Welcome to Denmark Class
We are a specialist Resource Base (SRB) providing specialist teaching for children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN). We work very closely with our speech therapy colleagues. Places at our SRB are allocated by the Local Authority.
Mrs King and Mrs Street are our part time teachers in Denmark class. Mrs Brown and Miss Maxam are our teaching assistants.
Our class is supported by a speech therapist for two days a week.
We have had lots of fun over the last few weeks learning different songs. Some of the songs we have learnt are linked to a panto that we will watch next week.
We wanted to film one of our favourite songs to help spread some Christmas cheer! We hope you enjoy watching it …… and see if you can join in too!
To continue with our topic on ‘Festivals and Celebrations’, we have been learning about another festival of light. This week we have learnt about the Jewish festival of light called Hanukkah. We looked in detail about the special candlestick called a Menorah and how the oil was only meant to burn for one night but it lasted eight nights. We took on the role of news reporters and had to carefully name and describe a Menorah. We thought of our own sentences and spoke in our ‘talking tins’ so we didn’t forget what we wanted to write. We listened back to what we had said and wrote our sentences down in our books. Afterwards we got to design and make our own menorahs out of Lego!
This week we have been learning all about ‘Diwali’, the Hindu festival of light. We learnt all about the story of Rama and Sita, the monkey army and the ten headed demon. We retold the story using pictures and decided we wanted to write sentences all about the ten headed demon! We also learnt about how Diwali is celebrated by drawing mehndi patterns on our hands and creating colourful rangoli patterns. We created salt dough Diya lamps and decorated them in sparkly paints before lighting little tea lights. We were very lucky and a had a special visitor come into our school to teach us a special dance which retold the story of Rama and Sita. This was so much fun! Everyone concentrated so well and the performance at the end was fantastic!
We have been using our best acting skills to retell the story ‘Whatever Next’ by Jill Murphy. We listened to the story and created a ‘story mountain’ plan before retelling the story as a group. We decided to collect props to help us retell the story and we all took on a specific role. We had to carefully listen to what happened previously to know when it was our turn. This activity was a great way to practice our speaking and listening skills!
We have been super creative over the last few weeks designing and making alien puppets. We looked at different puppets to see what was good about them before spending time on designing our own. We used felt and cotton to sew the made body of our puppets before sticking on the details. We are super pleased with how well they turned out! We thought about what we like about our puppets and what we would change for next time. We just need to think of some cool alien names for them now…..I wonder what we will come up with!
We have had so much fun looking after Alie the Alien and making sure he was having a fun time learning in our class. We turned up to school one day last week with a letter for us to read. It was from Mr and Mrs Zoob asking us if we have seen their alien baby! We wrote postcards back to them with a description to see if it was Alie…..and it was!! So we decided it was time to say goodbye and help Alie on his way back home. We read the story book ‘The way back home’ by Oliver Jeffers and it gave us lots of inspiration. We wrote a list of all the equipment we might need to make a rocket and send him into space. Out on our school field, we used a stomp rocket to fly him high in the sky. This was so exciting and we all had a go a ‘stomping’ him into orbit!
Bye bye Alie, we will miss you!
We arrived one morning to discover something has crashed landed in our school garden! After lots of investigating and researching, we discovered green slime and a little alien was hiding under the cone! We made the alien feel welcome by inviting him into class, paying him compliments and showing him what a lovely class we are. In art we created space pictures for ‘Alie the Alien’ to feel more at home. These were based on the artist ‘Peter Thorpe’ and used his style of oil pastels on black paper. We have designed and labelled alien body parts and created salt dough models which we painted in neon colours.
Hello and welcome back everyone!
We have had a fun week back in Denmark class. Even though our classroom might look a little different to how it was before, we soon realised that a lot of things were just the same! The children have had a wonderful time catching up with each other this week, talking about all the fantastic things they did over the summer holidays. We used these ideas and thoughts to create a class poem which we named ‘Summer is….’. We used our speaking and listening skills to share our ideas and read through our sentence at the end.
In our art lessons, we learnt about portrait artists and looked how different artists have various styles and techniques. This year, the children decided to paint ‘realistic’ self-portraits using paints. They had to carefully mix and test the paint colours to make sure they got the right shade for them. They concentrated so hard on the tiny details and we are so proud of the results!
Next week something…..or someone will come to visit us from a far away place….watch this space!
The Denmark Class team x
