Celebrating who we are
Chestnut Class finally got the the RAF Museum to finish our World War Two topic (after some drama with tube strikes in November!).
We had a great time exploring the museum, we experienced life in a wartime classroom and were completely in awe of some of the amazing planes in the hangars!
The Year 6 children at Berger Primary School engaged in an exciting Computing project last half-term. They had to design a new app for young people that aimed to solve an existing (social) problem.
To arrive at this point, they had to work collaboratively to research existing apps, brainstorm existing problems young people face, design the home and other landing pages for their apps, formulate a PowerPoint presentation to explain the app and design an app logo.
Finally, they had to pitch their app idea to a panel of young people
In Chestnut Class, we have been investigating and researching light and how the eye works.
With the help of the wonderful Sharmeen, we set up a fair experiment in the sensory room (because this was the only place we could find which did not have other light sources impacting our results!) and we measured the length of shadows when we changed the distance of an object from a light source.
We discussed the conditions required to make it a fair test. As well as making sure no other light sources interfered with our shadows, we also decided to:
¨ keep the distance from the wall the same
¨ Use the same torch
¨ Keep the torch at the same angle
¨ Keep the way we measure the shadow consistent (top to bottom, not side to side!)
We began learning about WW2 today and to kick our topic off to a great start the children in Year 6 packed a suitcase with all their formal documents and some personal items too and were ‘evacuated’ into the countryside. We made the long journey to a safer place and when we arrived some kind adults (and some not-so-kid adults!) arrived to give us new homes. Some of us had a lovely time and safe and cared for - others of us were made to work for our keep. We all wrote postcards home about our time. Sirens went off during our lessons too and we had to climb under our tables to be safe!
It wasn’t quite the Copperbox and we had to contend with some rain but none of this stopped us having a brilliant time at our last Berger sports day! Here are a selection of action shots from the afternoon!
We planned, cooked, tasted and evaluated the most wonderful picnic and even the rain held off for us to enjoy it!
To start, Year 6 made summer rolls (thank you Rahila!) and melon balls (thank you Katie!). For our main course, we all enjoyed a delicious bulgar wheat salad (thank you Fatima!) and finally, we had a healthier twist on an Eton Mess for dessert (thank you Miss Thomas!). A big thank you also to Sharmeen and her design team for all the lovely decorations they made. What a great day we had!
We had another wonderful session in the forest where we did a whole variety of activities including: making wooden jewellery, climbing trees, making shelters, digging to China and (with help from Jaiden P’s dad!) even made a working zip wire!
While we have been working very hard on our SATs revision and core learning, we have also found plenty of time to flex our creative muscles and have produced some amazing pieces of art in Year 6 within our Oceans topic.
We did some lino cutting and printing with inks using Hokusai’s ‘Big Wave’ painting as inspiration.
We also experimented with different media and created a collage of an ocean scene with an orca leaping out of the sea.
We researched creation stories from around the world in groups and presented them to the rest of the class!
In a shocking turn of events, Year 6 discovered the fish tank in the library full of plastic and suffering sea creatures. We were so outraged that we have decided to go on a protest to raise awareness for plastic pollution in our oceans and to help save the seas!
We protested on Well Street on Friday 14th January and people came out from shops; cars beeped their horns and lots of passers-by got involved! What a success!
We are having a sciency return to school and Chestnut Class are having a great time investigating circuits in our electricity lessons. We began by drawing some circuits and have got simple circuits working including: bulbs, fans and buzzers. Some of us even included a switch! Now we are busy investigating the effect adding additional wires has on the brightness of the bulb.
Our classrooms are very hard to make dark…so Amrita took us to the sensory room (where it is very dark, as you can see from the photos!) in small groups where we set up an experiment to find out what difference the distance between an object and light source made on the size (we measured the length in cm) of a shadow.
We also enjoyed experimenting with our own shadows and the shapes they make in the playground!
Chestnut Class were an absolute pleasure to take out on our trip to Hendon to the RAF Museum. We had a brilliant day there and learned a lot! We saw many different planes and other aircraft used by the RAf - both now and then. We also enjoyed the WW2 classroom experience, where we wrote using real ink from ink wells and even had to hide under the tables during an air raid! We also learned some simple conversations of pounds, shillings and pence - and then had some very tricky maths questions to answer. (Even the adults had to think hard!)
We were looking at different pictures from the WW2 period and using our history detective skills to identify whether they were primary or secondary sources and explaining how we knew.
Chestnut Class visited Forest School twice this half term. During the first session, we made shelters that soldiers could have used during WW2 to take cover in. On our second visit, we explored the site and made free choices as to what we decided to do. Some of us made mobiles using natural resources; some of us made and played on tree swings; some of us climbed tree after tree and some of us made another shelter!
We began our WW2 learning by having a WOW Day, where we learnt about the evacuation of children and vulnerable people from London (and other big cities) to the countryside, where it was safer. After we had packed our suitcases, we journeyed around the playground and some kind adults came to take us in and gave us tasks to earn our keep!
We are starting our new topic on Ancient Greece with a bang and are all taking part in the Potato Olympics this week! Meet the athletes below and stay tuned for updates on how we get on with our events this week!
To introduce our new topic, we spent some time today doing a carousel of activities all about Ancient Greece.
Here are the photos of our workshop all about crystallography.
