English
We have written our own Ted Talks asking the public to take more notice of the plastic problem. It was quite hard to get the writing going to begin with as we haven’t written speeches before. We talked about the style of our written work, the use of rhetorical questions to grab the audience’s attention and the importance of numerical data to back up our statements. As a class we wrote 4 pages of shared writing! We were extremely proud of ourselves and found that because of the shared writing, we were much more confident when it came to writing our independent versions. We even got to perform our speeches to each other and then gave feedback on what we could improve for next time.
Maths
This term we have learnt about different units of measure. We started with millimetres, centimetres and metres. It was quite tricky having to compare them all and then order them. It is easy when they are all the same unit of measure, but when you are asked to compare mm to cm it can get a bit confusing! We have worked hard to understand the differences and are feeling more confident now. After mm, cm and m, we have started to look at grams and kilograms which was a lot more straightforward to grasp.
Art
We have been learning about Banksy for the past term and a bit which has resulted in our protest posters.
We have all made our own stencils ranging from plastic bags to sea creatures to Mandalorians! Miss Tonner gave us the letter stencils so we just focused on the character/shape we were producing. It was not easy making the stencil and some of us needed to start over a few times as we cut one too many shapes out. We were given help with tricky sections, but overall the stencils were designed and made by us. Once we had our final stencil ready, we chose the paints and got to work. We then used the letter stencils to write out our protest messages. We are really pleased with how the final posters look and think they would stand out in a crowd.
Geography
We went on a trip to Gloucester Waterways Museum to learn more about rivers and pollution. It was so nice to be on a trip!
We were allowed to have a free roam of the museum and see all of the artefacts linked to rivers and canals. Throughout the day we were asked to set up PH level testing to look at water quality followed by setting up flood defences and understanding the impact of erosion. We also looked at the history of canals before heading off on a boat trip where we also got to eat our lunch! The day was so busy and before we knew it we were back in Minch.
Science
We have started looking at solids, liquids and gases. Our first experiment was biscuit bashing! We were looking to see what the properties of solid were and whether or not a solid could act in a similar way to a liquid. First, we took a pile of biscuits and bashed them into tiny crumbs; they almost looked like tiny pieces of sand. When we poured the biscuit crumbs into another container, we noticed that they piled up together and didn’t fully take the shape of that container unlike the liquid which filled every space of the bowl. We then poured the crumbs into a different shaped container and they separated a bit more, but still did not fully take the shape of the container unless we forced them to. The liquid again took the shape of the new container. We came to the conclusion that although some solids pour just like liquids do, they do not fully take the shape of any container unless forced whereas liquids will fill the container completely when poured.