Whatever the weather, we love reading outdoors at Thomas Buxton Primary! This week, every child in Years 3 and 4 received a book that they had chosen from the National Literacy Trust. To celebrate this, children took part in story telling – lead by Year 5- in the Secret Garden; played campsite games and experienced some of the Victorian games that Children in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s book, ‘The Secret Garden’ might have played. Enjoy your new books!

We enjoyed a fascinating Interfaith Week in year 5 this year.  We were focused on Humanism and Christianity – we compared and contrasted both faiths and considered their perspectives regarding different topics.  We visited Christchurch Spitalfields to have a hands-on experience of Christianity – we learnt about the stories behind stained glass windows, what happens at an altar, and what it means to be baptised.

We were visited by a humanist who outlined what the belief contained and how they lived their lives using a ‘moral code’.

We spent time discussing moral arguments and situations.  We also spent time discussing the need for cohesion and understanding; we asked, “What does ‘community’ mean to us?”

We had so many questions that were still unanswered! We used a fantastic resource called ‘e-mail a believer’ to ask a Christian and a Humanist our questions.  We asked them questions about specific festivals that they celebrate, the parts of their religion that they enjoy the most and what their religion means to them.

We look forward to the next Interfaith Week!

This week we have been gardening! We planted potatoes, peas, and basil – we can’t wait to watch them grow!

It’s Shakespeare week at Thomas Buxton and Year 5 have been studying Macbeth – Shakespeare’s great tragedy. This week has been focused on debating and performance skills. In class we have been debating key ideas in the text using ABCDebate (agree, build, challenge, delve deeper). This lesson we practised responding to other’s points by delving deeper e.g asking for evidence or clarification.

Year 5 also took part in a performance workshop where they learnt how to act and developed their own interpretation of the play using their performance skills. It ended in a gruesome battle!

Here are some photos of the children’s work.

This half term, we have been studying materials and their properties.  As classes, we decided what we wanted to investigate!  We asked ourselves, which solutions did we want to create to test our theories?  We learnt that some materials took longer dissolve than others – some didn’t dissolve at all!  We timed our experiment and presented our data in a graph.   

What could be happening at Thomas Buxton this week? Watch this space to find out more!

We have been very fortunate to have had a visitor from Spitalfields City Farm this week!  We learnt how to plant some vegetables and plants which we hope will grow over the next school term!  By the end of the school year, we could have a plethora of healthy vegetables to harvest!

We’ll need to take care of what we have planted – I wonder how we’re going to do that?

We even got the chance to pick some mint leaves and take them home…

As part of our World Book Day celebrations last week, 30 year 5 and 6 children attended an event hosted by the Tower Hamlets Schools Library Services!

At Thomas Buxton, we held a short-story writing competition: the challenge was to write a short story in 500 words or under.  There were 30 deserving winners; they won the opportunity to see Michael Rosen performing – some of the children even got to meet him!

Michael recited some of his poetry and told us a little more about himself.  As ever, he was entertaining, humorous and above all else: inspiring!

After the performance, he was kind enough to sign some of his books for us.

Thanks Michael!

In year 5, we’ve been lucky enough to have Yvonne from England Netball come in to teach us over the past few weeks!

We’ve really enjoyed developing our netball skills – most of us hadn’t played the sport before!

We’ve been learning about the rules of netball, passing and receiving the ball, and how it is vital to work well as a team.

We had to really focus on our hand-eye coordination skills – it’s not as easy as it looks!

Our topic this half term has been the Anglo-Saxons!

We started our learning journey by taking part in an archaeological dig!  Our brief was to find replica tools, armour and currency.

Ask us what we found!