Years 5 & 6

This half term, Year 5 and 6 have been learning about Space. They have researched and designed posters about a planet and made a working model to represent the movements of the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun. They can now explain night and day in terms of the rotation of Earth and have discovered how the appearance of the Moon changes. The children even recreated the phases of the moon using Oreos! Using the fictional moon Pandora (from the film Avatar) as a stimulus, the children invented a creature to live on Pandora and wrote a non-chronological report about it. Their final products were out of this world! As part of our Space topic, the children visited the Life Centre in Newcastle, where they learnt all about life on the ISS, performed space related experiments and used robotics to simulate repairing the ISS. In their computing lessons, the children have been learning about the Mars rover Curiosity and how it sends messages back to Earth using binary code. They then went on to build their own Mars rover and used Crumble programming to make it move. I was very impressed with their computer programming skills.

This half-term, the children are listening to the Podcast Tunnel 29, the extraordinary true story of a man who dug a tunnel under the Berlin Wall from East to West Berlin, right under the feet of border guards, to help friends, family and strangers escape.