Year 6 Bikeability

This week some of the year 6s have participated in Bikeability. The children have been going out of class everyday to have training on how to cycle safely on the roads. This is a great opportunity and allows the children to go to secondary schools being able to travel independently. The children have really enjoyed this experience and have all come away with level 1 and 2 cycling proficiency qualifications.

Child Initiated Play - Writing in Year 1

The children in Hepworth class and Miro class have been busy showing off their writing this week! We have written a letter to Mrs Moore with reasons as to why she should or shouldn't cut down the forest area in the school and replace it with a playground. We have also been writing about Science Day from last week, recapping on what a hovercraft is, how we made our hovercrafts and what we learnt that day. The children have really impressed us with their writing and their ideas!

Year 1 Subtraction

Year 1 have been focusing on subtraction this week in maths, using bar models and cubes to help us. In pairs, we have been finding the missing parts of the bar models and using the cubes to help us write two subtraction number sentences.

Multiplication mayhem!

Out favrourite way to rehearse times table facts is by competing with each other using Playing Cards.  If you would like to support your child further with this at home, please see our videos on our website!

http://www.windhill.herts.sch.uk/Race-4-Recall/

Year 5 Magritte Gravity

In science, we have been looking at forces. Monday's lesson was all about gravitational pull. We measured the mass of objects (how much matter they are made up of) and weight (how much gravitational pull there is on the object) to see if there was a relationship. On Earth 100g = 1 Newton. Can you work out whether we would have more, less or the same mass and weight on the Moon or on Jupiter?

To build or not to build?

Year 5 have been understanding the background to Donald Trump's rally speeches where he decided to build a wall between USA and Mexico.  We watched video clips and then ranked factual information from the most useful to least useful in terms of what we might want to include in a balanced argument.

Year 1

Year 1 have had fun looking at African masks this week. They took part in some observational drawings using oil pastels. The children looked very carefully at each mask, identifying the correct colours and features and representing them in their art work.

We would also like to take this opportunity to welcome Miss Hayden to Hepworth Class. Miss Hayden will be part of Year One all the way through to June.

Year 3 Newsletter

There's been a lot of science going on in Year 3 this week starting with making the most amazing rockets with Mr Forgham for science day!  We learnt some new vocabulary for the different parts of the rocket (we now know what a fuselage is!) and how to build one out of card and lots of sellotape!  We had such great fun making them and the children worked together brilliantly.  We are very proud of their teamwork, resilience and open-mindedness.   Launching them in the afternoon was very exciting and mostly successful.  A couple even flew over the ball court and nearly reached forest school and these were the furthest out of all 60 rockets in year 3 and 4!  Congratulations to these rocket makers!
We also investigated what makes the best parachutes for eggs and tested 4 different types: kitchen roll, fabric, plastic bag and a bin bag.  We made predictions before we dropped them from the same height.  Most of us thought that the bin bag would be the best because it would collect the largest amount of air inside due to the having the largest surface area.  However, we were incredibly surprised when the only parachute that got the egg safely down to the ground without breaking it was the kitchen roll!!!
Other lessons this week have seen us develop different strategies for adding mentally, learning about the story of Muhammad (PBUH) and his escape from Mecca with the help of a spider and a dove, delving deeper into writing recounts in English and discovering more about Egyptian Gods.

Making the fuselage 

Making the nose cone and fins 

Adding the nose cone

Adding personalised details

The finished article!

The kitchen roll parachute

Not even a crack!

Year 5 Newsletter

We have been debating, dicusssing, calculating, presenting and investigating this last fortnight!  The highlight though has to be Science Day, where we investigated a number of experiments connected to air.  We discovered that it is incredibly hard to inflate a balloon inside a bottle (unless you pierce a large hole in the bottle first)!   Also, we investigated the effect of air resistence by creating a fair test around parachutes. Interestingly, a larger surface area, different materials and the number of canopys all made a different to the rate of fall.  In topc, we have enjoyed drawing together much of the work that we have done by writing discussion texts on whether the Ancient Maya were savvy or savage.  Even though they invented screw top lids and had a number system with zero, many of us concluded that they were savage because they committed human sacrifices to their gods!  We have really engaged with our history topic this term and look forward to using it as a stimulus for our art and DT projects.

Year 6 go Up! Up! Up!

This week the children were blown away by Dan from the Royal Institution of Science. He 'wowed' the children with his scientific demonstrations in our morning assembly- inclusive of multiple bangs and flashes!

Following the theme of 'Up! Up! Up!', the children were then given the opportunity to investigate lift and gravitational forces. The children designed and made their own helicopters. They were able to adapt their designs and test the proficiency of them by recording the time it took their helicopters to land and the number of times their propellers rotated.

In the afternoon, the children were then able to wow their parents, siblings and carers. The children showed off their rockets designs and set their rockets off using the chemical reaction between Alka Seltzer tablets and water. The children learnt that the chemical reaction produced a CO2 build up within the film canisters creating a pressure build up making the lid pop! This led to our discussion over Newton's third law of motion explaining why when the rocket went off on its side, the lid went one way and the rocket went the other- for ever reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction. As well as learning all of this the children had a great time and we hope that we encouraged their love of learning! Thank you to all our guests who came to watch and share the children's excitement on this brilliant day.

Science Day in Year 2

In Science Day this week, we tested different materials to see which would be best to make a parachute. We tested three materials using a hairdryer underneath to see which one had the best air resistance when we turned it on. We made our parachutes by attaching four pieces of string and a maths cube to a piece of material. We made sure our experiment was a fair test and only changed one thing (the type of material we chose). We tested our parachutes by launching them off of the ramp on the KS1 playground. We found out that material that was light and thin created the best air resistance and would be the best material to use for a parachute. We also had a very exciting assembly during Science Day. Science man Dan came in and we learnt lots about different types of energy. Some of us even got to go to the front and do the experiments. We had lots of fun on Science Day!