Under the Sea

News

25th September 2020

WOW! We’ve had a fantastic start to the year with everyone fully immersed in our whole school topic, ‘Under the Sea’. Both staff and pupils have thoroughly enjoyed exploring life in the water and discovering weird and wonderful sea creatures and unusual plants whilst also investigating the impact that global climate change and plastic pollution has had on our ocean wilderness.

Enchanted Forest

We have read Commotion in the Ocean to find about the different creatures that live beneath the sea. We have also read The Rainbow Fish to understand the importance of sharing with our friends as well as creating our own colourful fish. We enjoyed a special visit from Nemo; he had so much fun playing with the children that he wanted to stay all week! We have used magnifying glasses to look at shells, seaweed and sand in our rock pool and caught lots of fish!

Neverland

Oceans in a bottle in Science. We created our own ocean in a bottle using oil, water, food colourant, sand and shells and finding out about different habitats of sea creatures.

We also created our own version of the Rainbow Fish whilst discussing our feelings using the mood monster story to open up conversations/feelings (whilst listening to ocean music/whale songs).

Narnia

In English Narnia read poems written about the seaside. We used our learning powers of “empathy” and “noticing” to talk about how the poems made us feel as well as finding interesting words and phrases in the poetry. We shared memories of spending time at the seaside too. We then used all of our ideas to create an anthology of poetry.

In art we used “noticing” again to look closely at patterns on different types of fish and develop skills of drawing using pen. These were useful when, in the following week, we created backgrounds of seascapes using tissue paper and created a fish tile to print on our backgrounds. We particularly enjoyed getting messy using mod-rock to create model of fish. Some were huge!

In reading we explored non-fiction texts. We used the book “Life on Earth: The Ocean” as inspiration to create our own lift the flap question and answer information pages.

Hogwarts

In Year 6, their writing focused on the big question ‘Is plastic important?’ which examined plastic pollution in our oceans and how it impacts upon our lives. The children argued for and against the topic and although, they agreed that single use plastic caused major damage, they also thought that some plastic plays an important role in our lives and if disposed of and recycled properly it can be beneficial.

In Year 5, the children brushed up on their descriptive skills as they focused on writing a ‘oceanscape’ description. This involved them focusing on their use of adjectives, powerful verbs, adverbs and openers. Their descriptions were very imaginative and definitely worth a read.

Their afternoon sessions focused on Ocean Geography. These included identifying and describing the world’s oceans, describing and labelling marine features around the UK, the layers of the ocean and a fact file on the animals within the different layers of the ocean.

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