Year 4 create origami birds and clay animals

This week Year 4 had a sneaky preview of the intriguing painting called ‘Orpheus’ by Roelandt Savery. During the upcoming ‘Take One Picture’ week, the whole school will be taking part in a wide range of exciting cross curricular activities using this picture as a stimulus. We have lots planned in Year 4 so we decided to get started and began by discussing the image together. The children were particularly interested by the extraordinary amount of detail in the painting, as well as the fascinating variety of animal species included in it. In English, we imagined what it would have been like to experience this magical scene and then we focused on improving our descriptive writing. To do this we used different senses and created expanded noun phrases, including powerful adjectives and verbs. We also learnt that prepositions are words which indicate location or time, so we used these to add further detail to our writing. Following this, we tried to experiment with word order in our sentences, to give different sentence openers and avoid repeating. Here are a few great examples!

With its silky mane rippling in the wind, a golden lion sat majestically, entranced and gazing at Orpheus. Niamh S

Surrounding me were gloomy trees but I soon began to hear peaceful music enchanting the mysterious forest. Ben E

Eventually, a massive clearing appeared, surrounded by a wide variety of species all drawn together by the enchanting music. Harrison J

On Thursday the children really enjoyed creating origami birds and clay animals, based on those we found in the picture. When these are complete we are sure they will form part of a fantastic display for our ‘Take One Picture’ open day coming up soon!