Enjoying our new classroom and our first week back after half term!

11th November 2024Sarah Mcglone

Crew McGlone were very excited to explore their new classroom after half term. They have really enjoyed getting to know where our resources are kept and the areas we have in our new room.

Whilst we were enjoying our half term holiday, the season definitely changed and we noticed LOTS more golden, crunchy leaves had fallen off the trees in our outdoor area. We loved playing with our friends in Crew F2 and we worked together to collect them up and create big piles for us to play in. We even found some mini-beasts and insects!

Single-clause sentences – Leftovers

8th November 2024Laura Hamill

Towards the end of this week, we have taken our knowledge of single-clause sentences to the next step by working with ‘leftovers’ – extra information in the sentence that is neither a subject nor a verb. We still had to follow our script in order to identify our verb, followed by our subject but we realised that once we had done this, there was extra words that we hadn’t labelled. We then had to decide which clause these ‘leftovers’ belonged to. Once we’d done this, we could ask ourselves when our subject had stopped doing or being in order to identify the end of the clause. Once we knew we’d got a full, independent clause with a subject and a verb, we were able to add our full stops and capital letters.

After we had done this, we then looked at what these types of single-clause sentences would look like with ‘to be’ verbs, instead of action verbs and repeated the same steps as before.

Reading in Crew Hamill

8th November 2024Laura Hamill

After having a heavy focus on retrieval skills during Autumn 1, Crew Hamill have shifted their focus this half term and begun looking at inference skills – using clues from the text in order to provide an appropriate answer that is backed up with evidence from the text. To help us with this, we began by taking part in a hot seating activity in which we worked in mini crews to create questions that we would like to ask the main character of our story. One person then pretended to be this character and attempted to answer the questions, using what they knew from the text as support.

Following this, we then looked at some demonstration comprehension questions that we again focused on our inference skills. After working through how to answer this style of question with Miss Hamill on the board, we were given three questions of our own and three matching answers. We had to work in mini crews to match the question to it’s correct answer, using what we knew from the text to support us with this.

Single-clause sentences – Pronouns

8th November 2024Laura Hamill

Following our success of identifying single clause sentences, we moved on to look at what these may look like with pronouns. We worked in pairs to identify repeated words within two sentences that follow on from each other, discussing which pronouns we could use instead, to avoid repetition. We then used this knowledge to follow our script in order to identify verbs and subjects and then add in full stops and capital letters once we were sure we had two full, independent clauses with a subject and a verb.

Positive Vibes on a Friday in Crew MI

8th November 2024Emily Ibbotson

Today we talked about how a positive attitude is good for our mental health. We talked about what is a happy mind and what a different that can make to our lives. We spoke about what made us happy. We all agreed that when someone else says something positive that then makes the rest of us happy. We worked together to compose a positive statement to share with the crew. We read some some inspirational quotes and decided which one we liked the best- these helped us with our own. We spoke about how some people can struggle with their mental health and how this then can be difficult to feel happy. To help this, we spoke together about what those people could do like talk to a trusted adult.

Reading in Crew Godley

8th November 2024Laura Godley

I have been so impressed with the children’s resilience with reading this week. We have achieved level gaming and improved our comprehension skills. Leon and Oliver have been working hard in RWI and applying this when reading speedy green words. Great work, Crew Godley!

Bonfire week in Crew Tymon.

8th November 2024Abbie Hanson

This week in Crew Tymon we celebrated bonfire night. We explored mixing paints together with our hands to make fire paintings. We also put the fire out in phonics using spray bottles. Using our hand eye coordination to roll a ball to make a beautiful firework picture, we also practiced our cutting and fine motor skills. To end the week we had a sparkle and shine disco, and we showed everyone our best dance moves.

Knight Training

7th November 2024Nicola Robson

Yesterday KS1 took part in knight training. To begin with we learnt about how knights left home at 7 years old to go to go and live in the castle. At 14 years old they became squires and eventually started their training a 21.

We tried out three activities; jousting through rings, flag toss and shooting bows and arrows.

Air Resistance – Parachutes

7th November 2024Laura Hamill

This week, Crew Hamill have continued their expedition lessons by focusing on another force – air resistance. We looked at what air resistance is – a type of friction between air and another material – and looked at the impact this had on objects when they fell to the ground. We tested it out by dropping two pieces of paper (one flat and one screwed into a ball) and discussed which one would fall to the ground first. We then discussed why this might have happened. Together, we predicted the ball of paper would fall fastest as it was more dense and had a smaller surface area. We were then introduced to our mission from the National Space Station:

Using our design brief, we worked in pairs to design and create a parachute that could be tested for air resistance. We worked in mini crews to create these and then came together as a whole crew to test them out. We began by ordering the parachutes from biggest to smallest in order to test whether our prediction (that larger parachutes will take longer to fall to the floor as there will be more air resistance) was correct. We found that we were correct – the larger the canopy on the parachute, the longer it took to fall to the ground. However, there was one anomaly with a parachute that had been made with a thicker canopy and this effected the results slightly.

We loved conducting a fair test to investigate! Raza made an excellent scientist by being our constant variable and being the only one to drop each of the parachutes!