What a week! 6J have just finished their SAT’s tests and we are are now beginning to breathe! (Although we did learn some great breathing techniques during our yoga lessons least Friday to help calm our nerves and make us confident!) Today we spent the afternoon, making clay ‘fairy towers’. It was difficult as the clay dried out very quickly in our hot hands! (all that writing in SAT’s!) We particularly found it tricky to make ‘slip’ to connect all the small parts of our towers but we’re all very happy with the results. Take a look!
We have been looking at the artist William Moris. First, we found out about him and looked at his style. We used his ideas to create motifs of our own and reproduced them using tracing paper. Have a look at our final pices. We are very proud of them.
On Thursday, we worked with Malcolm who was an actor from ‘language alive’ on developing our poetry skills. It was great fun. We all had to pretend we were under cover reporters, that had infiltrated an ‘illegal’ poetry group, to write an article for ‘News of the Globe’. While we were there, we learned all about using metaphor, simile and kennings in poetry. We also did some performance. We tried to use this to improve our written work. Our poetry was based on our topic work – victorian working children.
Steven Cartwright is a designer and maker of stained glass windows. He worked with us to create a new window to commemorate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. We had to make a design and then after Steven had cut our glass, we had to mount the pieces carefully. We could also use glass glitter which will melt and fuse to our glass when our tiles are fired. Wehope the window will look great when it is finished.
On Thursday, we learned about the Victorian workhouse. Did you know there used to be a workhouse on Kings Norton Green? We tried some workhouse food like gruel, waterery soup, bread and cheese. The portions were tiny and it tasted disgusting!! I suppose if you were hungry enough, anything would have done.
Next week ‘Language Alive’ are coming to Broadmeadow to work with all of you on poetry writing.
As before, each class will have a fun and stimulating session with specialist teachers to show you how to write the best poetry that you have ever written!
I would love to read your fantastic creations so I have asked your teachers if they would kindly put a selection of your poems on your class blogs.
Remember to listen, use every bit of your imagination and above all try your hardest – I know that I will be in for a treat!
Today in maths we worked on BODMAS. What is BODMAS I hear you say?
Bod is a little person who first appeared on UK Children’s TV many years ago. Is BODMAS something to do with Bod and his mothers (Ma’s)? – Not really, though it may be a good way to remember BODMAS. It’s actually an Acronym (word for letters used to shorten a collection of words to make them more “snappy”, for example – did you know that NUT stands for the National Union of Teachers – which may explain why most teachers are NUTs!)
BODMAS is the secret code which enables us to know exactly the right sequence of doing things mathematically. In particular electronic calculators have to use a rule (known in computing circles as an algorithm) to know which answer to calculate when given a string of numbers to add, subtract, multiply, divide etc.
What do you think the answer to 2 + 3 x 5 is?
Is it (2 + 3) x 5 = 5 x 5 = 25 ?
or 2 + (3 x 5) = 2 + 15 = 17 ?
BODMAS can come to the rescue and give us rules to follow so that we always get the right answer:
(B)rackets
(O)f eg. 1/2 of
(D)ivision
(M)ultiplication
(A)ddition
(S)ubtraction
According to BODMAS, multiplication should always be done before addition, therefore 17 is actually the correct answer according to BODMAS and will also be the answer which your calculator will give if you type in 2 + 3 x 5 <enter>.
We had to follow the trail of answers to gather the clues and work out a final sentence. These were the winners!
We looked at how the Victorians illuminated letters in thier books and came up with some designs of our own. We are going to use them as Mothers Day gifts.
6B and 6J are just settling down to doing us proud in their first SATs test. Good luck to them and all Year 6 children doing SATs this week! 1 week ago
