This half term, we have been focussing on analysis. When we analyse, we break information down into parts and explore our understanding and the relationships betweeen those parts. Analysis involves comparing, organising, deconstructing, interrogating, finding, seeing patterns, contrasts, cause and effect.
In the first week, we looked at broken up poems that we had to put back together. The Gold and Diamond group looked at the poem entitled 'I Wanna Be Yours', by John Cooper-Clarke; the Silver and Bronze group looked at a funny poem, called 'Never, Never, Never'-that reminded us never to put 'stickers on your knickers' as they would 'Come off in the wash'! The Rainbow and Moonbeam group had three short rhymes, all linked to different historical events; they looked at 'Ring O Roses'; 'London's Burning' and 'Rememner, Remember'. By breaking up the poems and having to reconstruct them, it made us look very carefully at the choice of words and analyse the poems and rhymes carefully.
We continued our analysis project, by working like archaeologists and looking at fine detail to discover more about people's lives. In this case, it was four dustbins and we had to match them up to the correct families! Look at the concentration on the faces of some of the children!
Next, the infant group completed rhyming word wordsearches, whilst the older children completed synonym wordsearches. They enjoyed thinking of what the words could actually be and then looking very closely to find them in the wordsearch.
The final part of our project, involved the children from the infant group creating their own rhyming word searches. We took copies of these to the classes, to challenge the other people in the class...do you think they were able to find all of the rhymes?
The junior classes looked finally at antonyms-words that mean the opposite to one another. They had to create their own antonym word searches and they had some copies to challenge their classmates. Everyone's brains were aching by the end of the lesson!