Welcome to Silver Birch!

For our final Learning Experience this year we will be Movie Making! We will use our knowledge of World War II to create a report about key events from the war. We will be learning about different camera angles and shots, the use of props and costumes, the importance of location and learning about editing and using apps to import sound into our films. We will review different films and understand how and why these are categorised by genre. 

We experimented with different camera angles and shots and thought about what was more effective for different  film genres. 

During Term 6 we will be learning about World War II. We will look at how and why the War started, what countries were involved and the campaigns that helped to protect Britons. We will also learn about the role of women during the war and how they helped support Great Britain. We will discover the significance of propaganda, The Blitz and why people used air raid shelters for protection. We will produce informative texts as an outcome of our learning experience, showcasing our hard work.

We learnt about the main events of the Second World War and ordered these on a timeline. 

We learnt about propraganda and how it influenced women and men during the war. We found out what jobs women had to undertake and created our own propaganda posters for the Women's Land Army. 

We learnt about food rationing during the war. We found out what food was rationed and what people would have eaten on such small quantities. We compared this to our own meals and made our own ration book 

We have been focusing on descriptive writing, we have compared The Blitz attacks in London and the evacuation of millions of children. 

We wrote letters as evacuees home to our families. 

Over the next few weeks we will be learning about abstract art. We will compare the work of different  abstract artists, experiment with mixing colours and using different shading techniques. We will be learning about how the use of shapes and colours can affect emotion and use all of our knowledge to create our own piece of abstract art. 

We painted the colour wheel to show primary, secondary and tertiary colours. We experimented with mixing different colours. 

Here are some examples of our work. We experimented with different sketching techniques such as shading, defining edges and holding our pencil in different ways. 

Take a look at some of our work with contrasting colours, we discovered that using colours that are opposite each other on the colour wheel can make pictures vivid and bold. 

We learnt how artists use colour to portray moods and create atmosphere in their work. We analysed different paintings using our understanding of colour theory. 

We learnt different brush strokes such as scumbling, dry brush and over painting which we will use in our final piece. 

We created a mood board of ideas using shapes, colours, pictures, shading and painting techniques to explore how we would use the shapes and colours to contrast between dreams and nightmares. 

Here is a look at our drafts which we self and peer evaluated to give each other ideas of how we could make our work look more abstract. 

Here are some of our final pieces! We worked very hard to make them look abstract. 

During the beginning of term 5 we will be making cheesecakes as part of our learning experience. We will be taste testing different cheesecakes, trying out different bases and making a New York cheesecake filling. We will create mood boards to show our ideas and designs to make our own cheesecake. 

We wrote our own recipes and chose what base and filling we would like. We followed our recipes to make our own mini cheesecakes! 

For the remainder of Term 4, Silver Birch will be exploring the deepest and darkest depths of our solar system, the planets within it and how it all came to exist! To kick off this experience, we will be having a virtual workshop on the solar system, exploring space from the comfort of our own classroom. Once they have learnt about the solar system, the children will be able to create their very own VR solar system before applying all of their knowledge to writing a non-chronological report on a chosen planet.  Alongside all of this mind-blowing space learning, they will be researching failed space missions in English and creating their own newspaper report on a mission of their choice.  This term is going to be out of this world!

To kick off our new geography learning experience, the children will have the opportunity explore Nepalese culture (including food!) before starting to explore its vast geographic features.  During the experience, we will explore the countries and oceans that surround Nepal  and discover how its human and physical features have generated an economy dominated by tourism! We'll also be exploring the town of Lumbini (birth place of Buddha) and comparing life there to life in Maidstone!

Alongside learning about mummification, we also learnt about burial chambers and what might be buried with the dead and why.  Here are some of our burial chambers with the things we thought an Ancient Egyptian might need in the afterlife.

We had a look at the mummification process and tried to recount the order! We then ordered it and gave detailed descriptions of each stage.

We did some research about the Gods and created a "Wanted" poster for our chosen god!