Sandgate Year 5 Blog

As a warm up activity after finishing our class book, Journey to the River Sea, we were set the mission of choosing our favourite scene from the book. In our small groups, we practised acting out the scene and then performed to our classmates. The classmates had to guess which scene was being performed and discuss what happened before and after the scene, developing our reading retrieval and summarising skills.

Dream Home Project

Thank you to all of the children who entered to be a part of the Dream Home project. The Arts Council and Miss Thomas enjoyed looking through everyone designs and it was tricky to narrow it down to just thirty designs!
Today the children taking part in the ‘Dream Home’ project met with Steph from Jenner to receive their boards and have a team talk! All of the children are very excited to be a part of the project and are looking forward to painting their dream homes on the boarding provided. Watch this space to see the finished products in a few weeks!

Turner Portfolio Competition

Here are a few pictures of our semi-finalists this year, Edie-May and Kate.
The girls attended the Turner Contemporary competition finals with their parents and Miss Thomas. The awards were very exciting and it was discovered that, out of over 1000 entries, the girls reached the top 20 for the KS2 category – well done girls!
There was further excitement during the evening when it was revealed that Kate’s entry ‘Portrait of Change’ won a Highly Commended award! Congratulations Kate!
Everyone at Sandgate is very proud of both Kate and Edie-May, as well as everyone who entered the competition last term; it was wonderful seeing you shine! We look forward to seeing what next year’s theme is and seeing all of your brilliant entries.

Harvey Performance Day

Here are some pictures of Year 5 in action at the Harvey Performance Day. It was a wonderful opportunity for the schools in the community to come together and perform to and with each other. Year 5 enjoyed the experience and sounded terrific.

READ ABOUT OUR EXCITING NEW ‘EXHIBITION SPACE’

Our new Sandgate Primary Art Exhibition Space is up in the main corridor, leading off from the School Reception area and it looks amazing already! The idea of the ‘space’ is to celebrate a range of the finished art that children have enjoyed taking part in around the school from Foundation stage to Year 6.  We will be regularly updating this area and displaying new new art work; including ceramics, sewing, sculpture, felt art, drawings, paintings, etchings  and other inspiring creations.

Each child whose 2D works have been chosen has written a little about the drawings and paintings they have produced, describing what inspired them, which artist influenced their work and what skills they were developing and so on. These descriptions have been typed up and are displayed next to each art work.

We know you will enjoy viewing these. With Parents’ evenings approaching, this is an ideal for time for you to enjoy viewing this sample of the wonderfully imaginative work the children have recently created. We congratulate the children whose works have been chosen for the first exhibition:

Isaac (Armadillos), Scarlett (Wolves), Niamh (Meerkats), Tom (Monkeys), Ryan  (Wolves), Ethan (Armadillos), Nyla (Giraffes),

Theo (Armadillos), Molly (Koalas), Eve (Kangaroos), Peter (Giraffes), Ali (Armadillos), Issi (Armadillos), Victoria (Rhinos),

Garrett (Rhinos), Elliot (Wolves), Alannah (Wolves), Praveen (Meerkats), Juliet (Monkeys), Amelia (Monkeys).

A couple of examples of what our resident artists have said about the inspirations for their art pieces:

‘I used shading, smudging and observation skills. I was inspired by WW2 and we used charcoal because of the black out.’(Isaac) 

‘It was really difficult to make a white piece of paper so dark, it took a lot of hard work.  It took a lot of patience to make my picture in the style used by Paul Nash.’  (Alannah)

‘COOL PHYSICS’

Last Thursday, we were really lucky to have a return visit from two Scientists from the University of Kent – an Astrophysicist and a Chemist.

They delighted our Year 4, 5 and 6 children in a ‘Cool Physics’ show , put on in the Main Hall, which focused on all the wonderful things that can be done with Liquid Nitrogen- every schoolboy and girl’s dream! 

Here is a selection of the action in full flow. Who can you spot with their head in the clouds?! . . .

We would like to extend a special thank you to The University of Kent.

Ghost Walk

To kick-start this term’s learning, Year 5 went on a ghost hunt around Folkestone. We visited places that had spooky back-stories and looked for ideas that we could use in our writing and we were equipped with our Magpie books to record these.
After this, we came back to school and wrote some ghost themed poetry. We then sat around our camp fire and performed our poetry to our peers. It was a brilliant start to the term!
Thank you to our parent helpers. 🙂

ART ENRICHMENT DAY 2 – ‘ THE JOURNEY BACK TO UMBUNTU’

On Tuesday 31^st January, we held our second of this year’s three Art Enrichment Days here at Sandgate Primary School.

The themes for this special day were ‘Journeys’, ‘Making a Change’ and ‘Humanity’, with a focus on the values we all share. We talked, as a Whole School, about the experiences of the journeys taken by refugees and migrants, who have fled their own countries due to conflicts happening there. The children gained a better understanding into the terminology of ‘refugee’, ‘migrant, ‘immigrant’ and ‘asylum’. These are terms that are used a lot in our World today and we felt it important that children understand what these mean.

We were very fortunate to have two fabulous visitors in our school to launch the project. We welcomed Alex Ntung, who had to leave his own country of Congo and, later, Rwanda and came to this country over 10 years ago as an asylum seeker himself and is now settled in the UK, working in education, careers guidance and international development. He was joined by Dr. Jonathan Barnes, a former Headteacher and Visiting Senior Research Fellow of Canterbury Christ Church University, who also visits many schools around the country to work together with schools on themes of values, the arts and global citizenship.

Alex and Jonathan led two very well-received Key Stage Assemblies on Tuesday, focusing on what is meant by ‘Umbuntu’ ( it means ‘Shared values and Humanity’ in Zulu and many African languages). They also led workshops across the school, including Djembe drumming and Watercolour Master-classes.

The children were immersed in Art related to the themes and much of this will be displayed in the Main Hall and Small Hall after the mid- term break.

Viking Artefact Museum

To kick off our topic, ‘Viking Warriors’, we had a Viking Artefact Museum set up in our classroom. We had to use our questioning and reasoning skills to suggest what all of the artefacts could have been and how the Vikings would have used them. We also considered what we could infer about the Vikings from studying these artefacts.

Some of the items caused quite some confusion, especially this ‘lucet’. Can you guess what this was and how the Vikings used it?