Music -Indian Hasthas

The children have been listening to different types of music and had to improvise movements to each piece of music- could they guess which animal matched each piece of music? Can you? Which animal- fish, bird?

The children had to listen to the rhythm and dynamics of the music.

During the last few weeks the children have been exploring descriptive sounds based around an animal theme in their music lessons. This week they have been watching some traditional Indian dance movements for different animals.

Hasthas are traditional Indian hand gestures. They are closely linked to the telling of traditional stories. This tradition of telling stories with music and movement goes back hundreds of years.

Can you guess which animals the children
are imitating? The children have been encouraged to let their hands take on the personality and mood of the different animals.

Video clips were shown to the class to help them improve their techniques.

James is pretending to be a deer and Lauren is the demonstrating the shape used for bees.







Raja abhogi is the name of the music the children listened to. They were asked to think about which of the animals studied they could most easily imagine moving in time to the music.

The children improvise moving their hands as their chosen animal in time to the music. The use of facial expressions is an important part of the dance.

Art - Colour Mixing

Over the past two weeks we've been looking at the work of Welsh artist George Chapman. In his oil painting

'Y Traffordd' (The Motorway) we've looked carefully at the colour scheme and tried to create parts of his painting with our own colour mixing.

We've used many skills including communicating information and with our talking partners we've asked many questions to each other e.g How can we make the different colours? What do we need to mix?

This is some of us at work today. We will post some more pictures of our finished work.

Geographical Features

J1 have been looking at direction as part of our topic, Ble wyt ti'n byw?- where are the shops and playing fields from our school? We used our communication skills-listening to others and their ideas. We used chalk

to draw the direction of each feature in Pontyclun.

Some groups wrote notes

for discussion.

All groups worked really hard and co-operated well.
Well done everyone!

Today J2 took a walk around the village to identify some features of Pontyclun. We used our maths skills to sort them into human and physical features of the locality. We didn't find many natural features close to the school except for the school and rugby fields. The river was too faraway for today's trip.

The railway station was quiet today although the 10.30am train arrived on time! We spent some time looking at the train times for the week. Good job Thomas Hart was there or Mrs.Morris would have missed the train as she was looking at Saturday's timetable!! Mrs.Coles told us that she remembered a time when there was a railway yard behind the station in Pontyclun.

Another important amenity for the residents of Pontyclun and their pets.

The Police Office inside the Community Centre.

Many of us were practising our IT skills and took all these camera shots ourselves.

The zebra crossing is an extremely important feature of the village we agreed, especially when a huge lorry thundered past us.

The library which is in our school yard is very important to us. Mrs.Edwards and the rest of the staff are always pleased to see us. They are a great resource. Many of J2 thought it was important to be near the school to help us to read and learn about the world.

Toby read the memorial stone that told us the WI planted trees around the War Memorial to commemorate the Queen's Coronation.

We will be out and about again looking at features and how they may have changed over time.
If you have any photos that you think would be interest to us we'd love to see them. We promise to take great care of them.

r

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Our Visit to Techniquest

Here are some pictures of our fun day at techniquest. We worked on all the different stations using our thinking and communication skills. We had lots of fun working together and discovering the answers.