The children in Year 5 and 6 have participated in two workshops this week teaching them about music and coding. They used the coding program makecode to design and create their own arcade game.

What a week!

We started the week with the Science Magician – Dr Matt Pritchard, the Curator of Wonder. He wowed us with experiments and illustions. Some of which we tried at home.

We were really lucky to have a presentation by Julianna Wood, a user Experience Designer who helped design a head mounted display for environmental awareness and situational assistance-for use in ground spacecraft processing and incorporation into the astronaut suit at NASA.

On Tuesday, it was Science outdoors day where we were given several challenges to complete.

Wednesday was Mighty Machine Day. We made “Brush Monsters” and raced them. Some monsters didn’t last the full distance of the race!

Michelle Galvin from The Christie talked to us about being a researcher. She explained how they take blood samples and test treatments on them.

On Wednesday, we were challenged to program Artibot so that he could travel the same path that light does through a periscope. When we coded Artibot, we had to enter the measurement in millimetres that we wanted him to travel. It took several attempts to do this.

We also met with Ellie Hallworth who is an aero-engineer. She described what her role involved and what type of activities she was involved in.

Naomi from Jodrell Bank taught us about the universe. Did you know it has expanded over time?

Finally, Mr Caiazzo (Cesare’s dad) told us all about his job with SKA (Square Kilometre Array). This is a network of telescopes and antenna in the UK, South Africa and Western Australia. The parts are manufactured all over the world and brought together at the site. He talked to us about how the Commodore 64 inspired him to become involved in engineering.

Year 1 are having great fun joining in with the Music Trust workshop. We created our own pictures using Chrome music lab and then learnt all about how to change the sounds and colours.

This week Year 2 are joining in the Love Music Trust workshop. We are learning how to use Chrome Music Lab.

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On a Monday afternoon Reception and Nursery work together to find out about our outside environment. This Monday we went on a walk around the school grounds to spot the signs of spring.

The children worked on their learning and development in the area of Understanding The World. They commented and asked questions about aspects of the natural world, we talked about some of the things they observed with the plants, the children developed an understanding of growth, decay and changes over time – looking closely at the similarities, patterns and change.

The children found flowers starting to grow, blossom starting to show on some of the trees and green buds on other trees.

Class 2 designed and made their own pinball machines using everyday materials

Our week continued…. we made pinball machines and then we conducted a nappy investigation.

This week Nursery and Reception have been learning about the female scientist – Maria Merian. She discovered that caterpillars turn into butterflies. The children shared the story of The Hungry Caterpillar to learn about the life cycle.

We have been on a bug hunt looking for minibeasts in our outdoor area:

The children couldn’t find many minibeasts…so we thought we needed to do something about it…so we made a bug house to encourage minibeasts to come to our outdoor area.

Throughout the week we have been learning about minibeasts in our outdoor area:

As part of our Mighty Machine Day we investigated mechanisms such as levers and linkages…look at what we made.

Year 1 have been busy learning all about materials. Yesterday we went on a material hunt to see which materials we could find in the outside environment. We then created a tally chart to show our findings and wrote down which material we found the most of and which we found the least of. We compared our findings and found that the most common material is metal and plastic.

On Monday International Women’s Day, we learnt about female scientists such as Mary Anning and ecologist Dr Margaret Lowman.

On Tuesday we investigated Biomimicry. We looked at inventions linked to birds and flight.

Then we made helicopters to investigate how they flew, it was different from a bird as they floated down.

Then we designed and made paper planes. They flew differently too, they glided through the air.

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Today EYFS and Year 1 had lots of fun in the snow. We have been busy making snowmen and an igloo!