Our first topic this year is Invasion! For our history focus this term, we will be exploring the effects of the Roman withdrawal and the chronology and geography of subsequent invasions. We will be studying the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings in detail, examining their reasons for invading, their settlements and everyday life. 

As historians we will be considering how we know about life in this period and will be investigating the Sutton Hoo ship burial. We will learn about Athelstan, an Anglo-Saxon king, and what happened after his death, before ending the term by learning about the Norman invasion of 1066.

 Our Learning: 

In Science this half term we have been looking at the digestive system. Together as a class we had a go at recreating the different parts of the digestive system using a zip-lock bag as the stomach, a pair of tights as the small intestine and a paper cup as the large intestine. The children really enjoyed this activity although they did also find it a bit gross!

They had to transfer chew and mash up some digestive biscuits (as the food), water (saliva) and orange juice (stomach acid) and pass it through the body using teamwork to see how it came out at the end of the process. 

For Art we have been looking at different ways we can tell stories through drawings. Throughout the process we have been looking at two artists that do this brilliantly, Laura Carlin and Shaun Tan. At the start of the term we had a go at replicating some of their styles of artwork, using sketching, colour and charcoal. Then we chose a poem from The Book of Lost Words, cutting up different lines from the poem and designing some comic strip style imagery to tell the story within the poem.

There were so many beautiful ideas that the children came up with, once these were sketched out we used watercolour paints and finally outlined the boxes and images to produced that stand out comic strip effect!