Friday 11th October

On Thursday we concentrated on why the Vikings became explorers instead of just staying in Scandinavia where they were from. We focused on one of the reasons which is that the Vikings were big on trading precious items and, in order to do this, they had to travel all over Europe in order to find people to trade with. The grid below shows some of the items they used to trade.

silver	silk	spices
wine	jewellery	glass
pottery	honey	tin
wheat	wool	wood
iron	fur	leather
fish	walrus ivory	slaves

To help us experience what it was like to be a Viking trader, we pretended to be Vikings and played a trading game. Each Viking (one of us) had a sheet with the precious items above on it. Each Viking picked out 18 items from the bag. They ticked off the items they had managed to pick out and looked to see what they needed and what they could afford to trade. They travelled around the room looking for other Vikings who would trade with them what they needed. The first Viking to collect one of every item called out ‘bingo!’ and was the winner.

 

Friday 4th October

In the hall, we made two giant number lines to 1000 using bead strings and Base 10. Two children at a time came and stood by the end of a giant number line, I rolled three 9-sided dice to generate a 3-digit number and then the children had to race to see who could find the number on their giant number line first!

When we got back to class, we made a vertical number line to 10,000 using the thousand Base 10 cubes. We put a number line to 10,000 question on the board and used our vertical number line to help us answer it.

Friday 27th September

The script below shows the conversation that we were challenged to have with a partner on Tuesday in our French lesson. We took the time to rehearse this script, applying our names and ages, and then some of us took on the challenge of performing our conversation to the class without looking at the script.

 

Friday 20th September

In our science lesson this week, we wanted to investigate what makes an igneous rock an igneous rock, a sedimentary rock a sedimentary rock and a metamorphic rock a metamorphic rock. To do this we started off by each choosing a rock we liked out of igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rock selection boxes. Because we didn’t know which type of rock we’d pick, we then had to do a series of tests to discover the identity of our rocks. The first test was the hardness test and this involved us scraping our rock with a lollipop stick to see if any bits came off. If bits did come off then this told us that our rock wasn’t as hard as other rocks and this is a trait of sedimentary rocks. Next we tested to see if our rock was permeable (would let water pass through it). We put a few drops of water on our rocks and watched to see if the water soaked in. If it did then our rock was permeable and this is another trait of sedimentary rocks. Yet another trait of sedimentary rocks is that they fizz (because part of their make-up is dead creatures) when you put acid on them so we investigated this by putting a few drops of vinegar on our rocks. The final test was to simply look carefully at our rocks through a magnifying glass. Igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks all have detectable appearance features (for example, igneous rocks often contain crystals) and so it was these features that we were looking for under our magnifying glasses. Once we had made a choice on which type of rock we thought our rock was, we brought it back to the front and placed it in the appropriate selection box. The answers were then revealed.

Friday 12th July

On Tuesday we had a P.E./ Science lesson. For this lesson Mr Balls prepared some quizzes on all of the science topics that we have studied over the course of this school year. We got into 6 teams and each team gave themselves a name. The aim for each team was to get a science question correct in order to earn themselves a point but, in order to be given a science question to answer, each team first had to complete a P.E. challenge. The first P.E. challenge was throwing a Frisbee into a bucket. All 6 teams were aiming at one bucket and, if a Frisbee went in, then the challenge was stopped and a question was asked. For the second challenge we had to get the Frisbee to land and stop in the hoop. There was an upside down bucket in the middle of the hoop to make this more difficult. For the third challenge we had to get small balls to land in an upside down cone and stay there. For the final challenge we had to try and get our small hoop to hook on a pole.

Friday 5th July

In Monday’s maths lesson, we worked in pairs to try and solve a series of maths problems. The problems were hidden under 8 cones, each representing a harder challenge level than the last (Good < Better < Best < Epic < Momentous < Phenomenal < World Class < Legendary). We were only allowed to move from one cone to the next once we had got the answer right (something we had to check with Miss Hayes or Mr Balls) and our overall aim was to try and complete all 8 challenges!

 

Friday 28th June

We started This week’s P.S.H.E. lesson as we do each P.S.H.E. lesson, by looking at the Jigsaw Charter (a set of rules outlining how we must behave during P.S.H.E. lessons), trying to get a new best score in our ‘Pass The Ball Game’ (where we’re not allowed to use our hands to pass the ball round everyone in the circle) and using the ‘Calm Me’ script to make ourselves feel calm and ready to learn.

We then moved on to talk about how our actions have consequences and these can be positive or negative. We thought of some examples of some scenarios and what we thought the positive consequences (rewards) or negative consequences (punishments) might be of these. Sitting in a circle, we then discussed (by handing around Jigsaw Jazz as our talking object) whether any of us had and examples of when we’d done the right thing just because we knew it was the right thing to do rather than because we were looking to be rewarded.

In the final part of the lesson we did some acting. We got into groups of 3 and each group was given a scenario to act out. Each group went off to rehearse their scenarios and they were also told to be prepared to act out the consequence, or what they thought the consequence would be, of that scenario as well. We then saw each group’s scenario and had to guess what the scenario was and this would then be revealed by the group reading off their piece of paper. We then had to say what we thought the consequence of that scenario would be before the group acted out what they thought the consequence would be.