Today, LKS2 were very lucky to have local author Paul Chrystal lead a discussion about our Guiding Question. Mr Chrystal has published over 120 books and we wanted to get his expertise on sweets, of which he had tonnes of knowledge to offer. During the talk, Mr Chrystal looked answered the Guiding Question ‘Why is sugar not so sweet?’ through a health angle. He talked us through how sugar is not always the healthiest, even though we all love sweets.

Thanks for a great talk Mr Chrystal, I know LKS2 appreciated the knowledge and tips to enjoy sweets healthily. Check out our images below for how the talk looked! 😆

LKS2 had a very fun lesson where they were taste testing different biscuits. The aim was to think about what types of flavours and textures we liked the most, evaluating whether we would eat them again or not and the rating out of 10. We put to test 5 different biscuits – garibaldi, custard cream, shortcake, Bourbon and malted milk. It’s fair to say there was a mix of opinions, but most loved custard creams the most. Years 3 and 4 loved sharing their opinions and debating why some biscuits were better than others.

We will now collate our data for each Crew and put them into a bar graph. Our charts will show the favourite biscuit of Crew Marsh, Flaherty and Gerrard. 

LKS2 had a morning of designing labels for their final product. Before completing this activity, we wondered what made a good logo/design. We had some great ideas such as bright colours, it being simple and eye catching.

We then watched Austin’s butterfly, to use the language of critique to help see how we could make ours and others’ work better. The children really took to this, as they provided clear critique for their peers to improve their labels. Their instructions were clear and you can really see the improvements.

Each class will have their own design and it will be very tricky to choose a class design for the labels, which will be used as part of our final product!

Today, LKS2 have been fresearching the origins of sugar and how sugar usage has changed over recent years. It was interesting to see already that sugar hasn’t always had such a sweet past. We put this into a timeline. 

We saw how honey was the main source of sweetness to enjoy from 10,000BC, until about 8,000 BC when tribes in New Guinea chewed on sugar cane as sweet delight. We then saw how sugar turned to people treating others unkindly, as people became enslaved in sugar plantations.

Finally, we got an idea of how sugar is had an impact on our local area of Doncaster. This ranged from Brodsworth Hall, which was built and funded by the sugar trade right to Samual Parkinson’s creation of butterscotch. We found it interesting that sugar helped cheer up soldiers during the First World War.

Today, LKS2 have been figuring out their guiding question for the Summer Expedition. We played a game of hangman to figure out what it was. This was great fun trying to guess what it could be and we managed to get there!

After having the Guiding Question revealed, Why is the history of sugar not so sweet?, we started our KWL by writing down what we knew about sweets and what we would like to know. It was great to hear questions like why does sugar energise us, how does sugar melt in water and who discovered sugar? LKS2 can’t wait to find these out over the next few weeks.

Finally, Year 3 and 4 then watched some videos about how sweets are made. We were mesmerised by how rock was made, as well as candy canes. We even wondered if we would be able to visit a sweet factory or make our own. Keep your eyes peeled! 👀👀