Surrey Teaching Centre

at The Children’s Trust

Summer Term 2019

Newsletter

Blue Class

During Children’s Art Week 8th-16th June, we worked on a number of creative activities.

Some pupils wrote a story that

linked Art Week to our topic work

on rainforests. In the story, they

were able to climb beyond the

picture frame and into a painting of

a tiger in a tropical storm by

Rousseau.

We looked at

artwork from

Africa and made

our own animal

masks.

Science: Our World

We loved having the ducklings in our class. We were able to watch the eggs in the incubator

as they hatched into wet, wobbly ducklings! It didn’t take long for the ducklings to fluff up

and start to eat and drink. After only a few days, the ducklings started to swim and splash

around. They made a lot of mess! We wrote descriptions, information booklets and even worked

on duck maths. It was lovely to have so many visitors to our classroom

This term, we have undertaken a variety of scientific experiments. There was so much rain

when we made our rain gauges that we were able to practise our skills in measuring volume

well.

We enjoyed building

circuits, making light

bulbs flash and sirens play

a variety of tunes. We

even made a fan spin so

fast that it flew. All went

well until it flew onto the

classroom roof!

World Environment Day 5th June

Maths: we have worked on ordering the months of the year, counting, addition,

multiplication, taking away and much more…….

It has been interesting learning about Wimbledon as part of our work on British Values.

We tried hard to understand the scoring and

were able to look at the way in which the

clothes worn to play tennis at Wimbledon had

changed over the years. We worked together

to make a model of a tennis court. It was quite

difficult to copy the markings of the court

onto our sheet of cardboard and we had to

think about the best order to do things. Our

Wimbledon maths was fun – we had to

calculate how much money we would need to

buy tickets, strawberries and lemonade!

Yellow Class

In Yellow Class we have explored Our World through several topics. We started the term with

a Garden Week. We learned about how plants grow by putting bean seeds into bags on our

window and we used scented herbs to paint pictures. Our next topic was The Farm, we really

enjoyed meeting the ducklings and finding out all about them. We tried lots of sensory

activities including milking a ‘cow’!

During the second half term, Yellow Class

enjoyed learning all about the seaside. We

explored a range of sea creatures, shells,

pebbles and fished in a rock pool. Some

children loved the smelly, slippery seaweed

and others enjoyed the water and sand. We

made rafts and tested them to see if they

floated and we practised our motor skills

playing pirates.

Yellow Class also enjoyed Children’s Art Week. We looked at the work of famous artists. We

looked at how Picasso, Kandinsky and Matisse, used shapes and colour in their work and

explored some of their techniques to make our own pictures.

Orange Class

Our topic this term has been Our World and we have explored the geographical and cultural

aspects of different ecosystems. We started by looking at desert nomads and made an

olfactory collage using ingredients in desert nomads’ drinks such as tea, coffee, ginger and

cardamoms.

We’ve also explored desert music; listening to the musicians Tinariwen and the sounds of

desert instruments (or as near as we could find!) including the qanun and the oud.

We listened to a desert

poem and then explored

related items such as sand

(obviously!) and the sound

of desert animals; a camel

and a snake.

When we were looking at the Grasslands, after exploring black and white images and tactile

stripes, we made a piece of canvas art with a zebra-inspired pattern.

A focus in one of our SMSC

sessions this term was the

Buddhist festival of Wesak:

we visited our own ‘Buddhist

temple’ and explored related

artefacts and symbols.

Everyone has been involved

in personal projects and

activities based on their own

interests; favourites have

included football, especially

Manchester United, and pet

animals.

Red Class

In English we have read a wide range of books and plays including ‘An Inspector Calls’, ‘Jekyll

and Hyde’, ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘The Hundred Mile an Hour Dog’. We have written character

studies and analysed language. Some students have developed their use of a range of

different writing styles such as descriptive writing, instructions to make their favourite

sandwich or persuasive writing for an advertisement.

In science we investigated a range of topics from the differing melting rates of chocolate,

evaporation rates and also how to keep warm.

In our chocolate experiments

we discovered the slowest

melting chocolate was the

very dark chocolate and this

was because of the higher

percentage of cocoa content.

However, in our taste test

that was the chocolate that

people liked the least and we

decided that chocolate lollies

made from this chocolate

would not sell well!

Evaporation happens when atoms

or molecules escape from the

liquid and turn into a vapour.

Sport has been popular this term in Red Class and we played football or basketball every

Monday as well as a tennis afternoon to celebrate Wimbledon.

We researched personal interests and combining text and images made a range of

presentations about the things that interested us such as Hot Rod Racing, Football, Friends

the TV programme and cooking.

We would like to finish by saying a big thank you to pupils, parents, therapists, carers and

all other staff for your support and wish you all a very happy summer from all the staff at

the Surrey Teaching Centre.