A Fabulous Final Week!

Thank you, St. Clare's, for giving me such a wonderful last week before I leave for maternity leave! We worked hard this week and we were so happy to welcome the fantastic Mrs Bennett into our St. Clare's team. I know you're going to make her very welcome.

We've been continuing with our Kings and Knights topic this week. Mrs Bennett worked with you to create these spectacular crowns. We were so impressed by how different they all were!

You made some super fact files about Edward the Confessor. You'll be learning lots more about him and his interesting life in the next few weeks, including a fabulous trip to Westminster Abbey. It's one of my favourite trips in Year 5- you're going to love it! I can't wait to hear all about it.

We read Part III of 'The Lady of Shalott' this week, in which we met the dashing Sir Lancelot. We worked together to write this fantastic description of the knight:

Here are just a few examples of some of the excellent writing from St. Clare's this week (click on the pictures to make them larger and easier to read):

On Wednesday, we showed Mrs Bennett how fantastic you are at poetry. Inspired by the moment that the Lady of Shalott looks out of the window and triggers her curse, we wrote this very dramatic poem. Can you spot some similes? Metaphors? Alliteration? Onomatopoeia? Can you find all the references to the poem we were inspired by, The Lady of Shalott?

The Curse

Dark clouds cloaked the sky like velvet,

Lightning tore through the coal,

She heard thunder crash upon the tower,

The air was filled with a deafening sound,

Rain lashed upon her trembling soul.

Crash! The mirror shattered into a million pieces,

Splinters flew like shooting stars,

A hurricane of glass and the web flew out of the casement.

A foreboding feeling enveloped her,

A scream of despair.

By St. Clare’s Class

Wednesday 11th January 2017

We also enjoyed our last P4C lesson together this week. Our stimulus was this beautiful short animation:

The questions we came up with were:
1. Can old things be as good as new? Why?
2. Should all people be treated the same? Why?
3. Can you still have happiness, even when you are unfortunate? Why?
4. How can we make life better?
5. What would the world be like if rubbish took over?

We voted to discuss question 3; Can you still have happiness, even when you are unfortunate? Why?
Our discussion included homelessness, the value of money, fairness, happiness and even communism! I shall miss our Philosophy discussions!

A Day in Camelot!

Today, we have spent much of our day in Camelot! We created our own knights and wrote letters from King Arthur, to explain why they had been chosen to join the Knights of the Round Table and to tell them about the quest they needed to go on.

 By Darcy

 By D

By Jack N.

Some of us wrote such fabulous letters that we were crowned ourselves!

Later in the morning, we read the fourth and final part of 'The Lady of Shalott'- it was a tragic but powerful ending. Mrs Parrott was blown away by our poetry analysis- we identified that the song she sang linked to the funeral songs she heard in Part One. We decided that her white robes had lots of connotations (our new favourite word!)- they made us think of purity, innocence, religious robes, an angel or Jesus- because he was also an innocent person who was killed. We also made a connection to the Bible by noticing that when she died the skies turned black and there was a storm, just like Good Friday. We thought that the darkening skies were definitely a clue that something bad was coming.

The Lady of Shalott, Waterhouse. Source: wikipedia

Then, we looked closely at the structure of Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shalott'. We counted the lines in each verse and noticed the rhyme patterns and repeated phrases. Next, Mrs Parrott challenged us to identify how many syllables or beats were in each line.

We found that the general pattern was:

8

8   The first four lines rhyme.

8

8

7   Ending in 'Camelot'

8

8   The next three lines rhyme.

8

6   Usually, 'The Lady of Shalott'

We used this structure to work together to write our own verse for the poem:

The tower beneath a clouded coat,

In the mirror she spied a boat,

She ran down to the willow’d moat,

Upon the prow, her name she wrote,

She floated to tower’d Camelot.

With her dying breaths she started to sing,

Her mournful song, heard by the King,

She died without a knight or ring;

The Lady of Shalott.

By St. Clare’s Class

   

Finally, we had a try at writing our own verses-

 it was a very tricky challenge! 

 By Francis

 By Elizabeth

 By Mina

By Finn