Oak Week Beginning 11th December 2023
Oak Class hasn't started the Christmas wind down yet; we have been super busy with new and exciting learning opportunities.
On Tuesday we had our first lesson using the newly delivered BBC Micro:bit's. We had fun coding with them changing a heart into a flashing heart. Then the following day, we joined a virtual coding session with 97 other schools across the country (and even some schools in Europe) for some festive twinkly fun! We were taught how to write coding to enable snowflakes of different sizes, to flash at different brightness level. The children were super excited by this and were really impressed with their digital skills. They learnt how to use the program very quickly and were soon getting very creative improving their flashing decoration with music, words scrolling across the screen and other flashy and whizzy ideas! We can't wait to use them again to help us to improve our coding skills and find out what else they can do, as they also act as data loggers. We have a total of 30 Micro:bits, all of which were free!! An amazing new and exciting resource for us to use.
In Science this week we were using our 'Being Scientific' skills and designing an experiment which would test the drainage qualities of two different soils. The children were given a range of scientific equipment to choose from (with some items acting as a red herring) and had 20 minutes to design the best experiment they could. We discussed the pros and cons of their ideas all together and had some brilliant scientific chat, reasoning and thinking about why some ideas were good and some not so good. We considered what the variables would be, what we'd change and keep the same, what we would measure and use to take the measurements and finally how to keep it a fair test. We also carried out the experiment and wrote up our conclusions.
We also got messy!!! We have completed the designs and written the step by step instructions this week to create our Neolithic villages. On Monday we used Modroc to create some small dome shapes to form the shapes for our houses. Then on Friday we got creative!! We dedicated the whole morning to create the miniture villages and had lots of fun in the process. The results are fantastic, check out the separate photo gallery of Neolithic Houses which contains all the pictures of this activity from both Oak and Willow class.
In amongst all this we also finished off our assessments and final pieces of work for each of our topics. It's been quite a whirl.
Next week we can start to get ready for Christmas and get involved with some seasonal activities. Check out the newsletter and emails for the day by day break down of what's happening next week.
