Oak Class Week 6
Oak Class have been kept busy this week with a wide range of fun learning opportunities.
We had an excellent morning on Wednesday when the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths)team ran a workshop for the upper Key Stage 2 children. They learnt all about how important engineers are to our daily lives, from designing toothpastes to the most up-to-date digital technologies.
Their challenge was based around developing sustainable technologies, in order to slow down the problems associated with climate change. They had to create a robotic arm to work in a recycling plant, that would sort and process the different materials that are recyclable.
The children used Knex to design and build the robotic arm and had a time limit and several other criteria the adhere to. In pairs, they worked very hard and used lots of team work, resilience and curiosity to complete the challenge. They thoroughly enjoyed it and created some wonderful sturdy structures with moving parts. They were very impressive.
The overall winners were chosen by the STEM instructor and they go through a regional final with other Primary school winners. The well deserved winners were Joshua and Freddy, who were very proud of their achievements.
Keeping up the design theme, in computing, Oak Class have been designing their own computer games through coding on the Scratch website. They have created a background, characters (sprites) and decided on different movements that the sprites will perform. These range from jumping, moving around the screen (without falling off) and programming sounds to indicate winning and losing. The children have had lots of fun coming up with their ideas and have learnt a lot of new coding instructions.
In History this week we have created a 'living graph' to plot the successes of the Viking mission to take over the ancient counties of England and force them under Danelaw. we put all the events into chronological order and then decided how successful they actually were.
Please could you encourage your child to practice the recall speed of their times tables by using the following website link to take them to a site that lets them practice at the required speed. The Year 4's will be required to take this style of test in the Spring Term and Year 5's should also be able to score full marks.
