Our learning

World Book Day

For World Book Day, we enjoyed dressing up as our favourite characters, or dressing in cosy clothing that we enjoy reading in. We joined in with BBC's live lesson and spent the day celebrating reading. We enjoyed making our 'potato people', either based on our favourite book character, or a character that we created ourselves!

Computing at Onslow 02.02.24, 09.02.24 and 16.02.24

For the past 3 weeks, we have enjoyed our time at Onslow St Audrey's Secondary School. Mr Conway was very supportive and taught us how to use the Scratch programming software to code our own games. In week 1, we learned the key tools and vocabulary and created some code to make our sprite move when we clicked buttons on the keyboard. In week 2, we developed these skills further to create a maze game - some of us we able to create more than 1 level! In week 3, we developed a ping-pong game. 

This was an introduction to the type of coding we will be using at secondary school. However, in Secondary school, we will be writing the code ourselves instead of using blocks!

Scratch is free to download and use, and more importantly, it is super fun and helps us learn! https://scratch.mit.edu/ 

01.02.24 Geography: Tectonic Plates

As part of our geography unit - Asia: Mountains, Volcanoes and Earthquakes - we learned about the tectonic plates on the Earth's crust. We looked at how the Earth has changed over millions of years and how scientists believe that the Earth used to be one large supercontinent. We watched a demonstration of the tectonic plates movement as we learned about the different plate boundaries and how they can cause mountains or earthquakes. We got to recreate this simulation ourselves; it really helped us explain to each other how mountains are formed and how earthquakes occur.

01.12.24 English: The Princess' Blanket

In English, we have been looking at The Princess’ Blankets by Carol Ann Duffy. It is a story about the Princess and her dilemma: she is always bitterly cold. That is, until a stranger overhears about her predicament and vows to relieve her of her torment. We wrote our own alternative endings, showing all of the different ways that a stranger could help to warm her up. We were also inspired to create our own forest, ocean and earth blankets that convey a sense of claustrophobia.

13.11.23 History: The Vikings Are Coming!

For our history topic, the Vikings, we began by learning about where they migrated from and to. We were amazed that their Viking longships could hold anywhere up to 50 Vikings at one time, depending on the size of the ship! We learned that they used the stars to help them navigate and were very surprised at how good at navigating they were! We really enjoyed creating our own Viking longships - we can label all of the parts. Did you know - the prow (front) of the ship was often a snake or dragon, which was believed to keep away evil spirits and scare their enemies?

3D Art Installation 18.09.23

In Year 5, we have been taking part in Installation Art inspired by Cai Guo Qiang, a legendary Chinese artist who is best-known for his gunpowder explosion events staged in public spaces worldwide and, in particular, for his firework display for the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

We used mixed media to create a small-scale model of an art installation, thinking about size, shape, colour and pattern. Using different tools, such as a stencil, powder paints and glitter, the children exploded their ideas into their spaces.

Year 5 experienced making their models in the hall and added small world figures so that the scale of the pieces could be appreciated when we photographed each 'location'.