Tuesday 28 February 2012

Fairy tales brought to life

The world of Hans Christian Anderson, the great Danish writer of stories for children - came to life this morning when we were treated to a performance by the Manchester Actors Company.
The play brought together some of his best loved stories including: The Ugly Duckling; Thumbelina; The Emperor's New Clothes and The Little Mermaid.


The company of three actors delighted the whole school with their performance which was at times funny, sad and dramatic.


"It was amazing how they were able to play so many characters!" said Ross. Everyone agreed that the performance had been a great way to start our day and will provide lots of stimulus for our Literacy work in the future.

Friday 24 February 2012

Calendar challenge!

As part of our topic on time this week we have been looking at calendars. Pupils worked in pairs with a class list (inlcuding birth dates) and had to work out, using their calendars, which day each pupil's birthday was or will be this year. Sounds easy right?

Well, we made it a little bit harder than that. Not only did pupils have to read the calendar pages carefully, work out from the class list the exact date and month and remember how many days were in each month, they also discovered that their calendars weren't complete! Some had whole pages missing......


Some groups just had a few pages of their calendars! Look - one's ripped in half!


Some pupils were left with just scraps of ripped up calendars!!


Class 4 had to use their best investigative skills to work out the most efficient method of working out the birthdays. Mr Sturgess was very impressed with how hard everyone worked on this, as well as the excellent achievement by all of the pupils.




Tuesday 21 February 2012

Scratch animation and lego robotics!

Class 4 recently visited the CLC centre for a fantastic day of ICT work. We were split into two groups for the two activities of the day. One of the activities was Scratch animation, which allows you to create a 'sprite' which can interact with different objects, backgrounds and so on. Some of the pupils had very advanced skills and even made their own 'pong' style computer game.

This is Nick, the scratch teacher. He said it would only be a matter of time before the groups discovered how to add sound to their animations (I think he kept quiet about this feature to save himself from a headache!). He was right - both groups quickly figured out they could add sound to their animations, which made the room slightly noisier!


In the picture above, the screen shows the programming software which was used to give commands to the lego robot. Although we finished up we a free-style 'dance-off' (with Mr Sturgess in Simon Cowell mode as judge), the first challenge was to navigate our robots round a course.

I'm sure you can see from the pictures that this was a lot of fun!



It was particularly rewarding and exciting when a group managed to successfully navigate the course. Eventually, most groups managed this task after lots of trial and error, and by making adjustments to the instructions (e.g. direction, time spent etc.). Well done Class 4, we had a fantastic time and we all learnt a lot about ICT control.









Wednesday 1 February 2012

A star is born!

Well done, Alex Sykes, who is currently performing with Opera North in their production of Norma. http://www.operanorth.co.uk/productions/norma