Welcome to the home page for the second half of the Autumn term 2022. Our topic this half term is called Maafa. It is a history-based topic about the slave trade.
The topic web below will give you an outline of what we will be covering in each subject area. New updates are added to this page weekly. We hope you enjoy reading about our learning.
Week ending Friday 1/12/22
We’ve been engineers and scientists this week as we welcomed the RAF STEM team into school to lead a workshop with us using LEGO programming kits. We also completed extra STEM challenges in class over the week. The main skills we have been using are creativity, problem solving, listening and lots of collaborative teamwork.
On Monday we created catapults from lolly sticks, elastic bands and a plastic spoon! It was lots of fun seeing how far we could fire a ball of aluminium foil. On Tuesday we were given 15 straws and 1 metre of Sellotape to construct a bridge that could span a space of 25cm and hold a weight. There were lots of discussions and reasoning about the designs and pleading for extra tape!
The highlight of the week was definitely the Lego workshop with the RAF Team. We had a task to create a moving robot/vehicle that could rescue people from a disaster zone. There were lots of discussions about the type of items that would be helpful and creativity to turn the ideas into reality. It was so lovely to see the children working collaboratively together to achieve their goal. It was lots of fun to then race the robots against each other.
Week ending Friday 18/11/22
There is definitely an autumnal feel in the air this week – especially on Tuesday with the torrential downpours!
In English this week, we looked at the original advert Shackleton placed in the London Times calling for people to join him on his expedition to Antarctica. We discussed the qualities Shackleton had as a leader and the skills and personality types he would expect in a member of his crew. Using this knowledge, we drafted and edited formal letters to Shackleton asking to be selected to be a member of his crew. The children enjoyed writing up their final letters on tea-stained paper so that they looked old.
Maths has continued with an exploration of multiplication for Year 6. They extended their skills by using long multiplication to solve word problems with multi-steps. Year 5 finished off their unit on addition and subtraction.
In science, the children learnt how to draw electrical circuits scientifically using symbols and then got a chance to make the circuits they had drawn; it was lots of fun!
Week ending Friday 4/11/22
Welcome back to the new half-term! We have an action-packed few weeks ahead of us with lots of new topic learning and preparation for our Christmas carol service. It’s been lovely to see everyone again and catch up with each other’s news.
This week we have finished off some of our learning linked to the Frozen Kingdom. Before the holidays, we did a home learning activity about climate change. We researched some of the causes of climate change and then generated some questions about it. We were very lucky to be in contact with a scientific researcher who is investigating climate change in Antarctica, and she was able to answer some of our questions for us! This week we read through her responses and then created posters that we could put around the school to inform people about how they could help reduce the effects of climate change.
In English, we started a new unit of learning based on the book Shackleton’s Journey by William Grill. Although this book links to our previous topic, we will be using it to write about the key events in the life of a significant person linked to our new topic. We really enjoyed reading Shackleton’s Journey and learning about the amazing events that took place in Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition.
In maths we continued with our new unit on the four operations. We worked on our formal column subtraction methods and applied the skill to problem solving.
With Mrs Wortley on Friday, we started to learn about our new topic and the Amistad munity. We also created stunning silhouettes in art to accompany our World War 2 poetry.
Posters about Climate Change
