Reception have been thoroughly enjoying their new topic of ‘How living things grow’. After planting their own sunflower seeds, they decided to create their own sunflower paintings. The children began exploring the work of Vincent Van Gogh and focused on one of his most famous pieces of artwork known as ‘Sunflowers’. They then create their own sunflower painting inspired by Vincent Van Gogh. Reception used a range of colours and shapes within their paintings to create their beautiful masterpieces. Take a look at their fantastic artwork!
Year 3 had so much fun at Beamish! We enjoyed visiting the new 1950’s Front Street where we explored Norman Cornish’s house. Inside of Norman Cornish’s house, we did some observational sketching of what we could see. We also explored the history of the 1900’s village and pit village- some of us even got the chance to go down the coalmine and experience how it would have been for children to work in the cold, dark and damp conditions. To finish the day, we visited the Victorian school and discussed the differences in school life compared to ours today. We even had a try at using the metal hoops and sticks in the school playground- it was super tricky!
Nursery have been working so hard on their artwork! Their topic for this half term is Minibeasts and they been learning about which animals are classified as Minibeasts. The children have then created their own Minibeast artwork including ladybirds, tadpoles, caterpillars, spiders and butterflies! The children have enjoyed exploring with a range of colours and using different shapes to create these fantastic Minibeasts masterpieces. Take a look at Nursery’s beautiful artwork!

Y3 had so much for today looking at the different layers of the Earth. We created our own Earth to show all of the layers. We created the inner core then covered it with the Earths outer core, mantle then finally the Earth’s crust. We then compared the layers of the Earth to a peach. We looked at the inside of a peach and imagined the peach’s stone was the Earth’s core, the surrounding soft bit of the peach is like the Earth’s mantle filled with magna and finally the skin is like the Earth’s crust.
This week in Art, year 3 focused on mixing warm and cold colours. We discovered that red, yellow and blue colours are our primary colours and can not be made by mixing other colours. We focused on the artist Piet Mondrain, an artist who regularly used primary colours within his art work. We then created a Mondrain inspired painting- they were fabulous!

After this, we then created our own colour wheels. We learnt that secondary colours are made my mixing together primary colours. Take a look at our colour wheels- our secondary colours sit halfway between the two primary colours it is mixed from.

Take a look at our superhero cities. We are so proud of them! First we mixed black with our blue paint and it made the colour darker. Then we used squares and rectangles to create our tall and short buildings. Finally we added some superhero words. We came up with POW, BOOM, CRASH, SMASH and ZAP!
This week we have been exploring colour mixing. We picked two primary colours and used our hands to mix them together. We enjoyed seeing how the colours changed and talking about the new colours we had made.
This week, we had a special visitor from Beamish who came into Year 3 to tell us all about the artist Norman Cornish. Norman Cornish was a miner from Spennymoor as well as an artist. We focused on Normal Cornish because Beamish are building a new 1950’s town and Norman’s studio will be part of that. This year will mark the hundredth anniversary of Norman’s birth. In the session, we looked closely at his artwork and then had our own turn at sketching and shading observational drawings. We learnt many new artistic skills such as cross hatching to help add more textures to our drawings. At the end of the session, we looked and handled many artefacts from Beamish such as the miners lamps. We thoroughly enjoyed the session and are looking forward to our upcoming to trip to Beamish where we will get the chance to visit the pit village, 1950 Front Street and carry out some sketching on locations similar to those in Norman Cornish’s sketches.

The children in Reception have been working hard to complete their Christmas crafts. They have followed instructions, used lots of different materials and different methods. They are looking forward to sharing their crafts with their family at home!
This half term we have been learning all about Space. We started off by finding out which planet we live on, planet Earth! We used Google Earth, found Harton Primary School and zoomed all the way out until we were in space. Look at our amazing Earth paintings. We included land and sea.