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.
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.
Phase One a Roadshow can come every week for extra physical fitness lessons, aka the school disco. Most parents may be curled up on the sofa in blissful peace and quiet tonight but the wonderful parents of the PTA are here at the Summer Disco ensuring safe, but loud, fun!
If you were here, and loved it, leave a comment.
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.
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!
This week our pirates have been learning all about friction and then applied their learning to the creation and construction of a pirate ship.
For our first activity we needed to use air resistance and gravity to help the Captain deliver his messages safely. We tested different helicopters to find the one that travelled slowly and fell directly to,the floor. Our outcome surprised us all – the original design proved to be the best as it was not blown to one side by the wind.
Our next challenge was to find the best small boat design to carry the most cannon balls (marbles) to the ship. This proved very exciting and once again we were surprised by the result. The boat in the photo had a surface area of 154sm squared as its base and held 60 marbles. That was more than twice the nearest contender. We predicted that the largest area would carry the most cannon balls but this proved not to be the case, other variables were just as important. Can you guess what they were?
No one wanted to slip if they had to walk the plank so we checked to see whose shoes had the best grip. This time our prediction proved correct. The shoes with the deepest tread had the most grip. We used Newton metres to measure the force needed to pull the shoe. How did that tell us which had the greatest grip?
Finally we got to design and make a pirate ship. First we cut wooden dowel to make axels, next we fixed the wheels to the axels. After that we explored ways to make the ship go fast or slow. Finally we created a ship design that was elegant and fearsome.
Today we started our Pirate themed days with a fun mini orienteering course. Mr Hall talked to us about the uses of maps, he had many different examples. We found out the meaning of some unusual symbols, the crossed cutlasses were not showing pirates but the site of a battle.
Outside Mr Hall showed us how to measure 10 metres by counting every other pace.
Nearly everyone learnt how to take a bearing from the compass (one person remembered how to do it from the Brancaster trip). Here’s what you do: turn the dial until the direction you want to travel is at the top, hold your compass level in front of you, slowly turn yourself until the red arrow lines up with North, look for a point straight ahead in line with the top arrow. You can now walk to that mark and you will be walking the right direction.
Our last activity was the mini orienteering course. Before school Mr Hall drew an excellent map of our school field, he showed us how to orientate ourselves by turning the map so we could match the far corner of the field to the map. It made finding out where we were so much easier. Over half of the class found all the flags and some were very tricky to find. 
A huge well done to all the children from Fakenham Junior School who took part in the cross country today at North Walsham. Every year group was represented and all the children put in a great performance.
Children have been working hard this term on improving the presentation of their written work. These children have been nominated by their teacher for having made the greatest improvement! During assembly the children were presented with perfect presentation bugs and then shared drinks and nibbles to celebrate.
A number of children from year 5&6 had the opportunity to compete in the North Norfolk partnership event at the UEA in a number of track and field events. There was great teamwork and a super attitude from all those who went, well done!
Fakenham Junior School 