This week we have been very lucky and had Mrs Barnes with us for baking. We made volcano cakes by baking cupcakes and tipping them upside down and cutting out a piece of the cake. We then used orange and red icing to create the effect of lava flowing out of the volcano.
To celebrate our last day with Mrs Barnes as it’s been our week of baking we made ‘cake pops’ to link with the chocolate from Cadbury’s world and decorated them with red icing to give the effect of volcanoes to link to our topic. We had great fun and they tasted delicious.
Look at our amazing costumes!
Class 3 visited Reception this morning to share a story to celebrate world book day.
To celebrate World Book Day, Year 5 went to read with Year 1. The children loved sharing stories together. Who would have thought that The Cat in the Hat and Harry Potter would ever meet.
We had an amazing time at Cadbury’s World yesterday. We learnt about where chocolate originates from – the Aztecs and Mayans first discovered cocoa beans and made them into a drink.
Then we learnt about the history of Cadbury’s. The company built a whole village for their workers including a school.
We learnt about the Cadbury’s brand and how every milk chocolate bar has the colour purple on it. One section of the tour was all about advertising and the characters they have used. We recognised many of them, which shows how powerful advertising is.
One of the highlights of the day was tasting the melted chocolate! Writing our names in chocolate was trickier then we thought.
Our final activity at Cadbury’s World was the 4D experience where we went on a chocolate roller coaster ride. It felt so real and we even put our hands in the air went we went hurtling down a dip.
This week, Class 5 didn’t have just a Pancake Day but we had a Pancake Week!!! We started the week with Pinaattiletut pancakes from Finland. At first, some of us were put off because they were green! This was the spinach and they actually tasted gorgeous.
Our next cooking session with Mrs Barnes was to make Korean Gamjajeon, which are potato pancakes with a soy sauce dip. We had to chop, mash, fry and combine several ingredients before making the pancake shapes.
Some of us then made Scotch pancakes, served with syrup or chocolate spread.
Finally, a group made French crepes, again served with syrup or chocolate spread.
Our official taster (Mrs Pearce) was very pleased with the standard of our pancake making!!!
Today was Fitness Friday. Ministry of Sport set up circuit training with a variety of stations which exercised different parts of our body. The stations included: burpees, lunges, bench dipping, box jump, mountain climbing, sit-ups, ladder speed run and many more. Some were an awful lot harder than others!
This week we looked at da Vinci’s self-supporting bridge. Using lollipop sticks and skewers we investigated how we could build a bridge without any glue of fixings. Our initial designs weren’t that successful. We then followed instructions to build a self-supporting bridge. It wasn’t easy – but we succeeded in the end!
Cesare successfully constructed a robot during STEM club. He used rulers, pencils, elastic bands, batteries, motors and a cotton real. His first design used just one motor and then he added another, however it worked better with only one motor. Click on the link to watch a video of it working.
In Year 3 we have been very busy looking at forces. We wanted to test whether different materials affected how far cars would travel.
We used 7 different materials; tinfoil, bubble wrap, wood, foam, corrugated card, sand paper and felt. We talked about how to ensure it was a fair test we would use the same height of ramp, the same car and the same person doing each job. Before we carried out the investigation we made a prediction about which material we thought the car would travel furthest on.
We had 6 groups and each group tested the ramp once. We combined these results to find out the overall result.
We had great fun and used lots of scientific language.
Today we were visited by Al Sylvester MBE. He shared with us his tale of leading the RAF’s first unsupported attempt on the Geographic South Pole across Antarctica. He told us about the 3-year build-up of selecting and training a team, raising the funds, choosing the logistics and his experience of living on Antarctica for 7 weeks in a tent. He explained how the simplest of tasks become complex a polar desert and what you can and cannot leave on Antarctica. We learnt about how sometimes things don’t go to plan and that determination and resilience are key to success. Living in extreme cold conditions, meant that specialist clothing was required. Jayden was given the opportunity to dress like an explorer. We learnt so much from Al and his expedition.
On the last day of baking with Mrs Barnes instead of making biscuits we used our skills to create a 3D volcano, we used a coke bottle, tin foil, various colours of fondant and mentos.
We created two volcanoes and took them outside, we added the mentos and saw the reaction that was created.
Why does the explosion happen?
Although there are a few different theories around about how this experiment works, the most favoured reason is because of the combination of carbon dioxide in the Diet Coke and the little dimples found on Mentos candy pieces.
The thing that makes soda drinks bubbly is the carbon dioxide that is pumped in when they bottle the drink at the factory. It doesn’t get released from the liquid until you pour it into a glass and drink it, some also gets released when you open the lid. This means that there is a whole lot of carbon dioxide gas just waiting to escape the liquid in the form of bubbles.
Unfortunately our explosion didn’t beat the record of 9 metres but we still had fun.
In Science to understand the formation of rocks we put our culinary skills to the test.
To show sedimentary rock we needed to show that they are formed from deposits settling at the bottom of the seas, lakes and rivers. We showed the water bed by using blue fondant icing, coloured sprinkles to represent fossilized bones and other layers of icing and chocolate to show the layers and sediment that build up over the years.
To show metamorphic rock we needed to show that these rocks have been changed by heat and pressure. For this we used three different colours of icing, layered the different coloured icing and folded them together. Once the rocks had been made we cut them in half to see the different swirls and layers.
To show igneous rocks we needed to show that they are formed when melted rock or magma is cooled. The children mixed up mini marshmallows, broken up biscuits and chocolate drops. We did this until the chocolate had melted and then we left the mixture until it had solidified again.
The children had great fun and ate their rocks at the end of the lesson.
