Croeso i Dosbarth Gwennol!
Our teacher is Mrs Rayner.
Miss Bunning and Mrs Brown are our teaching assistants.
We share our class information as well as lots of the things that our class have been learning about using Seesaw. Should you need a link to your child’s Seesaw account please contact the school office or speak to Mrs Rayner at the end of the school day.
Teaching and learning in our school changes each year according to the needs of the children in our classes however we would still like to give you an insight into what a year in Dosbarth Gwennol looks like!
To help us to do this, we would like to share some of their adventures from last year….
We started our year with our topic of No Outsiders. We started this by enjoying a book called Wonder. We looked at all the characters in the book and thought about what makes us all special and unique. We then created pop art pictures of ourselves in the style of Andy Warhol. We also created bunting made from our hands where we wrote everything about us that made us special.
We then focused on the book The New Girl which was all about someone starting in a new school from Japan. We thought about how that would feel and thought about the type of classroom we wanted to be and how we could welcome someone new. We decided we wanted to be a kind classroom. We created a kind classroom display with a range of origami flowers inspired by origami which the character created in the book. We then researched the language and created some phrases which we could say to her if she had come to our school. After this we created our own Haiku’s about being a kind classroom.
We then focused on our overall inquiry this year which was all about ‘The Future We Want’. We started this during global goals week where we looked at everyone’s rights in the world and found out what the global goals were. Once we had learnt that we created our own future of what we wanted to see. We brainstormed what we needed in our future for all the global goals and everyone’s human rights to be met. We then created our own world using shoeboxes in groups to create the future that we want.
We then moved onto the climate action global goal. We started this with a trip to Alyn Waters where we looked at all the local wildlife and enjoyed pond dipping. We found lots of interesting wildlife! We discussed the impact climate change was having on our local environment and decided we wanted to find out more to see how we could help.
Whilst enjoying our time in Forest school we started looking at the wildlife we attract and thought about how we could improve the biodiversity up there. We decided we wanted to sell something to help local wildlife which is why we created our bird feeders with you for our Christmas fayre which we all loved.
We looked at why climate change was happening and how this was affecting our Earth and its animals. We took part in some very interesting workshops with WWF, we found the power of poo one very interesting! We looked at different ways we could help to tackle the problem of climate change and wrote some persuasive leaflets to encourage people to look after our planet. We also enjoyed creating some protest Art to reflect our feelings.
In November world cup fever hit our class! We all chose a team out of a hat and updated the scores on a daily basis to see how our team had been getting on. We created a collaborative document all about our countries to create some top trump cards. We then researched the different flags and designed our own football kits for our team. They were brilliant!
After this we enjoyed preparing for our concert in the church. For our performance we created a poem together about what Christmas meant to us. After so many years without performances everyone was a little bit nervous but they were brilliant.
We started the new year with our inquiry of ‘What makes Wales special?’ We started with our overnight trip to Glan-Llyn which was great fun. The children were all fantastic and a credit to our school. We enjoyed canoeing where we learnt all about Teggy the sea monster. We went on the climbing wall, high ropes, watched a bird show, went bowling and enjoyed a movie with our snacks. The children all showed such resilience, confidence and all supported each other. It was a pleasure to see.
Next, we focused our enquiry on Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon) by listening to the story of Big Rhita which is how they say Yr Wyddfa was formed. We all retold this story and then created our own with different giants. We located Yr Wyddfa on maps using co-ordinates and compass points. We read a newspaper article about the dangers of climbing Snowdon unprepared, so we decided we wanted to create a video to inform people of how to climb Yr Wyddfa safely. We thought about what we needed to find out and started researching. We used all this information we found out to create our videos with advice and information for the public.
We loved putting on our play ‘The Bee Musical’ for you all this year. The children all worked so hard in the performance. It was lovely to have the opportunity to perform in front of you all.
In the summer term we are hoping to complete the inquiry ‘What did the Romans do for us?’ We will be finding out all about who they were, when they came to Britain and how they changed Britain forever and what it would look like today if they never invaded. We are also looking forward to completing a project designing our own Roman catapults.
We have had such a busy year this year and I have loved teaching them all. Diolch Dosbarth Gwennol.