What were the Mayas known for?

25th April 2024Laura Hamill

To continue our history case study, Crew Hamill worked in mini crews to gather as much information about Ancient Maya as we possibly could. We started by listening to a song and working as a crew to chot down the important facts and information. Did you know they were experts in maths, pottery, agriculture and astronomy? Following this, we worked in mini crews to look through some information from a non-fiction book on the Ancient Maya and wrote down as many interesting facts as we could. We are going to use this to create a poster in our next expedition lesson.

Computing – Inventions!

25th April 2024Laura Hamill

Crew Hamill had SO much fun this afternoon creating their own inventions! We discussed all of the pieces of technology we found around school during our last computing lesson and reminded ourselves of what a computer is. We then used this information to come up with our own inventions that all involved a computer. We had to think about what we would need to input into our inventions in order for them to work and then what the output would be once we did that. We had some amazing ideas, including:

  • A cupcake machine: You press a button on your desk and the cupcake machine pops up from underneath, producing a freshly baked cupcake.
  • A glitter party machine: A small box attached to the ceiling. When you clap 3 times, it triggers the machine to open. When the doors open, glitter rains down from the ceiling and the box starts to play music so that you can have a party.
  • A time machine: A box that you can go into and programme with different years. This allows you to move forwards or backwards in time!
  • A shrink watch: When you twist the outer circle of the watch in one direction, it makes you shrink to the size of a little bug! When you twist it back in the opposite direction, you’re the same size again.

St George’s Day

25th April 2024Laura Hamill

Crew Hamill loved having their picnic in class on St George’s Day! We used the afternoon to learn more about who St George was and why he was so important. We then focused on the British Values – democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect and tolerance. For our activities, we had a Crew Focus on tolerance. We discussed what this meant, understanding that we all don’t share the same beliefs and values but that it is important to respect the values, ideas and beliefs of others whilst not imposing our own onto them. We then thought about what the term ‘tolerance’ actually means and identified things that can impact on our own tolerance levels. We created ‘tolerance cups’, filling our cups with all of the day to day things that can niggle us and lead to us having lower tolerance levels. Once we had done this, we thought about the things that ‘make us pop’ – those things that mean our tolerance has run out and we struggle to control our emotions. Finally, we thought about what we could do to calm our brains in these situations and allow ourselves time to top our tolerance back up.

Crew Hamill, Crew Thompson and Crew Mcloughlin – French

24th April 2024Sarah Mcglone

We began a new unit by looking at life in a French school. We watched a video clip to help identify any similarities and differences between school life in France and the UK.

We then looked at new vocabulary related to instructions given in the classroom. We practised our pronunciation and understanding by creating signals to match the French pronunciation. We then worked together to match the symbols to the correct written phrase for each instruction.

To finish, we played a game of Jacques a dit (a French equivalent to Simon Says). We had to listen carefully to the instruction given to us in French before showing either a gesture or doing that action depending on whether it was prefaced with ‘Jacques a dit’ or not.

Measuring Millilitres

22nd April 2024Laura Hamill

This morning, Crew Hamill began looking at measuring in millilitres. We learned that the capacity is the amount of space filled by something and investigated with measuring capacity of different containers. We had several containers, each filled with water. We poured the contents of these containers into a measuring jug and accurately measured the amount of water for each, identifying their capacity.

Cacao Chocolate Drink.

19th April 2024Laura Hamill

Did you know that the Maya were the first people to turn beans from the cacao tree into drinking chocolate? Well, we were lucky enough to be able to sample a version of this today! We mixed some cacao powder with warmed milk and a dash of chilli powder to be able to try it for ourselves.

Ancient Maya inspired tuna salad wraps.

19th April 2024Laura Hamill

Did you guess what we were making? We used the popular Maya ingredients that we blind taste tested yesterday, along with the tortilla wraps we made today, to create tuna salad wraps! We worked carefully to cut and chop the ingredients we needed to add to our tuna – avocados, lettuce and chilli – and then added the ones we were comfortable trying to our freshly fried tortillas! Delicious!

Tortilla Making!

19th April 2024Laura Hamill

Following our blind taste testing yesterday, we continued with our hook week DT by making our own tortillas! The Ancient Maya people enjoyed making and eating delicious corn tortillas but we made ours with flour. We worked in mini crews to measure out and mix the ingredients to make the dough before rolling this out into tortilla shapes and frying. These were then used to go with our final product – Can you guess what we might have made? HINT: We used some of the ingredients from our taste testing yesterday…

New Reading Challenge! Who will earn a golden ticket?

18th April 2024Laura Hamill

“I’ve got a golden ticket!” – Who will be able to say these 5 magical words by the end of Summer Term?! Crew Hamill have been challenged again to read at home and this time, there will be FIVE winners! The first 5 to reach the golden tickets at the top of our challenge, by reading 30 times, will receive a special reward (that may or may not involve a chocolate baking treat). It’s been so lovely to see the engagement from the children already in this challenge! Lots of children’s names are moving up the oompa loompas and heading towards golden victory!

Blind Taste Testing

18th April 2024Laura Hamill

Today, Crew Hamill continued their hook week investigations into our new expedition by kick starting our DT lessons for this half term with a blind taste test. We all had to close our eyes and were given a selection of different foods that were popular in Ancient Maya. We had no idea what these 5 items were until we had touched them, smelt them and tasted them. Some of us were super brave and made sure we tasted them all! However, lots of us instantly regretted tasting the last food item (chilli pepper!!) and had to run straight to the sink for a drink to cool our mouths down!