took a few tries to work out how do it but I got there in the end!”
“I made my horse move using a motor I attached to the wheel rods, I was really happy it worked!”
“My horse’s legs were a bit wonky so I cut them to all be the same length and now it’s much better.”
Year 4 Design and Technology - Tudor Houses
Year 4 Shakespeare Portraits
"We got better at looking really closely at the detail."
" I am really proud! Mrs Giles said this is the best art I have ever done!"
"I kept improving the position of the eyes and their shape. I needed to add the eye lids."
"I needed to remember that the shoulders are wider than the head."
" I took ages to do the hair but it is really effective."
Project Work Learning in Year 5
(Please see tablet above)
"My artwork is a stone tablet that Mayans could have placed on a wall to add decoration. I used clay to make it. The pictures on there are a turtle and on its shell is the image of a person which I think depicts their way of life. Mayans would have used stone chisels and mallets made of wood to carve it."
Year 5
A snap of artwork across the school
Work across the school based on our Take One Picture Projects
We enjoy and value receiving comments about our performances.
Christmas Craft Fayre Makes
Some of the Art on display around school
Potato Competition
Art Competition Panto Pictures
Autumn Art Competition Entries
A walk around school .......
Fabulous entries for the 'Bottle Art' competition
The Christmas crafts made by each class for our fayre
Year 3 Observational Leaf Drawings
Some of the 'Spooky' art competition entries........
Fruit and vegetable monsters competition at the school fete
A glimpse of the Arts around school in May
Some of the amazing entries in the 'Under the Sea' Art competition
Some of the fantastic Christmas table decoration entries
Our Christmas Craft Fayre Makes
Autumn Art competition entries - animals preparing for hibernation
Working on a project with Mr Knapp based on Islamic Art
Take One Picture
Shakespeare
Garden on a Plate Competition
Photos of our crafts made for the summer fete
A snap shot of the art curriculum in May
A snap shot of the art curriculum being covered in April......
Music at Fir Tree
BBC Ten Pieces
Below is a link to the BBC Ten Pieces website. This was an initiative last year to get more Classical music back into school. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01vs08w
At Fir Tree, each year we have nearly a week whereby each class studies a piece of Classical music in depth to understand about the composer and the times they lived in. They analyse and explore the sounds and effects in the music, create their own sounds and response to the music, practise and perform it then evaluate the effectiveness of their work. This can be achieved in many cross curricular ways.
Music Glossary
Drama at Fir Tree
Drama is explored through many curriculum subjects as well as a subject within it's own right. We believe that harnessing creativity through drama develops self confidence, imagination, empathy and social skills.
Children explore many techniques such as; mime, improvisation, hot seating, freeze frame, conscience alley, Professor-know-it-all, thought tracking, flash forward, and flash back, to name but a few.
Our productions that we put on twice a year are exceptional! Year 4 traditionally put on a production in term 2 and Year 6 in term 6. Children are involved with ticket and programme design, lighting, sound effects, special effects, costume design, scenery and prop making in addition to acting and singing. Year 3 traditionally perform in the church at Christmas.
Each year we also hold 'museum' times for parents and friends to attend school to see what we have learned about particular projects. This is an opportunity for our children to be expert museum curators and for them to talk and demonstrate about a particular aspect of the subject that interests them.
Art, Craft and Design at Fir Tree
Book Character competition for library
Art Glossary
The winners were Laura, Charley, Holly, Sophia, Alicia and Jed. Well done to all of you!
Right at the end of term, Naz, an international Artist came to lead an assembly on her artwork and discussed her techniques and inspiration with the children. Later, some children from each class were selected to take part in a special workshop with her exploring ideas and techniques around cubism.
Term 3 has been another busy term across the school! Upper School have thrown themselves into learning all about China and explored it through drama, dance, music and art.
Pupils have made Chinese terracotta warriors from clay after learning about Chinese emperors. Notice how each figure has a different expression and clothing!
Below is some of the impressive work that can be seen around school.
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
Well done to Lower School for a fantastic production! We were extremely proud of your professionalism throughout!
The winners of the Mixed Media Art competition......
BBC TEN PIECES
Term 2 started with all classes taking part in the BBC's Ten Pieces.
Ash Class have CONNECT IT by ANNA MERIDITH! It is a fantastic piece of music and we were able to watch clips of Anna taking about how she composed the piece without any instruments. After we listened to the piece we were able to make some of the sounds ourselves - instead of writing a graphic score we took photographs to show the notes!
