Teacher: Mrs Efrat 

Support Staff: Ms Roberts and Mrs Darnell

Welcome to Alder Class 

Secondary School Transfer information

Please see below for Ms Newton's presentation from Tuesday 9th July concerning secondary school transfers and the lists of dates for secondary school visits for next year.

Moon Lane Link Reading Sessions - Chicken News

Last Wednesday (19th June), Alder class walked to Beckenham Place Park to take part in the Chicken News reading session.  We met with Ken Wilson-Max, the author of Chicken News, who talked to us about current affairs, relevant to children.  He gave us some ideas for creating our own newspapers.

All the children were extremely well behaved, despite having to sit on the floor for the entire session.

Kindness Rocks Project

Half of year 5 are currently taking part in Elfrida's Kindness Rocks Project whilst the other half are involved in the Jimmy Mizen Project.  Both projects are running for six weeks.

Kindness Rocks is an international project whose aim is to spread some kindness and positivity to random strangers.  The idea is to paint and decorate stones or pebbles with motivational messages on them and to hide them around the community for people to find.  Hopefully, the kindness rocks put a smile on the finder's face and brightens their day.  The finder then has two choices, to keep the rock and take it home or, to re-hide the rock for someone else to find and pass on the kindness and positivity.

At the moment, the children are eagerly painting and decorating their rocks and very soon will be going out into the local community to hide them and spread some optimism and kindness.  

We will let you know when to start looking out for them. 

Arts Week: 23.4 - 3.5.19 - Sandra Silberzweig

Sandra Silberzweig is a contemporary, abstract Canadian artist who has a condition called Synaesthesia. People with this condition produce a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body.  Sandra Silberzweig calls herself a synaesthesia goddess who has overcome the challenges of this condition and transferred them into something amazing through her very stylized artwork.

Silberzwieg’s paintings are bold, colourful and imaginative.  She primarily paints stylized, patterned-filled portraits and uses colour, shapes and patterns cleverly creating works of art with a sense of harmony; they are pleasing to the eye.  In particular, colour harmony delivers visual interest and a sense of order.

In her portraits, Sandra uses combinations of straight, zig-zag and curved lines which are black, with a range of thicknesses.  Her clever use of repeated designs and patterns add rhythm to her work.  Silberzwieg’s abstract pieces of work are flat with little form; however, they are full of texture: covered with repeated patterns of dots and dashes.

We used two of her portraits as inspiration for our own artwork.  In order to create harmony in our pieces, we used analogous colours.  Analogous colours are colours that are beside each other on a colour wheel.  Because they are beside each other, it means they work well together.

In addition, when we were learning about creating visual harmony, we learnt that using complimentary colours: those directly opposite each other on a colour wheel, such as red and green and red-purple and yellow-green creates maximum contrast and maximum stability (strength) resulting in a visually pleasing effect, so we also used complimentary colours in our own work.

Working hard to create our amazing portraits.  For the large areas, we had to use analogous colours: 3 colours that are side-by-side on a colour wheel and use our fingers to carefully blend the colours where they met to create a blurred, fuzzy effect. 

When we added the dotted and patterned textures, we chose complimentary colours: colours that are opposite each other on the colour wheel.

We used these colour techniques in order to create visual harmony (visually pleasing) in our portraits.

Post-It Note Art

We created our own Sandra Silberzwieg inspired artwork on post-it notes and put them all together to create on piece of artwork.  We are really pleased with the finished result and hope you like it too.

Fun Fair Physics

Yesterday, Tuesday 2nd April, both Year 5 classes went to the Fun Fair at Crystal Palace Park to learn about some of the physics of the Fun Fair.  Despite the rain, we all had a great time trying out 4 different fairground rides and thinking about some aspects of physics involved in them.  We discussed various forces and simple and complex machines.  Please ask your child what they can remember from the day.

Alder's Book Week Door Cover

For our door display, we decided to create a book cover for Cosmic, the book we are focusing on in literacy.  We all discussed various ideas and this is what we came up with.  We are all very proud and hope you like it too.

Parents Reading in Alder

This morning (Wednesday 6th March), Alder had the pleasure of Mekai's mum coming in to read the first chapter of 'The Magician's Nephew.  This book was chosen as Mekai's mum told us all she loved reading the classics as a child.  Everyone really enjoyed it.

Art Inspired by, The Day the Crayons Quit, by Drew Daywalt

Here is some art work Alder class have made whilst learning about tints and shades.

Tint vs shade: everything between white and a pure colour is a tint and everything between a pure colour and black is a shade.

The Day the Crayons Quit

By Drew Daywalt

On Monday, we read The Day the Crayons Quit.  It is a story about a box of crayons and a boy called Duncan.  His crayons all decide to write him letters complaining about the way he uses, or doesn't use them and they all quit and leave him.

In literacy, we had to try and empathise (put ourselves into their shoes) with the crayons.  We had to show their feelings through facial expressions and body language.  Here are some photographs of our freeze framed feelings.

Our topic this term is:

A Cosmic Adventure

Book Flood Day - 20th December 2018

After learning all about Iceland's tradition of Book Flood, which they celebrate on 24th December, by giving books to each other and reading them on Christmas Eve whilst drinking hot chocolate and eating chocolates, Alder class thought it would be a great idea to have our on Book Flood day.

The classroom was turned into one large reading corner and everyone brought in their onesies or pyjamas and slippers so we could all relax in comfort and share our favourite books and spend the day reading.

Great fun was had by all, especially drinking hot (warm) chocolate and eating chocolate whilst reading.

Here are some photographs of the day.

Alder's Trip to Sedgehill

On Tuesday, in the freezing wind and rain, Alder class visited Sedgehill Secondary School for a tiny taste  of Year 7 lessons.  They were introduced to a secondary school timetable and experienced the following lessons:

• Art
• History
• Dance

During the art lesson, the children learnt to mix colours in preparation for creating a collage next week in our follow up session.

Following the art session, they headed to the sports hall for a short break.  The hall was large enough to have various games of basket ball and football all going on at the same time.  Much fun was had by all - not just the children!

After the break, it was time for history.  For their taste of history, children listened to the story of Alphonse the Camel and the Camel killer.  They had to use their detective powers to find evidence in the story to  work out what they think contributed to poor Alphonse's death.  This was a great  opportunity for the children to practise their newly acquired speaking and listen skills.  What they found frustrating was that there is no right or wrong answer!

Dance, was the final session of the morning.  The children got the opportunity to work in a dance studio and created their own Haka style routine.  

As you can see from the photographs below, the children had a great time and are, hopefully, looking forward to next week's return visit.

13th November 2018 - Creekside Discovery Centre

The long awaited trip finally arrived.  Alder class were very excited to be visiting Creekside Discovery Centre for our walk in the river.  We started off with a short session in the classroom to find out more information about the river we were about to walk in.  We learnt that Deptford Creek is part of the River Ravensbourne and it is tidal.  One interesting fact we learnt was how Deptford got its name: a 'ford' is a place in a river where it is possible to cross through the water which is where the 'ford' part comes from; 'Dept' is from depth, meaning deep.  Deptford simply means, deep ford.  Another interesting fact is how Catford got its name.  We all thought it was because of the big cat!  But no - the name came first.  Apparantly, long ago, it was the place where farmers could get their cattle across the river so it became known as 'Catford'.

We also learnt about different features of a river:

• meander  - a bend
• banks - the sides of the river
• direction of flow - the way the river is moving
• flood defence walls - walls built high enough to prevent the local area flooding
• tidal marks - the marks on the walls that show where the water reaches at high tide
• erosion - what happens to the banks as the water flows fast and carries the mud from the bank away making the banks smaller and flatter
• deposition - when the water slows down, it deposits the mud making the banks wider and higher

In order to walk in the river, we all had to wear waders (extra long wellies), waterproof coats and carry a wooden stick to stop us from falling over.  The river was flowing much faster and a bit higher than usual, due to the recent rain.  As a result of this, we were unable to walk as far up it as planned; however, we still had a great time looking for artefacts on the river bed, having a duck race and fishing!  We found lots of different creatures.  It was great fun.

Then it was back to the Centre for lunch which was much needed.  We were lucky enough to sit outside in the sunshine to eat it: unexpected in the middle of November.

After lunch, we had a quick session in the classroom and then we went back out to stand on the bridge and sketch the river.  As we were sketching, the direction of flow changed.  We could see this as the leaves floating on top of the water suddenly changed direction going back up the river the way they had just come.  No, this wasn't magic; the tide was coming in.  

We all had a great day.