The Foundation of Light are offering a free 12-week course for families of children in years 5 and 6 in South Tyneside. There will be one 90-minute session per week, which include family fitness sessions, healthy eating advice, fun giveaways and incentives. The course begins on Monday 12th January, but parents/carers can sign up for later sessions if they can’t make the first ones.
Year 3 art club have been inspired by artist, Iris Scott and her “Shakin’ wet dogs” collection. They created their own amazing interpretations of the art work using finger painting techniques, layering colour to create texture. Finally, they used a paintbrush to add splashes of blues and greens showing the water flying from the dog’s fur.
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The children were so proud of their finished pieces of work!
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The children in art club created some fantastic pieces inspired by artist MC Escher. They used a template to carefully fill the page with the animal faces, ensuring that they tessellated together. They then added detail to each drawing, deciding whether each animal might be a cat, dog, fox or fish.
The finished pieces were fantastic!
Year 3 had a fantastic first art club drawing their own self portraits. We looked at different artists and their interpretation of self portraits then children completed a portrait of themselves using mirrors and photographs to help them. They were encouraged to think about shading to enhance their drawings and add details. We finished the session with a gallery tour where they looked at the sketches and gave positive feedback to each other.
There are some very talented artists in year 3! 
Today our parents joined us for the last session of History Club. We talked about the history of bridges across the River Tyne and the building of the famous Tyne Bridge. We then made our very own Tyne Bridge using junk modelling materials.
This week in History club, we talked about the River Tyne and discovered why it has been significant over time. We found out about shipbuilding on Tyneside and the Jarrow Crusade. We listened to the ‘Last Ship’ by Sting and then made our ships!
The Harton Primary Puzzlers attended The Word for their regional Lego League competition – going up against other schools (both primary and secondary) from South Tyneside, Teesside and Durham.
The children took part in 3 robot games, a team work task and delivered a presentation to share their innovation idea to a panel of judges.
Their project was praised by the judges as being incredible, with little to no improvement they could suggest. Our innovation project was the ‘Skipatron 5000’ – a skipping rope that generates electricity, allowing us to use the kinetic energy of the children on a school yard to charge a device, and take pressure off the National Grid. We devised and developed this product with the help of Suez TeesValley, Equinor, Skipping School and SeaJacks.
Winner of the Skips, with 44 skips.
We used our prototype – built with the help of our friend Danny, from SeaJacks – to hold a skipping competition in the pit. The person with the highest score won a bag of Skips. Children from every other team attending had a go. Even Mrs Ratcliffe joined in.
The robot games were tense, but enjoyable. The 2 robot teams worked very hard to start the robot in the correct place every time, in order to hit the mission in the correct place.
Getting ready to start
Telling Mr Forster to calm down.
Getting ready
After lunch, the children were told they were one of the top 4 teams in the robot game, and would have 2 more attempts to make it to the finals. With a score of 195, they progressed to the finals – another 3 runs to try and score the highest amount of points to win.
Some children were not impressed with the teachers’ enthusiasm.
Showing that it is not all about winning, after their last game the children (lead by Jacob) asked the judges to wait before calculating their score to walk around the table and shake the hands of the opposing team – showing incredible sportsmanship, teamwork and character. In the finals, the children repeated their high score of 195, but were just beaten with 205 points from the opposing team (the highest score of the day).
The day ended with the award ceremony – and taking into account the Core Values, the presentation and the robot game – the Harton Primary Puzzlers were awarded the Championship trophy!
They will once again proudly represent South Tyneside in the national competition in Harrogate in April.
For the last 3 weeks of Stop Motion Club, the children have been animating a story. In the final week they recorded the voices, added both sound effects and music to their videos.
Here are the children’s final videos:
For this week – taking inspiration from the likes of Morph, Shaun the Sheep and Wallace and Gromit – we tried our hand at creating some claymation videos.
This allowed us to manipulate the clay into different shapes and completely change the look of the object we were photographing.
Here are our first attempts are creating claymation animations:
