Educational Visit – Middleport Pottery
What an amazing time we had here! We were able to tour the site, popping into an actual pot bank and imagining what it would have been like lit by roaring fires underneath as the clay turn into pottery. The canals beside the site would have transported the pottery all around the country and it even ended up around the world! Do you know who a “Sagar makers bottom knocker” was? We do – as we found out that children would work at the factory too! Of course, if you are visiting a world famous pottery maker then you have to have a go yourself, which we did. Rolling the clay into long strips. meant that we could coil them round and round until we had created our very own pot bank! It has been great to learn all about our local history, what it would have been to live here 200 years ago – thick with smoke!
History
We started our first topic of the year by taking a tour around our city visiting Sir Stanley Matthews statue at Stoke City’s stadium before visiting Middleport Pottery. Our heritage in pottery has made our city known all around the world. Josiah Wedgwood, Josie Spode, Clarice Cliff and Emma Bridgewater have all created beautiful pottery. We have also discovered how Robbie Williams, Sir Stanley Matthews and Reginald Mitchell have also made our city famous. We learned all about chronology and put the major events and people on a timeline discovering that the story of our city goes back a long time.
At the end of our topic, we took a tour around the city once again to tell our viewers all about what we had found out. We visited the Spitfire at the museum, Wedgwood Factory, the Bet 365 stadium and of course Port Vale’s stadium.
English
Our Love of Reading text has been ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’. The story of how Phileas Fogg and his faithful butler Passepartout attempt to make their way around the world in just 80 days. They travelled on trains, elephants and ships! Of course we had to write a newspaper report all about it and practised our skills using conjunctions to extend our ideas. We also used this story to have a go at writing our very own stories – we imagined what would have happened if Phileas Fogg had travelled across the Arctic Tundra! We used this to extend our vocabulary and write descriptive sentences using adjectives. Non fiction books are just as interesting as stories so we had a go at writing a page from a travel brochure – inviting people to come and visit North America.
Maths
We have busy this term learning how to add, subtract, multiply and divide and have become accurate at these. We have learnt different strategies and used lots of mathematical equipment. We know how to show numbers involving hundreds in different ways and can partition these too! We love explaining how we have arrived at an answer and are getting better and better at problem solving. Knowing our times tables facts is very important to us, so we have put in a lot of effort to learn them off by heart so that we are really quick when answering questions.
Science – How do you make your body strong?
We love Science and this term we have been learning all about bones and muscles! We know the names of the bones that make up our skeleton and why they are so important! Did you know that the skull protects the brain, the rib cage protects our heart and lungs and our spine protects our spinal chord? Putting together the skeletons in the right order was lots of fun! We made arms which included the bicep and tricep and found out that muscles work in pairs. One relaxes and the other contracts which means that we can pick up our knife and fork. We carried out our own investigation, learning how to gather and record results and take accurate measurements. These are all important skills in Science. We classified animals into vertebrates and invertebrates and worked out the a jellyfish is really rather different from a human in more ways than one! Of course we know that keeping your body strong starts with what you eat – so we know all about healthy nutrition too!
Art – Clarice Cliff
We knew all about Clarice Cliff from our History topic so it was time to roll up our sleeves and have a go at making our very own pottery inspired by her. She was a unique potter from Stoke who was the first to use really bright colours and patterns. We planned our pieces of pottery, designing them carefully and experimented with different colours. We rolled out the clay and cut them into circles where we could add the designs and paint them brightly. We were very proud of how they turned out.