The Moon steals the sun’s spotlight

20th March 2015V Holloway

This was one of the fantastic headlines created in year 5 today as we wrote newspaper reports about the Solar Eclipse.

We started the day researching and investigating the solar eclipse by writing a brief description of what happens and using diagrams to support our explanation. We also watched the eclipse live!

Miss Low set us the challenge of using the solar eclipse to inspire us to write! So for the rest of the day we planned and have started writing (very nearly finished!), our own newspaper reports about this rare phenomenon! At the end of the day we shared our work with each other.

We will share some finished results with you next week.

Open, Grow, Believe

13th March 2015V Holloway

A big congratulations to 2 boys from 5c who have achieved their Open, Grow, Believe badges this week. You have both opened your heart to Brooklands Farm, have taken big steps on your learning journey and are believing in yourself and others!

Well done! (p.s we loved the silly faces for comic relief!)

How do we learn best?

6th March 2015V Holloway

In order to prepare year 5 for planning their own Hogwarts style lessons today we investigated the different ways in which children learn. We also completed an experiment to find out which way we learn best as individuals.

We looked at auditory, visual and kinesthetic learning styles. We found out that the majority of children learn best by seeing the learning and being able to do it and explore it for themselves. We realised that there is no one way to learn, we are all individual and sometimes needed the learning presented in more than one way!

We will now apply our learning from today to our lesson plans, it will encourage use to think carefully about the activities we plan!

 

Exploratory science

30th January 2015V Holloway

Today year 5 became scientists as they used their many skills, including being observant, resilient, resourceful, organised and teamwork, to work out how to separate different mixtures and solutions. After a lot of trial and error, they applied their prior knowledge to use the process of sieving, evaporating and filtering to separate the materials.

A lot of learning took place today with all the children growing in their knowledge and understanding as well as their scientific inquiry skills! Well done year 5!

 

Year 5 Homework due 4.2.15

30th January 2015V Holloway

 

Homework due Wednesday 4th February 2015

As a school we would like to enter an exciting competition for World Book Day, a chance to win a visit from David Walliams! For your homework this week please can you write why our school should win a visit from David Walliams in 50 words or less. It can be handwritten or typed. The best reason will be sent as our school’s entry!

Please take a look at this link which has some more information about the competition and may give you some good ideas!

www.worldofdavidwalliams.com/helicoptertour

 

True Selfies

23rd January 2015V Holloway

Some of the Key Stage 2 children had the privilege of going to the Anti Bullying conference in London last week. They came back and shared all the amazing activities they had done to raise awareness of preventing bullying.

One of the activities was to create a true selfie. On a piece of paper each child writes down everything that they know about themselves and are true statements. This means the children are then listening to themselves and ignoring anything negative that others say about them! We took on this challenge and created our own true selfies, on them we wrote things like:

– what they like
– what they don’t like
– what they are scared of
– personality traits e.g. kind, honest, good listener
– things that they are a part of e.g. restorative practice leaders

Here are some photos of our selfies!

FullSizeRender FullSizeRender (1) FullSizeRender (2)

An Individual Achievement

22nd January 2015V Holloway

5C celebrated this morning as the first person in our class was awarded their individual pin! Congratulations to Emily who proudly received her pin today.  In circle this morning we all said how Emily had been an individual to earn her pin, these included reasons such as ‘she has opened her heart to help people grow in their learning’, ‘Emily achieves learning zone 4 and 5 all the time’. We are all very proud of you!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next week we are looking forward to awarding out second individual pin!

Children as Experts

13th January 2015V Holloway

Today in our grammar lesson, 5c tried a new learning strategy…children as experts. Our focus was on using commas correctly in our writing. For those who were already confident users of commas they got the opportunity to consolidate their knowledge as they became the ‘expert’ and provided support and guidance for small groups. This worked really well as many of the children commented that it was different from being taught by a teacher and they enjoyed being in peer groups without the pressure of an adult! Because of the positive reviews we will definitely use this strategy again in the future.

A Magical Ignite

13th January 2015V Holloway

Last Thursday, Year 5 went on a magical adventure as they went behind the scenes of the Harry Potter films. As soon as we stepped into the Great Hall we were transported to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. We saw the costumes worn by Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), Emma Watson (Hermione Granger) and Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) as well as costumes of many other characters.

The props were also on show for us to see, this included the Triwizard Cup, the Gryffindor Common Room, the Potions Classroom. We also had a sneaky peek at how they filmed the flying scenes and even got the opportunity to ride a broomstick ourselves!

Butterbeer was a must have on the day, with many year 5’s gulping it down, only to realise it was extremely sweet! We learnt a lot about how they filmed the mythical creatures and how they filmed Hagrid…but we wouldn’t want to give all the secrets away! Walking down Diagon Alley was very exciting, we got see the shops used in the films including Olivanders and Gringotts Bank!

Finally, the highlight of the tour, seeing Hogwarts Castle. Due to the time of year we were very lucky to see it covered in snow. We were all amazed by the detail and scale of the model, it was certainly a very magical moment!

Year 5 behaved beautifully, despite being so excitable, and were proud role models for Brooklands Farm. The year 5 teachers would like to say a massive thank you to all the parents/carers that came on the trip with us, we hope you enjoyed it as much as the children did. We are now looking forward to creating magic with our Harry Potter project!