Spanish visitors come to Wales!

We have been delighted to welcome Maria and Manuela from Salamanca to our school at Ynystawe.  It has been great to show them around our school and for them to take an active part in our lessons.

Our children have loved learning their first Spanish words and making new friends.  They have enjoyed learning about ways in which Salamanca is different from Swansea.

Books that I found interesting

Here you have some books that caught my attention ( some were at the school, some others from the book shop):

Deforestation

Years 2 and 3 were working with the topic "deforestation". Here you have some examples of activities they were doing:

Using Lego bricks for different purposes

The use of Lego bricks is naturally integrated in the carrusel activities that they carry out in the classroom. As you may know, our school Santísima Trinidad in Salamanca and Ynystawe Primary School are inmersed in the Erasmus + KA2 project 'Creating Tomorrow's School Today' which is mainly about the use of different resources, such as Lego Education sets.

This photo shows how they used Lego Bricks for counting in 5's. Some pupils were struggling and they used the bricks as a tangible material to count.

In this photo, they were building ideas related with deforestation:

And in this one, a SENCO teacher was working with some sounds that a boy was struggling with. Manipulating the bricks the pupil remembered better those sounds and how to produce them:

Astronaut skills

Here you have which I think is a great Science activity if you are teaching The Space topic with your pupils. Here you have the instructions and some photos.

 Using Lego bricks and oven gloves they had to try and build a Lego model to test their dexterity:

As you can imagine they were all really engaged in the activity.

Descriptions of animals, guess what animal is it

As I have already stated in the previous post, in Ynystawe Primary School, they work in a cross curricular way trying to connect the different subjects and bringing them together into one task.

Here you have another example of that.

 Year 6 pupils were learning about the animals in the Galápagos Islands ( they had watched a video the day before) and then, they were given some worksheets with animal facts on them. They had to describe one of those animals with their own words and then, their classmates had to guess what animal it was. They also swapped the descriptions and they had to edit or mark their classmates descriptions.

   

Ynystawe Primary School Way of teaching and learning

In Ynystawe Primary School they don't separate the different areas in different lessons taught by different teachers. Most of the time the same teachers stay in the same class teaching all the subjects to the same pupils. 

Every Thursday, year 5 and 6 pupils have 'Forest School' (if the weather allows them to do so) and on Mondays they do PE. That's all the timetable they have. Then, some days they learn more about Sciences linked with literacy or with art and some others they learn about Mathematics linked with art as well. To sum up,  they work in a cross curricular way so that the pupils make strong connections in their brains between all the aspects that they are learning.

They don't use textbooks but lots of  reading books, photocopiable resources, ICT, etc. 

They only have two notebooks: One for Maths, another one for Language and a kind of Portfolio where they keep all the works they have done. Here you have a link to a document parents receive at the beginning of each term so that they are informed of what their children will be doing. Newsletter

As you can see, they work the whole term around one 'Leonardo Theme':

• Air/Flight
• Water
• Earth
• Fire

In that document you can also see how homework is addressed.

Here you have what I think is a great example of teaching Maths,  Literature and Art all together in one task:

Art technique- Heat Transfer

Heat Transfer in another technique they use in Ynystawe Primary School when Morriston Comprehensive School lends them a Heat Press:

 

First, pupils coloured a pattern on a piece of paper. Then, they put on it some feathers, some yarn...then a piece of fabric on it, and last, inside the heat press. You have some of the wonderful results below:

The paint was a special one so that it dyes the fabric. Here you have the name of it: Disperse Dye

Learning Welsh

Here you have some pictures of some Reading books in Welsh:

 This is the 'Welsh Corner' in Nursery and Reception classroom. The daffodil is their symbol as well as the flag with the Red Dragon:

Books about daffodils and activities carried out related with them:

 

Here you have one lesson on Welsh language with Year 5 and 6 pupils. They were reading a book and doing some reading comprehension:

Some posters with Welsh Vocabulary:

And here a webpage that they use in the school with digital contents both in Welsh and English:

Hwb Wales 

Art technique- Batik

In the hall of the school, they have got these lovely displays made with this technique by one of the teachers, Sarah Williams.

Here you have how it works:

And here you have another easier way of doing it if you dont have the wax heater and the canting pens.

  

Year 3 and 4 pupils were doing an activity with this technique that was related with Science. They were working with rainforest and they were doing a colourful leaf.