As part of our whole school learning about our sister faith of Judaism, we took part in a workshop that taught us all we needed to know about the Jewish day of rest called Shabbat. The workshop took us back to our autumn RE, where we had learned that God rested on the seventh day and the Jewish people do this as part of their Shabbat on Friday, going onto Saturday at sunset.
Whole school assembly to launch Judaism Day
What do you know about Shabbat?
We will set our table ready for Shabbat.
We used the yad to read the Torah.
What do you think about this mystery object?
We recognised some stories from the Torah.
Dressed up in a kippah and tallit!
There were so many kippahs to choose from!
Can you find the Hebrew ‘C’?
Hebrew is read from right to left.
There were so many things to learn!
We ended our morning with a liturgy.
The children had great fun exploring the Jewish resources, such as the kippar (cap), Torah (religious text), yad (pointing stick) and tallits (prayer shawl) and showed great respect as they learned about this fascinating religion which has so many connections with the Catholic faith. Our morning ended with our own liturgy where we enjoyed grape juice and challah bread, followed by a whole school assembly where we taught the rest of the school a Shabbat song and found out lots of new things from other classes.
Shabbat candles, shabbat candles. Burning bright, burning bright. Challah on the table, challah on the table, it’s Friday night, Friday night.
On Monday the children sculpted Tutankhamun’s death mask from clay
On Thursday the children painted the tiles, using brilliant blues and golds like in Ancient Egypt.
The finished results look stunning; and are mounted, ready for you all to view on Open Evening.
Learning can be a sedentary affair, increasingly so the older children get. You need to be still when concentrating hard on equivalent fractions, for example. It’s also important, and fun, to break this up with movement. The class likes to dance to i-moves tracks in-between other sessions. This week we’ve all enjoyed dancing to “Count on Me” and “Celebrate”
On Thursday and Friday, year 3, like the whole school, was treated to fantastic interactive learning to help understand Judaism. After a couple of years’ absence, Ruth returned and helped year 3 understand all about the synagogue – what it looks like, contains, what Jewish people do there. The children were able to wear Jewish clothes, explore Torahs (artefacts), learn about Hebrew letters and even eat and drink some traditional Jewish cookies and grape juice. The children created their stained-glass windows, remembering that they must not contain images of God or people. Today, Vincent and Pauric shared what they had learnt with the whole school, presenting their knowledge in confident, expert ways. Year 3 listened beautifully to the contributions by other classes today, too.
Pollination was an important theme this week. In Science we learnt what flowers are for. And on Friday Dr Lyal came in to talk about minibeasts, which is what he spent his career studying. To be specific, he spent his career at The Natural History Museum collecting, categorising and naming weevil beetles.
These are some of the pieces of equipment Dr Lyal uses to collect insects, which has taken him to all sort of exciting places like the jungle in Belize, Indonesia and…. Hertforshire…
Yesterday, he went on safari in his own back garden and collected some minibeasts to show us and talk about. Amongst the huge amount of knowledge shared, the children learnt about the number of legs minibeasts have, the names for different types of minibeasts, why minibeasts are certain colours; and much more.
We talked about the fascination and wonder of nature. There is always something new to learn, question, discover and rediscover. Professions working with animals, plants and other aspects of nature are open to anyone who is interested and commits to understanding the world around us, both by working hard at Science and also in taking any opportunity to explore and understand at home – for instance by doing a bug hunt at home. A magnifying glass or plastic tub with magnifier at one end is a cheap way to explore local minibeasts more easily.
The children have drawn and written a card to say thank you to Dr Lyal which I will post.
The homework is on Google Classroom. Please also remember the RE homework on the Quicklinks.
I hope to see you at the school fair tomorrow. Have a lovely weekend.
As a whole school, we have been learning about the Jewish faith In particular, Year 6 have learned about Rosh Hashanah (The Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur ( The Day of Atonement).
As well as learning about these special and significant Jewish days in class, we took part in a workshop with Ruth, a Jewish teacher who used artefacts and told us of her experiences as Jewish person who celebrates these days.
Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year, which will be celebrated this year on 25th September. It is an opportunity for a fresh start. Before Jewish people ce;ebrate their new year, they ensure that anyone the yave wronged through the year, they apologise to so that when they start the new year they can have a completely new beginning without dragging past wrongs with them.
The day is spent in a celebratory manner with prayer and family time enjoying sweet foods such as apples dipped in honey. This is a symbol to remind us that God’s love is sweet and He provides for us. Pomegranates are used as the seeds represent all the good things we can do for others and to serve God.
The children enjoyed sharing the pomegranate seeds and sharing bread and apples dipped in honey together.
Yom Kippur is ten days after Rosh Hashanah. It is a more solemn day, spent in prayer and fasting for 25 days. The prayers ask God to forgive our sins and to remember the rules He wants us to follow.
A celebratory assembly on Friday, allowed Year 6 to show the school what we had learned. Some children even used the shofar (a ram’s horn) to demonstrate how one of the world’s oldest instruments is used to signal God, the King, is approaching. The shofar is in fact blown 100 times each day of Rosh Hashanah.
Learning about Judaism, a faith in which our own faith is so deeply connected is fascinating. The children were very respectful and interested in knowing more about this religion and culture.
All through the year, the Year 2 children have been caring for the plants growing in the raised beds next door to the classroom.
We have thoroughly enjoyed watching the different insects using the Bee and Butterfly Garden that we created and having grown them from seed, all of our vegetables, including onions, peas and courgettes are busy growing. This week was very exciting as we were finally able to harvest our strawberries and we used them to make milkshakes. They were very delicious!
Every plant was filled with ripe, red strawberries.
Look at that huge strawberry!
What a massive harvest!
We washed the strawberries before we could eat them.
We used the bridge cut when cutting the strawberries.
We poured the strawberries into the jug
Next we added the strawberries, ready to blend them. Unfortunately, the camera stopped working after that, but the milkshakes were very delicious!
What a varied week we’ve had in Year 1 this week. We started the week by focusing on volume and capacity. We really enjoyed experimenting with different containers and lots of coloured water, describing and comparing the capacity of each container using words such as ’empty’, ‘full’, ‘half full’, ‘less than’ and ‘more than’. Keep a close eye out for different containers around your house, describing and comparing their capacity.
We ended the week by learning about Judaism. We had a special workshop to learn about Moses and the Exodus. We also carried on the learning back in the classroom to understand how Moses became the leader of the Israelites. To understand the Exodus story, we also got to try some unleavened bread and dress up like Moses and the Israelites.
The Year 2 children have had a wonderful trip to Ashridge. They were blessed with warm, but not too hot weather and thoroughly enjoyed exploring the habitats there, learning to identify and name a number of trees including sweet chestnut, holly, hawthorn, oak and beech. The children enjoyed exploring the habitat below the logs and leaves and found many minibeasts including centipedes, harvestman spiders and rove beetles. It was a very exciting day and the children were superb, with one parent commenting ‘I am absolutely blown away at how well behaved and engaged the children were today. They are an absolute credit to the school’. We are very grateful to the parents who were able to accompany us to Ashridge, without whom we could not have run the trip.
This week we’re having temperatures to understand what it would have been like in Ancient Egypt. The children enjoyed drawing their plans for the Egyptian death masks they will make. While they did that, they also examined some beautiful replica artefacts – a winged scarab, ushawbti figure which the Egyptians believed would do the work for the deceased in the afterlife and an eye of horus. The children handled them very carefully and were fascinated by the Egyptian beliefs – for example, that the scarab beetle pushed the sun across the sky.
In RHE, the children are learning about living with each other and this week they were working in groups to consider actions which make you feel cared for by others.
I hope you were as proud of the children this morning as I was. They learnt the many words to a complicated song very well, performed the actions clearly and performed everything with the enthusiasm. They did have pictures they’d carefully drawn – of parts of the song, or to show their feelings for their own Dad or God the Father – but we forgot to show them this morning. Here is a photo of them all holding all the drawings.
The class is loving reading and writing rhyming couplets about children who get up to dastardly deeds and come to sticky ends. We’ll finish them next week and start a new book. The learning about fractions has moved into the area of equivalence which is quite tricky but the children listened and reasoned really well in our first session of this.
Well done for coming to school with suntan cream and for those children with caps. Please keep remembering the water. Have a great weekend.
Too hot or too cool to join in with my Dad-dancing in today’s assembly, the children were less reserved in Thursday’s rehearsal and threw some amazing shapes. Relive the magic this weekend with our video…
We are looking forward to our class trip on Tuesday to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. The forecast is currently for sunny intervals and a high of 23 – much more bearable than today’s temperatures, but the children will still need to dress for the weather – sun screen and school caps are a must, as well as comfortable shoes or trainers for all the walking we will do. The children should wear school uniform.
It would be a good idea to pack an extra drink or two for our trip in addition to that included as part of our packed lunch. A small, draw-string style backpack would be a handy way to carry this around, if you already have one.
Please make sure that you have given your child any medication needed – such as travel or hay fever – in plenty of time to ensure that they enjoy the day. Our journey to Kew will take about an hour.
I hope the sun continues to shine over the weekend and that you all have a Happy Father’s Day.
This week, we have made preparations to celebrate our fathers and male role models in our families.
The children have made some lovely Father’s Day cards.
In addition, after a week of practising a song with actions called Thank you Dad, Year 6 enjoyed taking part in the whole school Father’s Day assembly.
Year 6 completed their science topic of electricity by planning and conducting an experiment to discover if the length or number of wires would affect the brightness of a lightbulb in a series circuit. The children worked well together with a partner and showed independence and scientific thinking in their work.
We have begun to work on the summer concert so watch out for that in the coming weeks.
It’s been scorching in Year 1 this week and our learning has been on fire too!
We are really enjoying our new book in English, Iggy Peck Architect. We have had fun creating our own structures out of objects around the classroom, just like Iggy! We’re looking forward to continuing the story next week.
In Maths, we have been focusing on money. We have been learning to recognise notes and coins. In an increasingly cashless society, please make sure you remind and show the children these coins and notes regularly. It was great to hear so many of the children had a money box or a piggy bank too.
We ended the week by taking part in the Father’s Day assembly. We really enjoyed performing our class song and taking part in the whole school singing. We also made some ‘tie-rrific’ cards for our dads/male caregivers too.
