Swan Class

Welcome to the Swan Class Page! This is where you can find out about what we’ve been up to recently in Swan Class, read our newsletter and see some examples of our work.

Class Teacher:

Adrienne Wrigglesworth

Leanne Bell

Speech and Language Therapists:

Ceri O’Connell

Caylin Hall

Learning Support Assistants:

Jayne Jones

Sonia Loggia

As part of our learning journey as a UNICEF Rights Respecting School, we agreed a class charter to help us to be the very best learners and globally-aware citizens that we can be.

After lots of discussion, we settled on Article 3 Best interests of the child as our umbrella right. Then we chose Article 12 Right to be heard, Article 29 Right to an education and Article 31 Right to relax and play.

Everyone in the class has signed up to our charter, making sure that everyone is doing their best to TALK, LEARN and GROW.

The Children were learning about Cuba in Journey Around the World with Mary. These are an traditional doll made in North America. The children wound yarn around card to make the shape and had to learn braid to make the arms and legs.

Our topic in Children Around the World this term is Comparing the UK with China. Before half term we learned that there are many physical features in the UK such as river, hills, mountains and coastlines. We looked at familiar towns and cities and researched what these are like including York, Guildford, Chessington and Modbury.

We visited the village of Ewhurst in the Surrey Hills where we studied physical and human features of an English village. We did a traffic survey, learned all about the bells in the church of St Peter and St Paul and found the village shop. We had a lovely walk by the allotments and through some farmland to Sayers Croft where we had great fun doing some archery. Our Year 6 children will be going on their residential journey to Sayers Croft in the Summer term.

In the second half of the Autumn term, we are comparing the UK with China, looking at the geographical and cultural similarities and differences.

In Maths, we made space rockets to see whose would travel the furthest. We measured the distances using a metre stick and made a bar graph on Purple Mash.

We are using Chatta, an interactive storyboard-maker that helps the children to develop as “attentive listeners, confident speakers and fearless writers!” In Science we made a CHATTA chat about pushes and pulls.

As part of our Super Skills learning we visit Addlestone library each month. Everyone chooses their books and then they have to return ones they have borrowed and issue the new ones independently – THINK FOR YOURSELF Swan Class!

It is so relaxing spending time with a good book and sharing our reading with our friends. We definitely recommend this as a way to help our wellbeing.

This half term we are starting a new story The Chinese Emperor’s New Clothes by Ying Chang Compestine. Mind Da is only nine years old when he becomes the Emperor of China. His ministers take advantage of the boy emperor by stealing rice, gold and precious stones. But Ming Da has a plan. He orders his tailors to make him ‘magical’ new clothes that only honest people can see. Can Ming Da outsmart his ministers and save his country?

Swan Class are learning to think about current issues such as refugees settling in the UK from Afghanistan, gender stereotyping and children’s rights. We talked about how all children have equal rights under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

This week we are learning to share other people’s opinions. We have learned that we need to listen really carefully to our friends’ ideas so that we can summarise them and retell them. We talked about secondary schools re-introducing masks in the classroom and had a very interesting discussion whilst wearing masks ourselves. It made communication very tricky and were not popular at all.

Superskills presentation for home heroes

In Swan Class, we are working hard on our targets to develop our independence, become effective communicators and grow as responsible individuals. Our targets are taken from the Meath School Talk, Learn, Grow curriculum intent and help us to focus on ways in which we can build our resilience in our learning. We share these at the beginning of each learning session as part of our introduction including the WALT (We are Learning To) when we take it in turns to lead the class in Colour Words (see the Meath School specialist approaches).