This half term Year 3 have been learning all about keeping ourselves safe online. For our lesson this week, we worked in groups to create a ‘beat cyber bullying’ poster and then thought about two different scenarios that we could come across. We brainstormed our ideas of how we would feel about each scenario and what we could do help solve the problem of cyber bullying.
For Safer Internet Day this year, the children discussed and highlighted different ways that they use the internet. We learned about sharing our thoughts and talking to others, in order to spread awareness of things on the internet – this could range from: problems we found while using the internet; what we enjoy doing on the internet; or who we follow or interact with online.
Here was some of things the children in 5F wanted to talk about when discussing the internet:
The children were also tasked with thinking of things, people, games, websites and activities on the internet for each letter of the ‘Alpha-net’. Here are a few examples:
They also thought of 3 things that they love about the internet, and offered 3 improvements that they would like to see:
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.
The year 5 children spend the afternoon coding fortune tellers on the Micro:bits.
They had to instruct the Micro:bits to give answers to questions when when they have the correct input (shaking the Micro:bit), and used a random number generator to choose the response based on if the condition was ‘true’ or ‘false’.
After spending a lesson editing out their mistakes; adding music and sound effects; and altering the volume of different tracks of audio; the children completed their podcasts.
So please listen and enjoy.
Ancient Entertainers – Jessica, Layla, Sonny and Riley
Diving into History – Jack, Ella, Dylan and Faith
History Mystery – Maci, Leo, Grace and Zak
Rewind from the Future – Jacob, Jax, Ryan, Tilly and Celine
Wacky but Weird Mystery – James, Madisyn, Ellie and Jensen
William’s Wacky Wonders – William, Bella, Molly and Flynn
Using their knowledge from the research they did before the half term, the children have crearted their own podcast.
They wrote their own scripts, took roles of experts (or Maya priests and villagers from ancient times) and recorded their podcasts in the last lesson.
Now their task is to edit out any mistakes they have made and add music to make their show sound more professional – using Garageband.
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:
Following our first week of stop motion club, here are all of our videos that the children made in their first hour of stop motion.
When working with databases, the children have been searching using terms to search datafields. They have developed this skill further through the use of ‘AND’ and ‘OR’ terms to narrow their searches. 
