DRAGON!!!!!

Over half term we all designed and made our own shields.  Here's a selection...

We talked about all the different designs, and why we thought shields had pictures on them.  We thought that it might be to scare the enemy. Harry wondered whether shiny shields would reflect the light and blind the enemy, so we went outside to check because it was a lovely, sunny day.

When we were outside we made some strange discoveries!

 We found strange footprints all around the field, bits of burnt material, scratches on the trees, plant pots knocked over, and 4 huge hatched eggs.

We were convinced it was a dragon.  We spent play time looking for more clues.  There were lots of bird feathers around... maybe it ate birds!  Someone found something that looked like a tooth!

Then at the end of playtime, we spotted it!

The huge dragon was on the roof of the school.  We chased it from one side to the other, before it finally came down and ran off down the road towards the junior school!

We needed to warn people about the dragon, so we made posters using all of our excellent descriptive words to help people recognise the dragon.

Let us know if you spot it!

Castles and Dragons

Castles and dragons is our new topic this term.  We started by looking very closely at different pictures of castles and discussing some of the features.  We found that most castles were on hills or surrounded by water; they had turrets, they had very few windows, and the windows were like slits in the wall or crosses; they were made out of stone.  We talked about the reasons for all these features and then painted pictures of our perfect castle.

Time travel writing

As part of our time machine topic we have been thinking about what it was like to write in different eras.

We learned about Viking Runes, and made our own rune stones out of clay.  We also tried writing with a quill and ink.

Here is some of our work.

Time travel treats

On Monday we looked at a time line of history and all the different periods, such as Ancient Egypt, Romans, Vikings, Tudors, Victorians, and the 20th Century. As a class, we decided that the Viking era would be an interesting time to learn about, so we left Wolfgang Tempus a message asking him to go back in time and gather some information.

The next day he left us an answerphone message saying that he would travel back in time for us, but in the meantime he has left us a little surprise hidden in the nature garden.

After following some clues we finally found a time capsule from the Victorian times.

We discussed what all the different items might be, and then wrote some captions about what we would put in to a time capsule to let people know about life today.

Some of our ideas included Skylanders, ipods, cameras, McDonalds Happy Meals and modern hot water bottles (we found a Victorian hot water bottle in the time capsule).

Wolfgang takes us back in time.

Today we had another message from Wolfgang Tempus the time-traveler.  His time machine had vanished on Wednesday morning, and now we know where he went.

After watching the message we started to piece together the mystery.  We worked out that one of the people in the film could be Jesus.  Mr Littlewood then told us that he'd done a little bit more research and found out that it WAS Jesus, and that the other man was called John the Baptist.

We learned about the story of John the Baptist and talked about why people get Christened today - we remembered Reverand Stordy telling us about Christenings at the font at Ecclesfield Church.

We ended the day by making a storyboard to retell the story of John the Baptist and the baptism of Jesus.

Arty Targets

In ICT we have made some word clouds to remind us of our personal targets to display around our class target board. We personalised them with words about our interests.

We made these at a website called tagxedo.

Electrical safety at home.

Today we did some more work on circuits, introducing switches and seeing what happens to the brightness of lightbulbs when we add more to the circuit.  We also looked at a website about safety.  The Monkeys asked me to put a link on the blog so that they could have a look at home... so here it is.

http://www.switchedonkids.org.uk/house.html

This website requires a flash plug in- may not work on some tablets and smartphones.

MONKEYS DISCOVER TIME MACHINE!

This morning, as we were busy looking at the timetable and finding our what our learning was going to be like today, Mrs Donegan came and told us about a curious discovery that she had made.  She had gone out to feed the guinea pigs and found this...

What could it be?  It was too big to fit through the door so it must have landed or appeared there.  We went back to class and thought about some clues... The clock, the keyboard, the wires, the light bulbs... all things that led us to different conclusions.

One of us went on a special job to ask all the other classes if they had put the machine there, but they hadn't.

We were left to mull it over for the rest of the morning.

Message from a time-lord!

After dinner, Mr Littlewood told us that we had received a message about the special machine.  It revealed that it was in fact a broken time machine!

If the link above doesn't work, click here to view it.

The message said we had to learn about circuits so that we could help repair the time machine.  Mr Littlewood didn't know what to do so he gave us lots of wires and batteries and bulbs to see if any of us could work out how a circuit works.

 

 

After we had found out for ourselves how circuits work through trial and error, we made circuit diagrams to help the time-lord mend his time machine.

We thought of some class 'top tips' for the time-lord and left him a message... let's see if the machine is still there tomorrow.

Fairy house building

Today we received another little letter from the fairies in the bungalow garden tree.  It said that due to the recent high winds, the tree that they live in was no longer big enough or strong enough to live in any more.  They had seen our junk model houses and were really impressed so they asked us to build them some new houses in the local park. 

There were some rules though.

• Use only natural materials, as using things like yoghurt pots would be littering
• Use only 'found' natural materials... don't pick any living things

So, we went for a walk to the park and used our knowledge of materials to make houses.  We tried to find materials that were strong and waterproof for the outside, and soft and warm for the inside.

Here are some pictures.



We also had a play in the playground before walking back to school!

Tiny house building.

This afternoon we used our knowledge of materials and their properties, and our designs from Tuesday, to build our own elf and fairy houses.  They had to be sturdy, waterproof and warm.

Here's some photos of the process, and some of the finished results.

 

Material girls and boys

After the Easter holiday we have been carrying on our Little Kingdoms project.  We are going to make little houses for the elves and fairies to live in.

The first thing we had to do was find out the properties of differenr materials.  We sorted them in to different groups such as water-proof and not water-proof; transparent and not see through; flexible or stiff; soft or hard etc.

 

 

We used our new knowledge to think about how we would build a house for the elves and fairies out of junk modelling materials.  We drew our designs and labelled them, showing which materials we planned to use and why.

I'm using cotton wool for the bed because it is soft.

 

Lollypop sticks will make a strong frame.

 

Today we are building our designs.  Check back later to see how we've gone on.

Giant writing

This morning in 'Everybody Writes' we did some giant writing.  As part of our Little Kingdoms topic we have done lots to tiny writing and little notes to fairies and elves... but what if we were the little ones and we had to write a message for a giant?

Imagine a giant is up there in his cloudy kingdom waiting for a beanstalk to grow high enough for him to climb down!  We decided to write really forceful sentences using exclamation marks to keep him away.  We went out in to the yard and used big chalk and squirty bottles to write our messages so that he could see them from the clouds.

 

At the end of the lesson we all planted our own beans and put them in the new greenhouse in our classroom.