Crew MW – Music

21st May 2024Sarah Mcglone

We began work on our new unit of work called ‘Down there under the sea’ by first of all warming our bodies up, thinking about making big movements with our arms and legs to represent different activities you would do at the beach – swimming, surfing, making sandcastles, and jumping over waves.

We discussed lots of different sounds that you might hear at the beach, and thought about how we could represent or make similar noises using our voices. We talked about the noise of the waves, seagulls, a rain storm out at sea, as well as a foghorn blaring to help keep ships safe! We worked together as a crew to create short soundscapes for each of the sounds.

We then listened to and responded to a piece of music that represented being underwater. It was accompanied by a video that showed lots of different sea creatures and how they moved in the water. We responded by moving our bodies to the music in different ways and at different speeds.

We finished the lesson by listening to and beginning to learn our new song ‘Down there under the sea’. We listened carefully to the words and started to try singing along at the same time as the song, thinking about how we moved our voice up and down to sing different notes.

Applying editing and redrafting

21st May 2024Ruth Shields

After having some time to edit and redraft other people’s work, it was time to apply these skills to our own work. We were given time to start working through our plot point so we could uplevel it. This is a skill we’ve been working hard on this year and still find it a little tricky especially as we feel we did a good job the first time round. However, we know there is always room for improvement.

Is it fair or unfair?

21st May 2024Ruth Shields

As we came towards the end of our history case study last week, we consolidated out learning on the process taken to make chocolate. Then we had an opportunity to look at the working conditions before fair trade and after fair trade. We then worked together to sort a range of statements into fair and unfair. We were surprised to see there were a lot more unfair than fair. Finally, we conducted a conscious alley, where we were asked to debate a side of the argument. We really enjoyed this activity.

Editing and Redrafting

21st May 2024Ruth Shields

Last week, we spent some time revisiting editing and redrafting out writing. We were shown examples of work from books and then we worked together to edit for things like punctuation and sense. Once we were happy we had completed the editing, we worked together to redraft which could have considered of added a fronted adverbial, conjunction or adding further description.

Do all liquids behave the same?

20th May 2024Laura Hamill

Crew Hamill have LOVED their first science lesson for Case Study 2 today. We recapped our sticky knowledge of solids, liquids and gases from the things we learned during hook week and took this knowledge forward to conduct an experiment about whether states of matter behave in the same way simply because they’re the same state. To begin, we made predictions on what we thought would happen. Once we had looked at the different liquids – water, oil, cornstarch and honey – we decided that they would behave differently due to some liquids being thicker than others. We predicted that they would move differently, with the thicker consistencies moving more slowly, and that if we dropped a marble in them, it would fall more slowly in the thicker liquids as they are stickier. We then poured each liquid into a glass container and made observations on what happened. We were correct in our prediction: the thicker liquids did pour more slowly into the container. After this, we dropped a marble into each liquid and observed what happened. As we’d predicted, the marbles dropped much quicker through the liquids that weren’t as thick – the water and the oil – and they moved slower, with some resistance, through the thicker liquids – cornstarch and honey. You can see if the videos below how this happened:

Grammar Day

20th May 2024Laura Hamill

Today, Crew Hamill began their new writing genre and discussed that we would be creating a non-chronological report all about Ancient Maya. We have done lots of historical learning over the last few weeks in expedition that we will be using to support this writing and we are going to be using one of our class texts to gather further information. To begin this new genre, we looked at our first grammar focus: fronted adverbials. We discussed what these were and read two different passages that contained them. We discussed how these are used differently depending on the genre we are writing and made comparisons between the two passages. Following this, we worked in talk partners to identify which fronted adverbials would be most appropriate in a non-chronological report. We then up-levelled sentences by adding fronted adverbials to them to make them more interesting. We can now use these sentences when we begin writing our plot points!