In The News

We were all so excited in school when our new pieces of equipment arrived! We now have two ActivAlls in school. These amazing machines have all sorts of games and activities the children can play which help to build fitness, stamina, strength, hand-eye coordination and agility.

We were able to buy these brilliant bits of equipment using money raised via the Big PIE initiative and through our school fund which is money raised by parents and carers for the school – so a big THANK YOU to the community of Reid Street. We will make great use of these for years to come.

Check out the link below to find out all about the ActivAll and watch the videos sent via ClassDojo to see some of our pupils in action.

https://www.activall.co.uk/

We had great fun this morning when we started our new Science topic – Electricity. We were looking to answer the enquiry question, ‘How can we use and control electricity in our lives?’

First, we revised what we learnt in Year 4 about electricity including different types of circuits (series and parallel) and components of a circuit: bulbs, motors, buzzers and switches.

We talked about careers which need a good understanding and knowledge of electricity including apprenticeships with an electricity specialism.

Then we created our own experiments and linked the battery’s power with the brightness of a light bulb, speed of a motor or volume of a buzzer. We recorded how they were effected by adding additional components. We used appropriate symbols for each component. We worked in teams to record our findings then presented them to the rest of the class. Fantastic team work.

Next we are going to be making our own buzzer game!

The children in Year 1 have been enjoying learning all about the Victorians and how different life was in the Victorian era.

As part of our topic, we travelled back in time to spend an afternoon in a Victorian classroom! Our school desks were lined up, all technology was switched off and Year 1 staff were in the role of strict Victorian teachers.

Our pupils were asked to line up outside their classrooms – before they were allowed to enter they had to politely greet their teachers (“Good Afternoon Ma’am”), while the staff checked their hands and shoes for cleanliness.

In Year 4, we have been reading Ted Hughes’ book The Iron Man. We have completed many tasks based on the story including writing instructions to explain how to make our own Iron Man/Iron Robot. We had a fantastic time working in pairs to design and create a robot out of recyclable materials.  The children helped one another and created some excellent robots in the literacy lesson. We also described the features of our robots and explained to the class how our robots work.

This also linked to our Global Goal work in school. Global goal 12 .

Consumption (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle) we learned that the energy used to create packaging is wasted when the package is sent to the landfill rather than recycled into a new package or another product, contributing to high embodied greenhouse gas emissions.

So our recyclable robots are helping to save the environment too!

Thejas said;” It was good fun and we worked well in our team. We are proud of our Robot creation.

Have a look at some of our marvellous robots:

Darlington Rotary Club, who we work closely with at Reid Street, approached us to design a Christmas card to help them raise money for the charities they support.

We had many entries from Key Stage 2 pupils which you can see below.

Fabulously, two of our designs were chosen as winners. Chloe and Holly received a tub of sweets and saw there card in print.

When we studied reflection, we learnt that when light bounces off a surface, it changes the direction of the light ray. All objects reflect light; smooth and shiny surfaces reflect all the rays of light at the same angle, rather than scattering the rays of light like rough or dull surfaces. We studied the effects of reflections on different materials.

The light ray that hits the mirror or other object is described as the incident ray, and the ray of light that bounces off is known as the reflected ray.

In year 4 science lessons, we have looked at how germs spread and the importance of washing our hands.  We got two pieces of bread and we took the first slice outside. When we were outside, we dirtied our hands and rubbed our germ filled hands all over it! We also dropped it onto the floor to gather more dirt and germs. We then placed the germ filled bread into a sealed plastic bag.

On entering school, we washed our hands correctly with water and soap to remove the dirt and germs. We collected another piece of bread and touched both sides with our clean hands and placed that into another sealed plastic bag.  We left the bread for a week.

As you can see the germs had spread on the dirty bread and it had turned a greenish blue with yellow speckles.

Ellie said, “It looked like it had fury bits on it!”

Isaac said, “The bread looked disgusting and gross and I would not eat it now.”

May said, “We all learnt that we should wash our hands to stop the spread of germs and this links with stopping the Coronavirus spreading!”

The pictures below show how important it is to wash our hands to stop germs spreading!

After learning about rationing in our WW2 topic, we researched some WW2 recipes and created a meal fit for a king or queen. An adult worked with the first group, then those children supported the next group giving instructions and top tips.

First, we read the recipes carefully. We made potato and leek soup,

carrot and apple soup (also using apples from the garden)

Wand for something sweet, we made Grannie’s Orange Drop Cookies.

Then we evaluated our cooking skills, noting measuring in grams and litres, peeling, chopping, grating, pouring, mixing, simmering, boiling but most importantly – incredible teamwork.

We also evaluated our product. Most children decided the soup needed more seasoning but most loved it and asked for seconds. The biscuits were very sweet because we used honey instead of sugar but the main issue was that they stuck to the grease proof so next time we would use a silicone sheet.

Today in Science, we carried out an experiment to learn about the digestive system. We used a variety of household items to recreate the different steps involved in digesting food.

We used bananas and crackers to represent food, water to represent the saliva and fresh orange to represent the stomach acid. Then, using a sealable bag to represent the stomach and our hands to represent the stomach muscles we mushed it together.

After, we put the food into a stocking which represented the small intestine. We squeezed all of the food through allowing the nutrients to flow into the tray below which represented the body.

Then, with the hard waste left we cut a hole in the stocking and transferred it into a paper cup with a hole in the bottom which represented the large intestine and rectum. We finally pushed the waste out through the bottom of the cup to represent our POO!

We had lots of fun with this messy experiment.

In Year 1, we have started learning about our new History based topic – the Victorians.

We used the Global Goal character, Ekani Empathy, to help us to learn about what life was life for children in Victorian times.

On Wednesday 11^th November, we stepped into the shoes of poor Victorian children.

The children learnt about the different jobs that poor Victorian children will have been forced to do in order to earn enough money for themselves and their families to survive.

Using artefacts and role-play, the children learnt that these jobs were hard work and were very dangerous, with small children (as young as 4 years) working long hours in very tough conditions.

Some of the jobs they tried their hands at were:

• Chimney sweep

• Working in coal mines

• Working in factories and mills

• Maid

We were all agreed that it is much better now that children don’t have to go out to work to earn money, and that employers today care about safety and well-being.

The next day, we learnt how life was different for rich Victorian children.

They had much better food to eat, warm clothes and servants to do everything for them.

They also had toys to play with, which we had a lot of fun exploring for ourselves.

We even made our own Victorian optical illusion toy – a thaumatrope.

However, we also found out that rich children were often very bored and very lonely – they weren’t allowed to make noise or mess, they had to ‘be seen and not heard’ and they had lots of rules to follow – especially about using ‘good manners’.

They very rarely saw their parents, and didn’t get kisses and cuddles from them.

Life for Victorian children was tough whether you were rich or poor!