Class 2 Meet the Penguins

On Thursday Class 2 walked down to the Harewood Bird Garden to meet the penguins. We were lucky enough to play on the adventure playground first.


We then went to the penguin pool to watch the penguins have their breakfast. We found out lots of information and were able to ask lots of questions.

We went inside to make penguin hats which was lots of fun and we all came back to school wearing our hats and walking like penguins!

Year 6 at Crucial Crew (live blog)

Year 6 are at Crucial Crew, learning how to keep safe in all sorts of situations. The areas we are covering are:

Fire safety

The recovery position

Electricity safety

Water safety

Dealing with an accident

The magistrates court and alcohol awareness

Internet safety

The impact of shoplifting.

We also covered drug awareness, stranger danger, how to make an emergency call and the impact of hoax calls. It was, as ever, as superb afternoon, jam packed with learning very relevant to the children.

Superb Singing Lessons

How do you get someone to learn musical notation, so that they can read the music they are singing? Write it on the new library carpet of course!

Another brilliant idea from Mrs Southby's singing lessons. It worked really well and children were very quickly singing the phrases they had written.

p.s. It was only written in masking tape so, thankfully, it did come off.

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.

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.

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.

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