STEM week May 2024

This week we have a focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths, with a few special activities planned in throughout the week. Today, Year 5 started the day by dipping the pond, finding a huge range of creatures including newts and tadpoles.

In the afternoon, Kim introduced us to her family rabbits and told us all about the care of them and their behaviour. Izzy brought in some owl pellets which she broke apart and we saw the skeletons of some of the tiny creatures the owl had eaten. We had great fun trying to identify the skeleton parts! What a great start to STEM week!

Forces

Year 5 have been learning about forces and carried out an investigation about parachutes. What makes a good parachute? We thought about surface area of the parachute and the shape. We practised using stopwatches to time the descent. Great team work from Year 5!

Recycling Visit

This week, year 5 had a visit from Kirsten Juniper, the recycling officer from Dorset Council. Year 5 have been learning about climate change and plastic pollution, particularly of our seas.

Kirsten demonstrated the recycling bins, what goes in them and what doesn't. She had many ideas about repurposing items before recycling. She showed examples such as purses made from tyres, toy bicycles made from a tin can and much more. 
Year 5 showed a good knowledge of the message Reuse, Reduce, Recycle.

Kirsten went on to explain the processing of recyclable materials, including an anaerobic digestion plant for recycling food at Piddlehinton in Dorset, which makes compost and renewable energy sources from food waste.

A discussion followed about sending our unrecyclable waste to Wales and the Midlands.  A good question was asked about why it had to travel so far and not processed in Dorset. This brought up arguments that no family wants a recycling plant near where they live because of pollution by lorries and pollution by the plant itself.

The discussion came to a conclusion that future generations, instead of thinking about how to better process our rubbish need to think carefully about why we make so much rubbish in the first place.

Poetry Festival year 5

On Wednesday 24th April, Year 5 attended Weymouth Pavilion as part of the Oracy Project for the Chesil Schools’ Partnership. Each school learned a different poem to perform on the huge stage at the Pavilion. We managed a quick run about on the beach before heading into the Pavilion to have a practice and wait nervously for our performance spot. 

We are incredibly proud of Year 5, who overcame nerves, many who have never performed on a stage before. They delivered their poem ‘Refugees’ by Brian Bilston, each child having their own spoken part, and ending with a chorus of the final line to rapturous applause from other schools and friends and family. Our feedback from the LAMBDA coach was that they were brave and fabulous!  

Thank you to our families for supporting us with collection of children out of school hours, and for coming along to watch us. We hope that you enjoyed the afternoon as much as we did. 

Year 5 enjoyed looking at different books each day this week. We have looked at books about space, magazines and comics, and some of Mrs Neale's favourite books! On Thursday, we were so lucky to watch an online session with poet and author Michael Rosen, who made us laugh out loud with stories about how he was so old that he lived in the Stone Age. He taught us a wonderful new way to learn spellings including the word shampoo ~ I wonder if you can remember!

We also listened and drew with author illustrator Sarah Bowie who told us about her characters in her new book 'Nina Peanut'.

On Friday, we didn't recognise half the class because of their super costumes. Thank you to all for this wonderful effort. We loved hearing about their books as the children shared so many books. We also tried to create a class story by Livewriting using Google Classroom, which we enjoyed but definitely need more practice!

Following on from our Morrisons trip, and as part of our DT bread making project, we designed and made our own bread. Judging by the evaluation sheets, it was delicious!

We invited Katy Chamberlain, a volcanologist from Liverpool University, to speak to the children about volcanoes. We learnt such a lot and the children asked some fantastic questions. We might have some budding geologists amongst us!