Science week in class 2

Science week ~ Class 2

Last week in class 2 we were extremely busy celebrating our science feature week. 

We kicked off the week with a stroll into the Harewood woods to see what plants, trees and wildlife we could find.

We made sure to record our findings so that we could do some research back in the classroom.

We split up into small groups to cover the area!

We found lots off moss.

Tonnes of mud!!

A few lady birds and millepedes. 

A selection of different leaves on the ground.

Many different birds.

Lots of pinecones.

A few cheeky monkeys!

Ever green trees.

Snowdrops and daffodils. 

Stinging nettles.

Overall a fantastic muddy trip to the woods! 
Well done class 2 and thank you to all the parents that kindly joined us!

Following our trip to the woods, we returned back to the classroom where we were then very lucky to have Mr Wilson join us who treated us all to a sound masterclass!

Mr Wilson taught us all about how our ears hear different types of sounds and lots of fascinating facts about hearing and sound.

Following Mr Wilson's fantastic sound workshop, we were next joined by Emma who is a Pathologist at Leeds University. 

The investigation that Emma arranged gave us an opportunity to explore the transfer of water through plants using food colouring. This was particularly fitting with our recent plant topic!

We began by preparing the flowers, Emma showed us how to do this in a safe way without hurting ourselves or the flowers.

Next we added water and food colouring into each different test tube where the flowers would sit during the experiment.

The children then decided on a variety of variables for our experiment, including flowers with long and short stems, flowers sitting in hot and cold water, and flowers with split stems sat between two different test tubes of water and food colouring, and of course a control flower for comparison.

Emma kindly offered to return to class 2 just before home time to help us record our results.

We were surprised to find that there was no difference between the flowers with differing length stems, and that the flower sat in the warm water was the first to change colour! 

Our favourite part of the investigation was looking at the flowers that had been split across two different coloured dyes! 

The children were fascinated and amazed by the results and thoroughly enjoyed learning about how the water had travelled through each part of the plant.

Very cool! - Thank you Mr Wilson and Emma!

Tuesday -  similarly a very busy day in class 2!


We began the day with some very inspiring construction work with Mark Haig, an artist who creates robots that start life as finds from skips, second hand shops, car boot sales and scrap yards. 

The children each carefully selected different parts of scrap to carefully craft individual quirky robots, each with their own personality. 

We used a variety of different power tools with fantastic precision and control! 

With amazing team work skills too!

Thank you Mark! 
We had a fabulous time working with you and we are all very proud of our new little friends!



After lunch we then welcomed Sam Murphy to class 2, a very talented artist based in Harrogate. 

Sam taught us all about how our eyes see colour, and how to use our knowledge of the primary colours to mix many different variants of the secondary colours to create a colour wheel. 

We first began by painting the primary colours onto our colour wheels.

Next we mixed our primary colours together, two at a time to create the secondary colours to add to our colour wheels.

Thankfully Oliver was on hand to help with all the washing up!

Following this, we mixed our secondary colours in order to create slight variants. 

Very beautiful!

We tried our hardest to spin our colour wheels as fast as we could to see if we could see white!

Our colour wheels came in very handy whilst discussing different colours of petals. We mixed the colours to match our flowers perfectly!

What a brilliant afternoon!

Thank you Sam!



Well done class 2 on all of your excellent work and brilliant behavior throughout science week, and thank you again to all of our fantastic helpers and visitors we couldn't have done it without you!

Christian Aid Week ~ Big Brekkie

Last week was Christian Aid week and we held a "Big Brekkie" event in the school hall to raise money for this important charity which this year is celebrating 60 years of fundraising for refugee families. We had a brilliant turnout and because all the food was donated by Morrisons in Wetherby and the school PTA, every penny raised went to directly to the charity. I hope you enjoy looking at the photographs!

It was a real team effort and a lovely family event. We raised a grand total of £279.79 for Christian Aid. Thank you to everyone for your support.

Class 4 Tonal Art Work

 Over he past couple of weeks Class 4 have been looking at using tone to create realistic form in their artwork. We have been working with a limited colour palette, create two-tone images with chalk on black paper / pencil, charcoal and ink on white paper and we have focused particularly on trying to draw shapes in correct proportion and only drawing what is actually there - this sounds obvious but it is common for children to draw an ear for instance even if it is covered in hair just because they know there is one there!

 One of the pieces we created used a strip method - we tried this out first as a whole class collaborative piece and it worked brilliantly (I need to take a photo of that to share in an updated blog) so the pupils attempted a self-portrait using very moody high-contrast mono photographs. The children were given thier portrait cut up into 1cm strips (these were numbered on the back with an arrow for orientation) which they then had to copy onto blank strips - for the image to work careful measuring was required and the clever part is that the children often didn't know what part of the image they were drawing as it was so small so they had to focus instead on the shapes and the light and dark.

 The children then placed their drawn strips on the original 'base' image.

 Some pupils found the strip method very painstaking! I offered them an alternative approach - the grid method. We used fairly large squared for this so drawing needed to be precise and carefully observed but it still really helps with overall proportion. Some of the images had an incedible likeness as you can see from the image below (note, the blue sheet which was used as a viewfinder so that pupils could view a portion of the image at a time). 

 Some pupils opted for a 'limited palette' approach whereby they chose three colours to represent light, medium and dark tones - this made for more stylised work and an interesting effect.

 Here is an half-completed piece using the strip method. Really excellent work!

 Some pupils also did additional landscape pieces using the grid method. The were drawn quickly using charcoal but were really effective too.

Great work Class 4. I'll upload more images of final pieces hopefully next week.