Reception have enjoyed learning all about Diwali – the Hindu Festival of Light which took place on Saturday the 14th November. They learnt about how people celebrate Diwali and enjoyed trying on some traditional clothing, creating Rangoli patterns, Mendhi hand patterns and making our own diya lights.
Nursery have enjoyed taking part in National Nursery Rhyme Week this week, they have explored a different rhyme each day and enjoyed taking part in some lovely follow-up activities related to each one. Can you guess which ones we learnt?
To celebrate achieving 1000 class points since the beginning of term and the end of our geographical study of Greece, year 5 and 6 enjoyed a delicious banquet. We had lots to try including: dolmades, feta cheese, hummus, Greek yoghurt with honey, tzatziki and pitta bread. Most were even brave enough to try some octopus too!
Our Year five and six pupils all enjoyed a live link to the Houses of Parliament as part of their learning during UK Parliament Week.
We learnt all about the House of Commons and the House of Lords, how laws are made, the role of Mr Speaker, elections, voting and much much more!
Scafell Class were quite eager to pass a bill to reduce the school week to 4 days, however Baroness Farraday and Lord Dean, who sit in the House of Lords, opposed this motion.
Today concluded the work around our final story for this half term; Supertato! The children have enjoyed the past few weeks where they have explored the story in different ways including thinking about how they can be superheroes, making superhero capes, learning about how vegetables are superheroes for our bodies, making evil pea traps and cooking and eating some delicious vegetable soup with Mrs Mason.
Enough food is produced in the world to feed everyone; so why are so many people hungry? Year 5 + 6 pupils worked together to find out just how unequally the world’s food is distributed.
Our work began with a series of challenges. First, we had to identify the continents of the world and try to decide which were the most densely populated. Most of us, used our knowledge of the world and considered the size of the continents to try to figure this out, but when we were presented with the actual population for each continent, we realised our estimates were not always accurate!
We then moved on to presenting the population for each country and its share of the world’s food using Lego figures, shreddies and a world map.
Each Lego figures is equivalent to 100,000,000 people and each of our Shreddies represents 2% of the World’s food.
We were shocked to discover that the continents with the highest populations actually had the smallest share of food.
For example: Asia’s population was represented by 36 Lego people and had to share just 3 shreddies representing just 6% of the World’s food. Just 5 Lego figures represent North America’s population who have as much as a 50% share of the World’s food! How can this be fair?
Our learning today made us realise just how unfair our food is distributed and how fortunate we are to have enough to eat and never experience hunger. Our discussions and our thinking contributed to writing some very powerful prayers to say thank you to God and to pray that the world’s leaders and governments will do more to bring about change so that everyone, regardless of where they live, has enough to eat.
Throughout this week’s harvest theme all classes have been busy recording these videos.
Year 1 are singing Autumn Days; Reception are reciting a poem Harvest Time is Here Again; Year 2,3 &4 are performing a song called Moving Along which talks about the changes in the seasons; Year 5&6 finish our service with prayers they have written this week.
In Science, Scafell have been learning all about different materials and their properties. Engineers choose materials for their projects very carefully because they know that the properties of a material affect how well it does the job.
We’ve been looking in depth at thermal conductors and insulators. Insulators can be found all around the home from cool boxes keeping unwanted heat away from a picnic to frying pans helping to cook our eggs evenly.
To put our knowledge into practice, we designed and built our own devices to keep an ice-cube cold. It’s warm in school with all of the radiators on, so we had to choose our materials wisely to insulate the ice-cube and make sure it didn’t melt!
Scafell did well in choosing sensible materials for the job and managed to keep their ice-cubes alive all the way through break time and beyond – a much better result than the control ice-cube sat on the side!
In Scafell, we have been thinking about the things that make us feel happy. We all chose just one word that represents loveliness in our lives – they included: football, cuddles, chocolate, baking and mountains! What word would you choose?
Further to our geography work on ‘seasons’, year 1 have been learning about location of hot and cold countries in the world. On Monday, we discussed the difference between ‘weather’ and ‘climate’ . We had some furry visitors in class. Some children chose different animals and we talked about whether they might live in hot or cold countries. We then matched the animals to the climate. On Tuesday, we looked at the globe and talked about the Equator and why countries close to this imaginary line are hotter, whilst countries further away are colder. We used this information to highlight the hot and cold areas of the world with red and blue crayons. Well done year 1!