Ashton Under Hill First School

Shaping Bright Futures Together


Oak Week Beginning 1st May 2023

We have been mixing up Coronation activities with our other learning this week, and have completed a wide range of learning opportunities throughout the week, here are some of the highlights!

We have had a very special guest appearance with us all week, King Theo who has taken on his role as Oak Class Monarch with much enthusiasm and it was as if he was born to be a Royal!! He has been handing out Royal Sovereigns instead of House Points and making decisions for the class. He has consulted with his subjects to decide the order of learning on some days and chosen two children each day to Knight for their hard work or services to the class. He has enjoyed sitting on his throne in class and wearing some royal regalia. He also led the parade for Oak Class on a mini tour of the village on Friday. King Theo has been a fabulous King - I am sure he will be very disappointed that his reign will be short after today!

We started the week with looking at the structure and features of a biographical text in English, using a biography of King Charles to annotate the different aspects. After this we started to create some biographical excerpts of Charles Dickens' life, using our class text for inspiration. This book is written in three different styles; report, diary and comic strip with direct speech, so we have been using these three styles in our writing to explain events in his life. 

In our maths lessons we have continued to discover more about the interior angles in shapes, and tried to measure them which we found extremely tricky and used lots of our 'can do attitude to help us make progress.

We used our new found skills in the Google Drawing App to create a Vector drawing of a crown fit for a King! They used lots of repeated shapes and learnt the shortcuts for these processes. The shapes were filled with custom made colours too. The most intricate design was judged by King Theo and the winning design is in the gallery - it was a very tough one to judge. The winner received 10 Royal Sovereigns.

Our art for this week, moved away from Impressionism to look at Pop Art in order for us to create a portrait of the new King. We looked at the life and work of Andy Warhol and studied the portrait he produced of Queen Elizabeth II in Pop Art style. The children's task was to use this as their inspiration and examine the colour patterns and modifications the artist made to create their own images. After creating a colour coordinated background using collage materials, they then added a variety of lines to create different effects and textures, and highlighted different features with colour. They used a variety of different media; felt pens, gel pens, pencil crayons and finally charcoal pencil to add some final definition. The results were very striking, check out our classroom window and the gallery for examples of our finished portraits.