Copper Class have certainly hit the ground running this term and have been enjoying being immersed in our topic: ‘Disease and Development.’ Through cross-curricular learning in reading, English, history and science, we have been looking at different epidemics and pandemics since the Black Death in the 14th century. In English we have been writing to entertain and inform our readers by creating our own Horrible Histories style information texts about the Black Death. We also wrote letters in role as a 17th century doctor to a patient who had contracted the Great Plague of 1665. This week in reading we have been learning about the polio outbreak that swept across America after World War I. By half term we hope to be able to answer the question: ‘Have we gotten better at fighting disease?’

In art we’ve been looking at the work of biological engineer and artist Dr. Tal Danino. He creates amazing artworks using real cells to engineer microbial art! We’ve been using his microbial rainbow piece as inspiration for our own and will be using collage to create our final artworks. These last few weeks we’ve been experimenting with different painting techniques to see if we could paint textures that could be found in a microbe and to make materials for collage. We were most excited to do some paper marbling, which we got to do this week. Even just using two colours, you can create so many different patterns and the effect is always different. It was well worth the wait!