Stanway Fiveways Primary School

This week has been eventful for our Year 6s, with many of them visiting their new secondary schools for transition day. They returned looking forward to attending their new schools in September, which is credit to how they have matured this academic year and developed their resilience during their time at Stanway Fiveways Primary School. We have also made excellent progress with this year's production (costuming and props now in full use and all characters' lines memorised). In between rehearsals, we have been designing and creating maths-themed board games and writing descriptively in order to start a narrative.

Over the course of this week, all of Year 6 have started rehearsals for the production (Into the Woods). The children have shown incredible enthusiasm and are eager to see their creative vision realised! In DT, we had the opportunity to taste a range of cakes and evaluate their aroma, appearance, texture and taste in order to inform our baking project later in the term. All three classes have added paint detailing to their Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse moulding, which has made them look even more spectaular! 

Throughout this week, the children have been exploring colour theory and how mixing certain colours of acrylic paint can lead to the creation of new, vibrant colours. This is laying the foundational skills we will need to paint our plaster of Paris Micky Mouse and Minnie Mouse sculptures, which some of us started to pour and set this week. We also experimented with animating 2D images digitally, as a way of exploring how films are produced and to understand how 2D images can become 3D sculptures.

This week, Year 6 continued to build on our knoweldge of the history of film and TV; we learnt about Thomas Edison's invention of the kinetoscope (an early motion picture device). Correspondingly, in art, we explored Walt Disney's creation of Micky mouse and used this to sketch our own Micky Mouse and Minnie Mousie designs, which we will eventually paint onto Plaster of Paris models. Our Year 6's also acted as incredible role models and encouragers for the younger students who completed this week's Mini-Marathon!

We have had an amazing first week back at school! The children enjoyed experimenting with Plaster of Paris; they created animal-themed moulds using play dough. They then mixed their Plaster of Paris and carefully poured it into their moulds. After waiting patiently for them to dry, the children removed the moulds to reveal beautiful figures. Year 6 also explored the characteristics of articificial intelligence by asking child-friendly chatbot questions to investigate if it could act authentically human. 

We have had a very busy week finishing out work on Brilliant Brazil! We compiled knowledge about carnivals; created worlds in Kato's Hike; and formed nets of 3D shapes as the final stage in our 'shape' topic. 

We are looking forward to moving onto learning about 'Lights, Camera, Action!' finding out about teh development of film and TV. 

We have been having a fabulous time with our lino printing this half term. We began by learning about artists and the history of lino printing. Then, we created a design inspired by Brazil. Carfeully, these designs were carved onto our pieces of lino and then printed using inks and rollers. They look very effective! 

Our outdoor PE unit for this half term is circuits. We took a baseline, recording how many of each exercise we could do in two minutes, in the first lesson. Since then, we have focussed on different muscle groups within each session. This week was 'core' and we all worked really hard with planks, mountain climbers, sit ups and more! 

On Thursday we celebrated World Book Day. All of the children came in dressed as a chracter from one of their books and took part in some activities relating to the day. Every child was fortunate enough to go home with a 'new' book from our book swap. 

In computing this half term, we are learning how to design and create a simple game using coding blocks. The children progressed quickly through the challenges and were able to apply their knowledge of programming. It was also an opportunity to develop skills in debugging and fixing a coding sequence. 

As part of our Brazil inspired DT, we have created mood boards for designs and colours we particularly like; we then planned and designed some carnival outfits; and have begun stitching and decorating our fabric usign embroidery and other embelishments. 

This week we have been looking at views of Humanism, and created some images of things that are important to us using string, this was inspired by the Humanism logo. In geography, we have been learning about the causes of deforestation. Our computing topic is games this half term, we have looked into the hitsory of games and we have refined our coding skills while creating our own on Scratch. 

As part of our Brazil topic, we are covering samba music. We were fortunate enough to have a workshop today where we all took part in playing a traditional samba style instrument. The rhythms created were fabulous and everyone came out with a big smile on their faces! 

We have made great progress with our character descriptions this week. We discussed all of the different aspects we could describe about a character and worked together to create some super descriptions. We have complete our 'toolkit' of literary devices to use within a wishing tale and we will use this all in the next couple of weeks while we write our own, wishing tales. 

In music, we are going to be using boomwhackers to create samba music. We have started by playing some more well-known tunes with them, to get accustomed to the tones they make. We are very much looking forward to creating our own sama rhythms with them.