Art, Portraits and Deep Thinking.

We began our second case study (Art) by evaluating and analysing works of art by various artists including some works by Jonathan Yeo. We discussed as a class What we liked about certain portraits and why. During a gallery walk, we then delved deeper into the choices the artist made e.g. the medium the artist used to create the portrait and why as well as questioning the colour choices and the impact these have on the overall composition. To finish, we began to think about why these people were chosen to have their portraits made and, if we were to make our own, who would we choose?

Working on reading pace

LT: To read with increasing speed

Y5 had a challenge to read and understand a short text in under 60 seconds, then they had 4 questions to read and record their answer within 3 minutes. We had great discussions around unknown vocabulary and how to unpick what the unfamiliar words might mean.

Dividing in Y2

LT: To divide into equal parts

In this lesson, we used the cubes to help us divide amounts equally into different groups. We then had to read worded questions and some of us used our whiteboards and counters to help.

Shelter building

We throughly enjoyed using our scout skills in Scottie’s today and made our own shelters! We got quite territorial and started adding thinks to make it homely ready for potential survival!

Conductors and Insulators

We really enjoyed learning about and investigating conductors and insulators. We discussed how to keep our test fair and what variables were keeping the same and changing. We wrote our own methods ensuring we were using time fronted adverbials. In mini-crews we then carried out the investigation to see which materials were conductors (allowed electricity to pass through) and insulators (did not allow electricity to pass through). We then recorded this in a results table and wrote our conclusion.

Case Study Reflection

To end Case Study 1, Crew Hamill worked together to consolidate all of our learning from the last 5 weeks. We worked together to create a mind map of all of the key elements of our expedition and how they helped us to answer the guiding question.

Once we had done this, we used this information to complete our case study reflection, answering our guiding question: How Can One Moment Influence Out Future.

Pulling Apart Written Comprehension

This week, Crew Hamill have looked in depth at their written comprehension answers, pulling apart the questions and identifying the steps needed in order to answer them correctly. We have identified as a crew that we are much stronger at answering comprehension questions on texts that we are familiar with so we have been challenged over the last two weeks to complete our written comprehensions on unseen texts. These have been much trickier as we have no awareness of the text before we answer questions on it, similar to how it will be in our SATs and assessments. We worked as a crew to discuss how we identify question types from the wording of the question and then how we use the information within the question to find the answer in the text. For any questions we got wrong, we purple penned our answers.

We are Scientists – Series Circuits

In expedition we have continued to be scientist by starting to learn about electricity. Children were given some equipment in small groups and they had to problem solve together to create a working circuit. This was a chance for children to demonstrate their resilience as they’d only been given the equipment and no further instructions. It was great hearing the children talk through what they’d done already and what they could try next. The majority of the groups managed to construct a working circuit and either make the bulb light up or the buzzer work.