SUMMER Term

Today marked the final assembly for Year 5! Children sang their song 'Team Spirit' to a packed out hall and were awarded with special medals to celebrate their successes over the year.  

It was so very hard to pick only a few children for awards because everyone has been so very fantastic- well done to EVERYONE! 

Our final topic of the year was looking at the art movement: Op Art. Children learnt all about optical illusion art; we studied the works of Bridget Riley who is a prominent artist in this area and gathered ideas and inspiration from her pieces. 

We learnt and practised lots of skills to help us with our final pieces: we explored colour palettes, tessellations, geometric shapes, repeating patterns and more! Enjoy our gallery of final pieces below! 

We had a fabulous time at the park today celebrating our community and bringing everyone together for a summer picnic. We had games, snacks, old students, new students- it was a joy having everyone together in one place, chatting and sharing food- what a lovelt community we have here at WDPS. 

Thank you to everyone who helped organise and set up! 

Thank you Year 6 for another fantastic Summer Fair! We jumped on bouncy castles, won tokens, chose sweets, licked ice lollies, threw bean bags, kicked footballs, shot water guns, hooked ducks...and so much more! 

Year 5 headed to Green St Library to take part in Newham's Summer Reading Challenge. Children issued 2 new books so that they could start their challenge. Once they have finished these books, they need to go back to a Newham library and issue 2 more- the more you read, the more badges, certificates and prizes they can win! Do please help your child by reading with them and taking them to the library this summer. 

Another fantastic International Day was had this week. Children dressed up in traditional clothes, ate food from around the world, learnt how to write their name in a different language, did Bollywood and Garba dancing, created their own flags, made presentations about their home country, created quizzes and presentations and more! Children celebrated cultures, languages and countries from around the world; the children at WDPS are a diverse, curious and kind bunch indeed! 

Thank you again to Ms Sultana, Ms Akhtar and everyone involved in making the day one to remember! 

Another exciting opportunity headed our way this week! We were invited to take part in a Q&A session with a real-life journalist, Lin Taylor- as part of our Newspaper Article Writing Project with The Guardian.   

Taylor is a journalist, editor and producer at the Thomson Reuters Foundation. She covers global inequalities and human rights for the Reuters news wire. For the past 15 years, Lin has reported on refugee and migrant issues, aid and development, racial inequities, climate impacts, digital rights, gender issues and other under-reported stories. Lin has reported from Jordan, Fiji, Vanuatu, Hong Kong, Vietnam, France, Spain, Serbia, Croatia, and Australia, where she was born and bred. 

Children created questions that they wanted to ask her about her career and her interests; they also created questions that they wanted to ask her so that they might use them in their own newspaper articles as their special expert interviewee. 

Some of our questions included: 

What was the hardest story you’ve had to write and why? 

1. What has been your favourite story to report and why?  

2. When did you know you wanted to be a journalist?

3. What’s the most challenging part of being a journalist and why? 

4. What is your favourite part of the job and why?

5. How did you feel when you earned your first award? What was it for?

6. What do you think is the most important story you’ve reported? 

7. Do you think London is doing enough to tackle climate change? 

8. Have you visited any countries that are successfully tackling climate change?

9. With all of your research into digital rights, what is your opinion on AI?

What a fantastic opportunity for our children to meet a real-life journalist with such a successful, varied career!

Our final English topic for the year is 'Newspaper Writing'. We were lucky enough to be invited to take part in a fantastic project with the national newspaper, 'The Guardian'. Throughout this project, we are taking a critical eye to newspapers and newspaper writing. We are learning about how the news should be balanced and fair but discovering that it can sometimes be biased and untrustworthy. Our aim this topic is to become critical consumers of the news, learning how to question what we read and how to judge news sources on their trustworthiness. Another outcome of this project is to learn how to write newspaper articles ourselves which we will be doing in due course- stay tuned for our articles! 

In Geography, we are learning about carbon footprints, air pollution and climate change. We have been learning about our personal impact on climate change, how climate change happens and how climate change affects different people around the world, sometimes unfairly. 

Whilst it is important to understand the mechanisms and science behind climate change, it also important to understand that we can, and should, do our best to make a difference! We have been learning about 'changemakers' at the different levels: personal, community, business and government. 

To help us with our learning, we had visitors from London Clean Air Initiative come to school to teach us all about climate change and its effects. We learnt about particulate matter, carbon dioxide and landfill sites in a KS2 assembly; we even took part in an experiment to test whether air pollution was real! 

Later, Year 5 took part in a workshop where children had to tackle 'pollution to solution' scenarios. Children were faced with scenarios of real-world events and had to find a way to make their role-play scenario more environmentally friendly. 

Throughout the day, we also had volunteers from Morgan Stanley join us to help make our school more GREEN! They spent all day with us building, tidying, planting, raking, digging and more! Take a look at all of the hard work they got up to. Groups of children from all across the school joined them later in the day to help plant flowers, shrubs, herbs and plants in the new plant boxes. 

We were lucky enough to to be treated to 2 workshops, given by fabulous Year 6 volunteers, this year during STEM week. Children investigated chemical reactions and states of matter when creating slime; they also looked at mechanics, forces and engineering when tasked with building marshmallow bridges. 

We attended an assembly and a coding workshop too! We were tasked with coding robots to move and twist and turn. We had to write our own code using Scratch and have our robots move into positions and all around the classroom. 

We also visited the BFI with Year 6 to take part in a STEM movie challenge. We had to apply our mathematical skills to interactive puzzles- like reading train timetables, calculating weights and plotting coordinates- in order to solve the mystery presented. It was a challenging day with lots of collaboration, resilience and enthusiasm on display! 

Thank you to Ms Fowler and Y6 for organising such fabulous workshops, trip and visitors for our school!