Group A sailing adventure

Our first afternoon activity was a great success – sailing right across the reservoir. The rain held off and the sky even turned blue on our way back.

Year 5 are having a puzzling time.

Timeline is helping children understand chronology with famous events and inventions throughout the ages. 

   
 

Jigsaws are popular, both online and out of the box. 

   
 

Quirkle and Rubik’s cube are the order of the day in Mr Loughlin’s room. 

  

5C try to find the best thermal insulators.

Trinity checks over the evidence.   

5C build KASH towers during their curiosity cafe this afternoon

   

 

Magic Mania for Year 6

Year 6 have been treated to magical tricks at Davenports Emporian this morning and are now busy researching famous magicians and solving puzzles in teams.  

    

    
    
 

Carol Singalong

Many thanks to all the parents who came along to the Year Four Carol Singalong. It was lovely to perform outside, next time we must all remeber to all sing up loud and clear to bring Christmas cheer.

Bouncing Bounty

  

Everyone in class has joined in the sponsored bounce. We are grateful to the parents who helped organise this and gave up their morning to count our bounces. We each bounced an average of 70 bounces per minute. That’s a whole lot of bouncing that will raise a bounty for the school. Thank you too to everyone who sponsered our bouncing.

Pirate Slam

There be no fiecer crew of pirates than those found in year five today. Just take a look  at the landlubbers they captured.

  
They be a right talented bunch of poets toos. They while away the long nights aboard ship writng pirate poems. I was lucky enough to see a true pirate slam poetry competition this afternoon and there be no better entertainment found in the Seven Seas. See here the piratical poets.

 
That be the end of our pirate adventures. Next, tales of Olympian feats from Ancient Greece.  

Play in a Day

The first question everyone asked was ‘How is it possible to put on a play in a day?’ Here is how you do it in four simple steps.

STEP ONE  – Make the props. We had the script and notice of props needed from Splat’s Entertainment. 5w had nearly 2 hours to make the props we needed for our scene. We got on quickly and had time to prepare a page about the play for our pirate books.

  
STEP TWO – Learn our parts.

We only had an hour to learn two scenes. We had to be really quiet and pay attention to the director. Then we needed to remember everything we did. It was hard to remember exactly what to do but luckily some people are really good at listening and we could follow their lead. By lunch we had been through the scenes twice.

  
STEP THREE – Rehearsal.

All three classes neede to run through their scenes. The audience started to arrive before we even got started! But once we started we could see some great acting. The key is everyone else being still so the actors on the stage can concentrate.

 
STEP FOUR – The Play

The play, was fantastic. Aaron, from Splat’s Entertainmet, gave us all the cues which helped us remember our parts. Even if we didn’t we found out it didn’t really matter as long as the audience  enjoyed our performance. At the start of the day many of us were very nervous ( especially the teachers) but by getting stuck in and doing our very best we found out it is possible to put on a play in only one day.

  
  

Simple Machines

Pirates can be marooned or shipwrecked. Left all alone on an island they would need good technical skills to solve problems. Our wanna be pirates learnt about the six simple machines today (I won’t tell you what they are, see how many your pirate can remember). 

Here’s a clue, on the day we explored pulleys and levers. Our challenge was to build a fixed single pulley, nearly everyone achieved this. The second challenge was to make a single moveable pulley, that was hard, only one group managed to make this. Next time you are in our hall see if you can spot the mechanism with 5 fixed pulleys. (Clue – look up.)

  
We also had time to make lots of Knex models that used simple machines, this one took 3 groups to get it made.

  
Which simple machine can you see in the picture below?

 
Once we had a good understanding of some of the simple machines we tried the Rube Goldberg Challenge – to make our own machine made up of the six simple machines. Rube Goldbeg was an American cartoonist who was famous for the complex machinery in his cartoons – very like the Mechanical Harry book we had in one of our  Curiosity Cafes.

  
 

This was my favourite Pirate day so far as I never had the chance to do these hands on activities when I was young and finally realised my dream of building a single fixed pulley!