We are making lots of learning resources about the London olympics. We are hoping that children from around the world will play and learn from our resources.

Congratulations to Kelly. We are so proud of her. On Friday she went to the London Mayors office to play the violin and to receive the above certificate. She has won a four year scholarship from the London Major.

A big thank you to Broadus Wood School in USA for all of their fantastic comments on our blog.

Yesterday MrG went to a big computer show for teachers in London. He met MrG from Trevithick School, our quadblogging partner. They discussed lots of ideas and are making arrangements for the children to Skype next week.

My new christmas friend… on Storybird

Well done to Olamide, Daniel, Morede, Korede and Amina for working on this presentaion over the weekend about being a Rights Respecting School.

This week we wrote three stories based on a book by Chris Van Allsburg, called Harris Burdick. It contains wonderful pictures to inspire our writing. We were concentrating on using a wide range of punctuation. We wrote comments on each others stories, and fifteen children were put in the achievement book.

Thank you to Martin and Mr Button at the BBA for giving us the opportunity to try trampolining. It was fantastic fun, but very difficult and bouncy!

We studied some still life paintings by Cezanne. We then produced pencil sketches and then paintings. It was great fun.

We got some fantastic letters from Mrs Pedersen’s class in Denmark. They wrote letters and made a presentation about their favourite sports, and athletes taking part in the Olympics.

We will be exchanging Christmas cards and sharing our Christmas traditions,

We used a paint program to draw portraits of ourselves. We drew on top of a photo of ourselves; it helped us to look carefully at our face and recognise where to draw lines and shade.

Today we had a filmmaker in our classroom. She was filming the children working on a research project about the future of books. We were also joined by three wonderful adults (Norman, Ann and Chris). they watched and questionned the children as they explored digital books on the whiteboard, laptops, ipads and iphones.

We have been using the fantastic film “The piano,” to write in interesting and emotive sentences.

The children produced some excellent sentences:
Albert ran sadly towards his mate holding him tightly as if he was a teddy bear. (Gwen)
Frank played the piano; the sorrowful memoroes came back to haunt him. (Daniel)
The old man looks up to the sky hoping we will have a peaceful life up in heaven. (Kelly)
For one minute, he forgot he was in the the middle of a battlefield. He felt like crying. (Charlotte)

This weeks 100 word challenge was red. This proved quite difficult but looking at stories from other schools helped with our writing. We take part in this challenge every week and the children have been fantastic at continuing and improving their work at home. below is karen’s entry in this week competition. Other entrees from Northwood can be viewed by clicking on the 100 words link on the right.

Lightning was crashing outside,as the war was taking its time to progress. It wasn’t a nice experience being in the war ;as every time you sleep you fear being killed. Tonight was dangerous.They said they were going to end the war. I was scared. I could see through the gap in the door;blood was spilling every-where. Every-body died.We lost the war. I served as a slave until I died, but I lived long enough to see the people celebrate on how hard the soldiers did for us. With red poppies.

r=remembrance
e=entity
d=destiny

As part of our Olympic project, children have been designing and making their own mascots from clay. Here are two examples; everyone has made one.

On Monday, all the children took part in a penalty shott out at the BBA. Everyone received a certificate, Emmanuel and Dami received a special certificate for excellent penalties.

Our friends from Turkey told us about animals in their country and animals facing extinction. We told them about aniamls that we find in our school environment: foxes, parakeets, woodpeckers, squirrels and magpies. The children from Turkey were fantastic at talking English.