Christmas Craft Week! :)
Christmas Cookiies, T-shirt painting, Gonk making, cross stitch, lanterns and more t-light lanterns.
Happy Christmas everyone! :)
What a fantastic term we have had! Kestrels Class have thoroughly enjoyed learning about Ancient Egyptians during the topic ‘Footsteps in the Sand’. It seems like so long ago that we began our journey down the Nile with our river poems. We produced some fabulous poetry and some children continue to write river poems in their spare time. Here are some of our creations below. We also looked at the course of a river and learned about the different parts of the journey including meanders, erosion, centrifugal force, the river mouth, the Nile Delta, upper, lower and middle course and the source of a river.
We have LOVED ICT this term. The children have been creating some interactive quizzes designed for adults and children, you can select which quiz you’d like to take. Some of the quizzes have really thought about making their child quiz, entertaining and child friendly. They have thought about age appropriate questions to ask children and included pictures to make it more entertaining. Some presentations even have sound added to them to read the questions to the children taking part in their quizzes. Watch out! There are some spooky questions in the quizzes that the children designed for adults!
We then moved onto History and had a look at Ancient Egypt and the strange and wonderful history of Mummification and Pyramids, as well as looking at some ancient Egyptian machinery. We learned about how the Egyptians irrigated their crops using a mechanism called the Shaduf. We learned about how Ramasis II built the Abu Simbel temple and how in the 60's it was moved in order to make way for the Aswan Dam. Kestrels have been lucky enough to be able to go back out on school trips this year and for this topic we went to Dorchester Museum to experience the Tutankhamen exhibition…We LOVED it!!! In fact, some of us have now been twice!
For Science we looked at forces, and explored air resistance, gravity, water resistance and air resistance through many fun experiments in our classroom. Kestrels learned about fair tests and how to change only one variable. The Year 5 and 6 children learned about cumulative data and how to work out the average/mean drop time to enable them to compare results. The children worked beautifully in mixed age groups and the older children were exceptional role models for the younger children.
Kestrels then designed and created their very own shadufs to help the ancient Egyptians irrigate their crops. They designed, measured accurately, cut and built their shadufs from dowel and rounded dowel. After their design stage, the children created prototypes from lego to see their designs in real life before making them. The children used paper brackets to reinforce their mechanisms and tested their shadufs using water and then came up with improvements. The Year 3 and 4 children used blue tack to build their simpler models and then worked with the older children to build the more complex designs.