Year 5 - It’s a Knockout!

Some of our Year 5s visited Redbridge Community School today to participate in their ‘Its a Knockout’ event run by their Year 9/10 Sports Reps. Our 3 Shirley Warren teams (Barlow’s Bananas, McKitterick Minions and Zhang Zebras) participated in a carousel of activities against several other schools in our federation, receiving a score at the end of each station out of 10 for teamwork. We had a lot of fun throughout the day throwing wellies, untangling human knots and pretending the floor was lava - to name only a few favourites -  and we thankfully managed to avoid the downpour! A massive well done to ‘Barlow’s Bananas’ led by a competitive Mrs Barlow, who narrowly missed out on a top 3 position! 

Green Council talks Road Safety and Reducing Plastics

There are two issues concerning Green Council at the moment, and we worked on them in our meeting today.

First, we are still concerned about road safety and secondly (inspired by class 5D) we want to encourage the school to reduce plastic usage in school.

Here we are making posters and designing little sketches for next Thursday's assembly so that we can let our friends know the very important messages about safety and recycling.

Fairground Ride DT Day in Year 6

These photos show some children from Year 6 deep in concentration as they work to create their fairground rides from their designs.

Can you spot the amazing unicorns at the top of this ride?

They needed to include a motor to make it spin.

This group were the first to make their motor work.

Well done Year 6.

Aldermoor Green Council Farmers!

Today Green Council visited Aldermoor Community Farm to see how Richard and the team Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, and also to reward our Green Council reps for working hard all year on Pupil Voice issues.

First, we had to identify the root vegetables from the leaves above. There were carrots, radishes and beetroot. Would you know what they look like or what their leaves look like?

Next Richard asked us to pick the radishes. We learnt that he will sell them in his shop on Wednesdays and Saturdays from 9am-5pm and they now take card payments.

When the radishes were picked there was space to plant new seeds - radishes, beetroot or carrots.

After this the hungry chickens needed feeding. If you want to go and feed the chickens at the farm, it is only 20p when the farm is open.

Our last task was plaiting garlic. This was quite tricky but a clever Year 6 who already had plaits demonstrated this skill.

We found out that one of our Year 4's is a regular volunteer on the farm.

Last but not least, somebody made friends with a caterpillar. can you see it on her arm?

Thanks to Farmer Richard for letting us help him.
If you want to know more about Aldermoor Farm, look up http://aldermoorfarm.org.uk/ There may be an Open Day coming up soon.

Green Council care for our school

Recently, Green Council met and had lots of items on the agenda (things to discuss).

A few meetings ago, some members noticed that playtime equipment was sometimes going missing.

So in our last meeting we started to label equipment with "SWP". We are hoping this will mean that fewer balls and other playtime items will disappear!

If you see any playtime equipment around the school or community, please bring it back to the office.

We are going to try very hard to look after what we've been given and we hope everyone will help us.

Special Project for Green Council

Green Council had a special visitor today, Jenny from Sustrans.  She has chosen 3 of her favourite schools to help her with a project finding out how children travel to school.  The Green Council and teachers will be recording the data every day for four weeks for her.

Here she is explaining the project to Green Council.

We are looking forward to seeing the results, which she will come and explain to us.

Year 3's Have been building the Titanic in Dance ! We have been exploring both Unison & Canon as well as turns & levels with repeated patterns. After half term, we will add travelling pathways and shapes with contact. 

Year 1 are being good friends on the internet.

On Safer Internet day Year 1 talked about using the internet safely whilst playing games or using You Tube, and if children saw anything scary, upsetting or unkind to...

Lock it, Block it, Show it, Tell it. 

Ask your child to show you the actions to help them remember this.

The day's activities and discussions helped them analyse online behaviour.

So that they could identify the best ways that they could keep themselves safe when they are online.

Also they created a pledge of what they will do to be a good friend, on a puzzle piece.

Some suggestions from the children were to...

'Not laugh at others falling down'

'Be kind to our friends'

'Never say unkind words about people's work'

What happens in a Green Council meeting?

In our school we have a "Green Council" which is made up from one representative from each class.

We decide the agenda and ask classes to discuss some of the issues we raise.

At our last meeting yesterday, we had asked classes to design some markings for the playground which we hope to be able to use in the future for our playgrounds.

Each class brought to the table their winning design and the children in Green Council had three votes each to decide which they liked.

Here are Green Council voting for the designs.

Here are some of the winners.

The Garbage King

In Class 6C, we have started our new class novel, The Garbage King.  

We are investigating the different characters and how they feel.

Here is a group exploring the Zone of Relevance for Dani's character.  

The most important characteristics are in the middle and the least important ones are round the side. We had a lot of interesting discussion deciding what we thought he was like and justifying our decisions from the text.

Shoe share Success

This week we have been helping UNICEF and Clarks by collecting shoes to be sent to other countries.

Here is a picture of the first day of the shoe collection, with Year 5 Green Council representatives.

At the end of the collection, we counted 79 pairs of shoes!  What a brilliant effort from Team Shirley Warren.

If you are good at doubling, you could work out how many individual shoes that makes altogether!

Green Council going for the Global Goals

Today was the first meeting of our school Green Council.
We watched this video about the Global Goals
https://vimeo.com/138852758

The Global Goals link with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

We can all work towards helping everyone achieve those rights.

We then thought about which Global Goals we could try to work towards in our school. We voted for these priorities:

1. Save electricity (GG7, 13)
2. Improving playtimes (GG 3, 4, 5, 10, 16, 17)
3. Looking after our equipment (GG 9, 10, 11, 12, 16)

Here we all are, hard at work thinking about the coming year.

Do you know which Rights these priorities link to? 

Can you see the Bright Ideas box, ready for your ideas?

Green Council Double trip to Lymington Solar Farm and Aldermoor Farm

Today, 11 members of our school Green Council took their waterproofs with them and set off on an adventure.

First we went to Solent Solar Farm where we saw over 9,000 panels which produce a lot of electricity. Cathy, who showed us around, helped to design and build the Solar Farm which has only been running for three years. We saw the cables that joined the panels to the mains - some of them were very heavy!

 In the afternoon, we visited a different kind of farm. Aldermoor Community Farm is a co-operative in Aldermoor Road and farmer Richard had lots of jobs lined up for us to do. First Richard got out his Lego and made a model. Then he put it in the bin! He got it out again, of course, but he was showing us that we can reuse many things and make them into other things. We shouldn't just throw things away without thinking if we can use them for something else. In the photo we are guessing what H has made out of the blocks.

 Here we are collecting plants to make Comfrey Tea. This isn't for people to drink, it's for plants! We had to find the comfrey plant, take off the leaves, break them up and put them in a barrel. After about four weeks they turn into fertiliser for other plants.

Another job we had to do was planting bean seeds. We used Aldermoor farm's special compost and carefully put each seed in each space. We put a lid on them so mice don't come and eat the seeds.

 We went inside the second polytunnel to see the tomato plants and also saw where the cucumbers grow. At the end Richard kindly gave each child a cucumber.

If you visit the farm when it's open you could also buy chicken food for 20p and Richard let us try this activity out. I think you can see from the smiles that everyone enjoyed this activity, even though it started raining heavily.

We are so lucky to have this community farm so near our school and want to thank Richard for another brilliant trip. Even though the weather wasn't good for us - though the plants liked it - all the children loved it and for us teachers it was exciting to see how much Richard and the team have done since we took a group last year.

You can find more about Aldermoor Community Farm online - they often have open days on Bank Holiday Mondays as well as being open Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays 9am-5pm. Maybe you could visit in the summer holidays and feed the chickens.

Fruit Kebabs at Nurture Group

In our school we are proud of our Nurture group which meets in the afternoons.  There are many activities and projects which this group is able to take part in, so here's a little flavour of one of our activities.

Last week the group decided to make fruit kebabs. First they had to choose which fruits they wanted.
Can you see what they chose?

What would you choose?

Can you see which fruit these children are cutting?

Chopping the fruit was fun, but we needed grown ups to help with the knives, as you can see.

Assembling the kebab was tricky work. We used steady hands and had to be concentrating carefully. Can you see which fruit is on this kebab?

 Well done Nurture Group, we hope you enjoyed eating your healthy snack which you all put in so much effort to make.

Golf in the Great Chamber