Stroud Valley Community School

This term Diamond class have been learning about the Stone age. Last week we travelled back to the Stone age to try some stewed fruit. The children were in charge of cutting up all the fruit and then we cooked it, some of the children were hoping it would be over an open fire!! The children all loved the stewed fruit, but that may have been helped by a sneaky bit of sugar that was added. See if your child can make you some lovely stewed fruit.

Today the chidlren created their own Stonehenge out of clay! They started by designing their own backgrounds, deciding if they wanted a dark night or a sunset. Then they spent the afternoon sculpting Stonehenge out of clay. Can you spot any of our clay people who are visiting Stonehenge?

This week Diamond class has been turned into a giant place value grid. The children have been learning how to multiply and divide by 10 and 100. The children have learnt how multiplying makes a number move to the right to get bigger and dividing makes it smaller, meaning it moves to the left.

On Wednesday 6th November,Diamond, Ruby and Quartz class went to Stratford Court to take part in a school rugby tournament. The children were all placed into countries to play against each other, we saw some fantastic sportsmanship. The children had all worked really hard over the half term to learn the rules of tag rugby in our PE lessons.
Well done to Scotland who won our tournament.

Diamond class had a fantastic week. All our lessons were based on ‘After the Fall’ by Dan Santat, we produced some great art work, collaging Humpty Dumpty on his wall and producing his paper birds. In maths we measured how far Humpty Dumpty’s birds travelled and produced a graph to compare the distances. We discussed the difficulties that Humpty faced through out the book and how he over came them relating Humpty’s bravery to our own lives. On Wednesday, Mr West came in to help us create our own walls for Humpty and his own house, unfortunately that collapsed too, after playing wall jenga. We loved dressing up as our favourite book characters, the children and their families had put so much hard work into their outfits. Can you spot Cruella De Vil stealing the Dalmatians in the picture? Diamond class helped her to come up with her plan….

Mrs Gardiner has decided to run a picture book competition. Here is hers that she and Mr Gardiner made. Once you’ve read the blurb and feel motivated, what you write and exactly how or where the story takes your reader, well, that’s up to you. But you might want to think about what happens to Dennis. How does he get out of trouble? Who does he meet? Many picture books have a moral within them: something the character and the reader learns along the way. Does your story teach, inspire or have a positive message?

One last tip, we are of course looking for stories with beautiful and fun illustrations, we want to be dazzled with words, uplifted and taken on a journey full of emotion and drama, but don’t forget your stories should always have a beginning, middle and end!

Please send your finished story in a Word document, or if it’s a hand drawn creation then simply take a photo of each page and sent them to Mrs Gardiner at creativewriting@stroudvalley.gloucs.sch.uk. We will review every entry and publish our favourite on the school blog. When we return to school, there will be prizes for the top three stories.

Happy writing!