Circus investigation number 1: The human cannonball.

The first science investigation we have done as part of this topic was looking at the human cannonball.  We watched a video of a man being shot out of a cannon at the circus, and then talked about all the forces being used.

We decided that the man was pushed out of the cannon, and that gravity pulled him back down again.

We decided to investigate whether you would fly further through the air if you were lighter or heavier, and to do this we used mangonel catapults and playdough.

We activated our investigation brains and loosened our bodies with a special dance and sing along to this song.

We discussed our predictions with our learning partners and filled in our investigation sheets, and then went to the hall to investigate.

The mangonels are loaded and pulled back

The playdough is pushed through the air, and then pulled down to the ground by gravity.

We found out that the lightest peice of playdough went the furthest.

The Circus comes to Lound.

Our new topic is The Circus.  We'll be doing loads of science investigations to do with forces and some letter writing and poetry.

After thinking about what we knew about circuses in the past and in the present, we wrote a letter to the circus asking if they could come and answer some questions for us... and on Wednesday they came!

Trudy taught us different circus skills including juggling, flower sticks, diablo and plate spinning.  Here are some photos.

Portside Pirates

This is the song we've been using to 'activate' during our Pirates and Mermaids topic.  Lots of marching, pointing directions and playing 'row-your-boat' with a partner.

Recently in maths...

...We've been very busy!

In data handling we've been learning about Venn diagrams and consolidating our understanding of pictograms, block graphs and tally charts

Our first attempt at sorting shapes that are blue and shapes that have 4 sides using a venn diagram.

Hard at work studying pictograms.

Our human pictogram showing how common each different eye colour  is.

We have also been working on halving, finding halves of shapes, and halving a number of objects.  We practiced this on Monday be cutting lots of things in half including paper plates, ribbon and fruit; and half filling different containers with snow (yes... snow again!)  On Tuesday we used our halving skills to share a pancake equally with our learning partner, making sure we shared the raisins, banana slices and smarties equally before cutting our pancake in half and eating it.

I cut an apple in half

Lots of practice at finding half

The pancake feast begins

Also this week we have been learning to use metre sticks to measure things.  We have been using metre sticks to find things around school that are longer or shorter than a metre, we have been creating structures that are exactly 1 metre high or long, and we have been measuring distance using metre sticks.

Nearly a metre...

We made our own metre stick

We measured how far we could throw a beanbag

I built a tower exactly 1m high

Question of the week.

How old is the world?

See if you can find out and post your comment below.

The Deep

We had a fantastic trip to The Deep in Hull on Wednesday.  We had a workshop where we learnt about how sea animals are different to us, and how they survive under water.  We played some ICT games, tried to guess animals hidden inside mermaids purses, and did some observational drawing of some tiny shrimps that we had to look at through magnifying glasses.

After that, it was time to explore The Deep.  We saw some fantastic things... our favourites were the coral tank, the megladon jaws, jelly fish and the shark tank.

There were some incredible colours!

The jellyfish looked great under special lights.

The tanks were huge!

We went through a tunnel and saw sharks swimming above us.

Pirates and Mermaids

Our new topic is called Pirates and Mermaids.  We are learning all about map making, life processes and sea animals, and we'll be doing some great arts and crafts.

We started the topic with a dressing up day and did lots of art work.

Even Mr Littlewood dressed up!

We had a letter from a pirate that said his treasure had been lost overboard and he was going to dive to the bottom of the sea to find it.  He asked for our help in identifying some of the animals he might see, and whether any animals are dangerous.

We are going to The Deep on Wednesday so maybe we will find out then.

Map making

On Tuesday we made treasure maps.  Mr Littlewood gave us each a chocolate coin and we had to go and hide it on the field or in the yard.  We had to pretend we were a bird looking down from the sky and draw all the features of the field and yard.  We drew the trim trail, willow arch, the throne, the outside classroom, climbing wall and much more.

After we had hidden our coins we had to write instructions on the back of the map using the "first, next, then, finally structure" and use lots of positional language like 'left', 'right', 'behind', 'under' and 'above'.

Map making

Writing instructions



Searching for our partner's treasure.



Trying to solve the clues.