The Marvellous Maya!

17th May 2022S Lovatt

We were lucky in Year 5 to have a drama workshop all about the Maya, which is our current History topic. We started with some true or false questions, then created freeze frames of different parts of Maya life.

Here we are acting out Pok-A-Tok (a Maya ball game where the players could not hit the ball with their hands, and the objective was to get the ball through a stone hoop at the end of the playing field.)

The Maya built many temples and painted them red, although we can’t see the red colour any more.

The Maya had a hierarchy in their society: slaves were at the bottom, followed by farmers, warriors, astronomers, priests and finally the king (known as the ajaw).

To finish off our workshop, we acted out the Maya creation story.

The two creator gods were able to think of anything they wanted, and it would appear. So they thought up trees and mountains. Then they realised they needed something that would praise them, so they thought of animals.

However, they realised the animals couldn’t speak to praise them, so they made people out of clay. But the clay people just crumbled to the ground.

The gods then decided they needed the people to be stronger and harder, so they made men from wood.

These men could not speak to praise the gods, so they destroyed them. Finally they made men from corn paste. These men could speak and praise the gods, but they could see too much so the gods removed some of their vision. They didn’t want the humans to be as powerful as them.

We had so much fun and tried so hard with our acting!

 

 

 

Scotswood Gardens

11th May 2022L Forster

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When arriving in Scotswood Gardens, we gathered in a circle in the woods. Then we discussed and created actions to the life cycle of a flowering plant.

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We then created a giant model of a plant and found pieces to represent the different parts of the flowering plant. After that, we looked around the gardens and found flowering plants to find the different parts on an actual plant.

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We then explored the entire gardens to collect pollen – using sticky bees on our fingers. We even found the bee hives that the gardens looks after. There was 50,000 bees in each hive, with one queen that lays 2,000 eggs a day!

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After dinner the children were allowed to explore the woods through a variety of activities, such as: den building; clay model making; potion making from the herb garden; mini-beast collecting; and making plant pots to take home a plant.

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To end our day, we lay on the ground and listened to the sounds of the forest. The children said they felt ‘calm’ and ‘free’ when working in or listening to the forest.

Stop Motion club – Week 2

4th May 2022L Forster

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:

Hadrian’s Wall 1900th Anniversary Festival

8th April 2022L Moore

This year Hadrian’s Wall is celebrating its 1900th anniversary. Years 1 to 6 took part in online workshops delivered by Tyne and Wear Museums as part of their ‘Virtual Hadrian’s Wall Day’.

We are working on a very exciting project in school. We have all been learning about Hadrian’s Wall and every child has made their own ‘fact brick’. We look forward to sharing the finished project with you soon!

Here are some pictures of our bricks. Can you guess what we are building?

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AR Awards

8th April 2022D Fawkes

Congratulations to Conner (Y6F) and Jack (Y5F) who have become our latest Half Millionaires, reading over 500,000 words this academic year.

Another huge well done to some of the children in Mrs Fawkes’ English group also who have worked so hard on their reading this half term and achieved their points target on Accelerated Reader. Well done everyone!

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Searching databases

1st April 2022L Forster

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.

Testing materials

8th March 2022L Forster

Following on from last week’s lesson about material properties, we then explored different materials and tested their properties.

We tested 5 materials from the feely bags for: magnetism, hardness, flexability and transparency – which posed a question of materials being transparent or translucent. Some of the materials were translucent (such as cloth) but the investigation was looking at transparency, so they got a N (for no).

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