Stalbridge Church of England Primary School
Activities Blog
Marshmallow and spaghetti structural engineering!
We have been designing our own piers in Owls Class and as part of our research we have been investigating building structures that are strong. We researched lots of different structures such as the Eiffel Tower, Forth Road Bridge and the Severn Bridge, as well as may others. We noticed that they use triangles to help give them strength. Our challenge was to use one bag of Marshmallows and spaghetti to make the tallest structure we could in twenty minutes. Our next challenge was to build a bridge from paper to hold as many books as possible. We investigated using cylinders and paper folding to create triangular structures. Well done to the teams that won the challenges. We had to show lots of resilience like a penguin and works well as a team like bees. Click on the picture to see us in action.
Journey Sticks.
As part of our Amazing Adventures topic, we have been making journey sticks. These were traditionally used by the Native American and Aboriginal people to help them recall their journeys and also so others could follow their route. we have been thinking about important events in ours lives and the changes that have happened during this time. To mark this journey through the first 7 years of our lives, we have been making our own journey sticks. We have also added the Native American symbol for our birth month. Our journey sticks are displayed in the window of the classroom so that we can share them with you. Click on the picture to see more images of us at work.
Thinking and Planning Learning Powers in Owls Class.
Owls Class have been busy using the Thinking and Planning learning Powers, just like this term's focus on being an Owl learner! We have been using the design process to think about the problem we want to solve (create a habitat for Insect in our school grounds), researching (using our homework, books and the internet) and beginning to plan our designs. It has been great to see everyone working well in groups to think about the advantages and disadvantages of each design we have looked at.
Learning a New Way to Communicate!
We have had a exciting day in Owls Class, learning all about communicating using British Sign Language (BSL) to link with this term's Learning Powers and the Parrot. Thanks to Mrs Williams, who spent the morning teaching us lots of signs, from greeting to signs about insects. By the end of the session we were able to describe insects, their habitats and even their food. After half term we will be producing our own video blog, using BSL, about insects and our project to build an Insect Hotel. We will let you know when it has been posted!
From Caterpillars to Stunning Butterflies
Owls Class have been carefully looking after some special visitors to our class. As part of our topic, Insect Detectives, we have been raising butterflies from caterpillars and are pleased that we now have four beautiful Painted Lady butterflies. We were lucky enough to see the fourth butterfly emerge from its chrysalis today and are expected the fifth to emerge in the next couple of days.LATEST UPDATE: five beautiful Painted Lady butterflies have been released in our wildlife pond area. Well done to Owls Class for looking after them so carefully! Take a look at the pictures of the exciting event.
Refugee Day
During Refugee Day we thought about what it would feel like to move to a new country. We played games and talked about things that we needed. We looked at the rights of a child and made welcome posters.
RSPB Avalon Marshes visit
Owls class nave had a fantastic visit to the RSPB reserve at Avalon Marshes and made the most of the glorious weather by spending the whole day in the outdoors at the Ham Wall site. We spent the day pond dipping, plant spotting and enjoying the wetland habitat birds. We spotted Great Egrets, heard a cuckoo calling and spent a lot of time trying to identify the chorus of song that turned out to be frogs looking for a partner. We found a huge range of mini-beasts including water beetles, dragonfly nymphs, beetle larva, water spiders, pond skippers, water scorpions and water boatman. We learnt about camouflage, food chains and habitats.
Owls Class Assembly
We hope you enjoyed sharing our topic during our class assembly. The children spoke with great confidence. A special mention has to go to Leon who was a fantastic story- teller for our Theatre-in-the-Round production of 'Where the Wild Things Are!', narrating the story in front of the whole school and family and friends of Owls Class. The children worked hard on their 3D rainforest dioramas, carefully sketching animals from different layers of the rainforest, and hopefully have shared these with you now they are at home.
Owls Class Acre of Rainforest!
Congratulations to Owls Class, who planned and hosted a Fairtrade Breakfast event and raised £50 to sponsor an acre of rainforest through Rainforest Concern. Our acre is part of the Choco-Andean Rainforest Corridor in North-West Ecuador. This is an amazing achievement and a lasting reminder of our 'Where the Wild Things Are!' topic.
Fairtrade Breakfast
Owl's Class hosted a Fairtrade breakfast for friends and family to raise awareness of the need to buy Fairtrade food to support farmers and their communities around the world. As a writing focus we made campaign posters and table cards to try and persuade our family and friends to choose to buy at least one Fairtrade product for their breakfast.We baked Fairtrade Muffins, made Fairtrade fruit kebabs and fruit smoothies, and served Fairtrade tea, coffee and hot chocolate for everyone to enjoy. It was a fantastic event and we raised £50 through donations. Thank you to everyone for your support for the event. The children thoroughly enjoyed the day!
Road Safety Week
This week it is road safety week. We had PC Neil Lovejoy in to see us. He taught us about being safe on the pavements, roads and in cars. We practised crossing the roads and learnt about different crossings.
Fleet Air Arm Museum Visit
As part of our flight topic, Owls Class visited the Fleet Air Arm Museum. We had a tour of Concorde, had a trip to the deck of an aircraft carrier and toured the museum. As part of our science topic, we took part in a materials workshop. There was lots of hands on science investigation and even some dressing up!
Making a Timeline
We have been making timeline of events we have learnt about so far, linked to the history of flight. To help our understanding, we used our birthdays to make a human chronological timeline! We were very good at this and helped each by organising ourselves by year, then months and finally the date of our birthday. Mrs.Lloyd was very impressed by how quickly we were able to complete this task. We then had to find pictures of the events we have learnt about in our topic so far. We found the dates and worked in groups to make our own timelines.
Being Resilient like a penguin!
We have been finding out about Learning Powers this week. We shared the story of Rainbow Crow, a native American myth about a crow who brings fire from the Sky Spirit to save his friends. After thinking and talking about the story, we decided the Rainbow crow showed resilience as he kept on going despite burning his beautiful feathers. We then though about how we could be more resilient with our learning and be just like a penguin!
Our group thought that Rainbow Crow persevered, as he kept going when his feathers burnt and turned black and he lost his beautiful singing voice. That is why crows are black and say, 'Caw!Caw!
Rainbow was worried about his friends so he kept going. He became Fire Crow and then Black Crow.
Owls can be firefighters too!
We had a special treat on Tuesday afternoon when we got to explore a real fire engine and ask the firefighters all of our questions! We have been looking at the Great Fire of London and we found out all of the things that firefighters have now that they didn't have back in 1666... We thought that if the firefighters could go back in time, they could be a real help to the people in the Stuart times! Because we were so good, and asked lots of clever questions we even got to hear the siren on the fire engine! The fireman came into class afterwards and told us all about how to be safe in the home, and he told us to remember to check our smoke alarms to check they are working every 'Test it Tuesday!'.
Science Day!
We have a very special day on Monday, as lots of different teachers came into our class to help us solve problems for Father Christmas. All of his problems needed scientists to help find the answers and we worked very hard to help him! We helped animals to hibernate, stopped Father Christmas' presents from getting wet and built an Arctic habitat for the winter animals!
Anti-Bullying Week
We have kick started our week with a whole day of Anti-Bullying activities. We challenged ourselves to think about empathy and how to put ourselves in other people's shoes. We used a mountain to see how sometimes our behaviour doesn't show our feelings and thoughts, and we talked about how best we can problem solve when this happens at school. We then used Frank and Bonnie (our local puppets!) to role play a scenario and think of ways to use empathy to solve a real problem. We worked very hard and we are going to try our best to put ourselves in other people's shoes this week and be good friends together.
Gunpowder, treason and plot...
We have been looking at Guy Fawkes in the first part of our history topic this term, so take a look in our window to see if we thought he deserved to be punished or whether we should have joined his cause! We made these fantastic firework pictures in art using pastels and glitter to create some amazing effects!
Perhaps we won't win cleanest class of the week...
But we have been very busy making a mess while we've been building our vehicles!! We have been thinking about different materials and their properties and our end project was to build a moving vehicle with a mixture of scrap! We're very proud of what we have made and we worked in pairs to share our fantastic ideas.
Materials Everywhere!
We would like to say a big thank you to everyone who brought in materials for our project. We have started by sorting them into different groups and categories (It's not a big mess, promise!)and deciding how we can link different items together. We also looked at how we can change the shape of some of the materials but not others.
Reading Journal Activities
Apologies for the delay, but Reading Journal activities are now available to download from 'Links' in the Owls Class section of the website. Snowy Owls, Barn Owls and Tawny Owls need to access Reading Activities 1 and Little Owls and Eagle Owls will need Reading Activities 2. These will still be available in the classroom, but just in case you needed them, they will be available now to download as a pdf file :)
Thank you!
Multiplication Magicians
We have been looking at our times tables for the last two weeks and we have become superstars at arrays and writing our multiplication and division number sentences. Today we were challenging eachother with arrays and asking number problems for our partner to solve!
Deep thinking in Year 2...
We have been thinking about kindness in year two and about how we need to be thoughtful of other peoples feelings. We made a conscience alley using puppets to think about the choices we make, and how to be the best kind person we can be!
Tea Party in Owls Class
We had a tea party in Year Two today because we were the cleanest class of the year! :) We had lots of lovely treats to eat, and found it tricky to live up to our clean title with our ice creamy faces! Oops!
Class Assembly!
Wow! We had such a busy and exciting day performing our class assembly to you all, we had such a fantastic time and are very proud of ourselves :) Thank you for coming to watch us and for joining in our picnic too! We especially enjoyed our Rounders match with our grown ups...
Adventures in the Environmental area
Today we had a special session with Miss Page and went to explore the Environmental Area, we went pond dipping and mini beast hunting and found all sorts of creatures! We are super scientists!
Fathers Day Surprise!
We have been very busy today creating some special Fathers Day surprises! Hopefully our dads and grandads will be impressed on Sunday!
Mr Twit's Bewildering Beard!
We have started to look at The Twits and we were all disgusted by Mr Twit and his horrible beard! We created our own Beards using lots of different yucky things, some of us had bits of popcorn and worms in our beards!
More Owl Activities
Today the class had a special surprise as after their Owl visitors yesterday, they had the chance to see a real Owl pellet! After talking about how horrible they smelled, they were able to see all of the different animal bones inside and identify which animal they came from too. What top Owl detectives!
Owls in the Owls class!
Today, we had a very special treat as Mrs Barlow brought in 3 Owls to show the class and to answer all of our questions. We had to be very still and quiet, but we are now all Owl experts! We loved meeting Eddi the Barn Owl, Beebo the Tawny Owl and Nibbly the Black Barn Owl and are looking forward to writing a fantastic fact file about them.
Busy Researching!
We have been looking at Information texts in Owls class and trying to find the answers to questions about different topics, this group were Fossil Fact hunters!
Pizza Maths!
We have been looking at pizzas to help us with our fractions in numeracy, we worked out what fraction of toppings needed to go on each slice. It made us a little hungry though...
Bristol
Owl Class really enjoyed learning about Brunel's ship, the SS Great Britain, in Bristol.
Arts Day 20th June 2012
We created an Elmer collage with Mrs Brown, Mrs Squires and Mrs Miller. We used oil pastels, felt and sequins.
Noah Messomo visit
On Monday we were lucky enough to be visited by Noah Messomo who originated from Cameroon in Africa. He came to teach us lots of new songs, dances and stories from Africa, which linked with our new topic of Kenya. We had such a fantastic day and so we will be sharing parts of it with you soon! Pictures and videos to follow.....Watch this space!!
