English

This week in English we are becoming journalists! We have been off around the school interviewing and gathering information for our articles about school trips and events.
We have had some interesting headlines, e.g. Potato Potarto!

Maths

In maths today, we have been learning how to construct graphs and then using the data to find the range, median and mean. Here are the results from our enquiry:

The mode is the number or thing that occurs most frequently in a piece of data, can you tell us the mode of our data?
In order to find the range, we took the highest piece of data (58) and the lowest (0) and found the difference which was 58.
To calculate the median we needed to rearrange the data into order from the lowest to the highest and then find the middle - our data was made up of an even amount of data so we were left with two middle numbers - in this situation we needed to add the two middle numbers together and then divide the answer by two - can you find the median of our data?
Finally, to calculate the mean, you need to add all of the data together in the tally chart (58, 7, 6, 4, 3, 2 ,1 0) and then divide the answer by the number of pieces of data (8) - can you work out the mean for our data?
Please comment with your answers,

Maths workshop

Yesterday, Neive and Oscar went to George Street for a maths workshop.

The first activity we completed was a magic square, which is a 3x3 box where you have to place the numbers, for example 0.6, 0.7, 0.8. We discovered that diagonally you needed to have the same number for the magic square to work. After this we completed magic squares with 4, 5 and 6 numbers.

Next, we were given a shape e.g. a triangle - which had 6 circles on it.(3 across the bottom, one on each remaining edge and a final circle on the vertex at the top) We had to place numbers 1-6 in each of the circles and find the highest number you could make. We multiplied the numbers and then added them together.

Another of the puzzles we were given was a range of shapes that when placed together in set way made a square. There are some pictures below to show you what we were creating.

We had a great day and learned lots!

Science day

Today, we all dressed up as mad scientists ready for a day of experiments! A big thank you to Clare Rudd, one of our governors, for coming to join us for the day.

To start the day off, we carried out an experiment with two balloons. The first balloon was just blown up, we wanted to find out what would happen if we put a flame underneath...instantly, it burst with a loud BANG! The second part to the experiment was carried out with water in the balloon. This time we held the flame underneath for quite some time! We discovered that the water was absorbing the heat from the flame and therefore it took longer to burst the balloon. Take a look at the video clip below to see what happened.

Our second experiment of the day took us a while to perfect! However, we persevered and made it work. We created a mixture of warm water, vinegar and baking powder. Originally, we mixed up the ingredients in a large zip lock bag...but this was unsuccessful.

We went back to the classroom and had another think about the containers that we could try. We decided upon a plastic cup covered with cling film and a water bottle.
This is what happened...

This came close to what we were expecting to happen...but it didn't raise off of the floor. The cling film was too weak to gather enough pressure for an explosion to happen. So we tried the water bottle...

We finally ended up with the result we were hoping to see!

In the afternoon we investigated to see if we could layer the colours of skittles. First, we counted out 12 purple skittles, 10 green, 8 orange, 6 yellow and 4 red. We placed then in glasses and poured hot water on them and stirred them up to ensure all of the sugar coloured coating came off of them.

 We then poured the purple skittle juice into a clean glass. Next came the tricky part! Using a syringe, we needed to take the coloured liquid from the green skittles and carefully pour it on top of the purple liquid. We needed to ensure the liquid ran down the side of the glass so that it did not disturb the purple mixture. 

We continued our experiment and although it didn't work as well as we had hoped, you can still see some layers of the liquids.

For the final part of the afternoon, we were joined by Mrs Johnson from SAM Science. We carried out 3 different experiments. First of all we began to create the mixture for our ice cream, we had to roll the ball full of ice cubes and salt around for ages! But the result meant that we all got a bowl of ice cream :)

In between mixing up the ice cream, we took it in turns to make our very own cups of jelly worms!

We also experienced flash paper!

Overall, it was a fantastic day full of experiments! A huge thank you to Miss Groves for organising the whole day!

nets

In maths today we were identifying nets of shapes. We used some polygon to help us on our questions about nets. At first we were asked to make a shape with the polygon and identify them such as octahedron,square based pyramid,triangular prism and more. After that, we were given a set of questions to answer,some were harder than others. We all managed to work through some very tricky questions.

Super hero WANTED posters

Today in English, we became our super heroes - we acted out how our super hero would move around, what their facial expressions might be like and how their body language would show their personality. This was extremely helpful to get us to think about our super heroes and create our WANTED posters. Tomorrow, we will be using our WANTED posters to help us write our non-chronological report. Take a look at our work below.

Skip to be fit

Last half term we had Skip to be fit in school and this highlighted what talented skippers we have in our school! This half term we have entered a virtual skip to be fit competition for years 3 and 4. It is being run by our Sports Ambassadors, Oscar and Ollie. Each week they will be timing pupils in years 3 and 4 to see how many skips they can complete in 2mins and then their scores will be averaged out and sent off to the league co-ordinator. Good luck to you all!

You can see how they got on by looking at the PE board in the playground at the end of the term.

Non-chronological reports - superheroes!

In English, our focus in non-chronological reports. We are using superheroes as our focus. This week we have been looking at superheroes and their powers along with their weaknesses. We have been hot seating different superheroes using what we have learnt about them. Individually we have been thinking about super powers that we could act out - here is a picture of us in action! Can you guess our super powers???

Cross Country

This week, Harry, Beau, Max and Ollie went to a 2000m cross country event at Cavendish School. The worse part of it was the weather, the best part was that Ollie came 9th, Beau came 15th Max came 16th and Harry came 25th. There were over 70 children in each race.

Maths-word problems

Today in maths we were coming up with word problems. Each table group created their own word problem and the rest of the class had to try and solve it; we got one that we thought should be a GCSE question because it was so difficult. Despite the hard work, Callum managed to solve the question - however, everyone persevered and didn't give up, we were desperate to come up with the answer. This is the question, without a calculator can you get back to us with the answer?

Mrs comer's maths question

At maths club on Wednesday Mrs Comer set us all a challenge, it was: what number has exactly 36 factors? The prize was five house points!! We could use a calculator, but we couldn't look on the internet. We all tried to find the  number but we couldn't yesterday.  I found out that 3330 had 24 factors so I doubled it which gave me 6660 so I worked on it and then it gave me 36 factors.

Willow O'Neill

Science experiement

Further to setting up our compost bin, we also carried out an investigation that we monitored and observed every 5mins.

We split into two groups to organise the experiment - one group were given yeast, sugar and warm water and the other group were given talc, sugar and warm water. We carefully measured out our ingredients and placed them in a tube - we then covered the tubes with balloons. We drew diagrams every 5mins to show what was happening to the two tubes. Look at our pictures below to see our findings.

Which tube do you think had the yeast in? Why? Comment and let us know what you think and why.

Science - observing over time

Today in science we have been really busy! We have set up an investigation where we will be observing over time. We have gathered ingredients such as: egg shells, an egg box, broccoli, paper towels, newspaper, dill, teabags, a banana, banana skin and mushrooms. We have taken a picture that you can see below. We then poured water in and covered the top with netting. Next week we will observe our compost bin to see if there are any changes.

We made predictions about what we believe will decompose and what ingredients won't.We think: the fruit and vegetables, egg box and newspaper will decompose and the rest will not. We will update our blog to let you know our findings overtime.

French

Today in French, we learned how to describe our personalities as well as other people's. We learned that if we're talking about a female, some of the letters change for example, spotif for masculine (male) and sportive for feminine (female). At the end of the lesson, we described our brother, sister or cousin using our knowledge of what we learnt in previous lessons; such as: eyes (les yeux), hair (les cheveux), name and age.
Here is an example below.

WW1 Poem Recital

In English, we were practising and reciting a poem called The Call.It is about the first world war, some people got into groups, and others worked independently. In yesterdays lesson we practised saying it, without the words in front of us.Today we performed it in front of the class. We paired u , and did a practice video.
After that, our partners looked at the video and peer assessed us.

Then we were videoed by our teacher (Miss Williams). We had lots of fun! We learned  how to include lots of expression in our voices and that it's hard to remember the poem without the words.

In the trenches

Our task today was to write a poem about WWI and life in the trenches. Before we could write our poem we needed to know how it would feel to be in the trenches. In order to experience this we created a trench in the classroom and listened to sound effects. We then came up with ideas about the conditions in the trenches, using the 5 senses we came up with: hearing sounds of the wounded, the feeling of being cramped and the smell.
In our poems we needed to include different literary devices such as: metaphor, similes, alliteration, repetition, onomatopoeia, rhyme.

Ratio

Today we learned that ratio can be used in practical ways such as: cooking, building, making squash and mixing shades of colours. We can simplify ratio for example: 3:9 = 1:3
Each of the numbers represents a part so 1:3 means there are 4 parts in total.
We were making squash so if the ratio was water to squash - 11:3 you would need 11 parts water and 3 parts squash. You cannot write the ratio 3:11 because you'll end up with 3 parts water and 11 parts squash - making the wrong consistency.

Here are some pictures of what we did today:

Dance

Today in Mr Bull's P.E lesson, we were focusing on Ancient Greek Olympics. We were performing entrances, boxing sequences and sword fight routines in pairs. We needed to include:

1. Facial expressions - show emotion
2. Reactions that were in time with the actions
3. Accurate timing, correct to the music.

We had lots of fun and we learnt how they would have fought in the Ancient Greek times.

Below are some pictures of our routines and a video of Harry and Dylan's performance (watch both video clips to see the whole performance). Comment and let us know what you think.

Our school visit from Mike Penning

Today we had a visit from Mike Penning, our local MP, he spoke to us about his life, family and his job.
We discovered that he is a SPURS fan!!! Also, that he has a license to drive a tank. Some of his previous jobs were a fireman, policeman and a journalist. One of his two daughters lives in Australia as a Marine Biologist, his other daughter is a teacher at Galley Hill School.

Our School Council recently had a visit to the Houses of Parliament, unfortunately Mr Penning was not there, we found out today that he was in Washington D.C!
During his visit this morning, we asked Mike a range of questions:

• When was the Houses of Parliament built?
• How do you raise money to keep the Houses of Parliament running?
• How many parties are there?
• As an MP, how do you feel about troops being sent to war?

On behalf of Great Gaddesden School we would like to say a great big thank you to our local MP, Mike Penning, for coming in to speak with us today.