Cakes and Story

Today we have finally finished our digi blue children stories. It was very hard but we enjoyed adding sound and creating the scenes.For each scene, when adding sound, we would always make mistakes beacuse we would start laughing.

In addition Year 6 have made cakes with ingredients they bought from a visit to Waitrose. We made the cakes all by ourselves and we were even taught how to make icing. The cakes have been made for a cake sale and the money raised will be spent on a digital video camera for yr3/4. Everyone thought making cakes were fun and we all got stuck in making. Everyone enjoyed themselves. We enjoyed every single part (apart from washing up and cleaning)! We have made approximately 230 cakes in one morning. The cakes will cost 20p each and we hope to make enough money to pay for a digital video camera for Year 3 and 4 to use.

Beacuse we needed money for ingredients our teacher checked that we weren't going to spend to much and let us use his money. Since we have done this we will need to pay our teacher £37.50. This has taught us about buisness for we will need to make at least £38.

Everyone enjoyed the day and we would all like to have more cookery lessons.

The Non-Residential Visit

On June the 8th 2009, a small amount of children came to school- not because they were ill but they were on a school trip, in Bude (for the whole week!) However, it is not really fair if the pupils in Bude had all the fun so, instead of the standard numeracy and literacy, the children who didn't go to Bude got to design a t-shirt for the pupils leaving Year 6. To succeed in this lesson, the children split in groups of 3 or 4 and chose a place to take a picture of. Then they planned what it was going to roughly look like and who was going to be in it. Of course, they showed this rough sketch to the teacher who then decided if they were ready or not to take pictures of the selected place. When the teacher said it was ok, they went where ever they needed to go. But, it wasn't as simple as taking a couple photo's, no. What they needed to do is take photo's all over the area staying in one place! To make this easier, they had to spin around slowly and take pictures looking down, then normally, then to the sky. This was extremly creative, this made me glad that I didn't go to Bude.

Once they finished, (which most groups done after break) they had to take pictures of people in the posses they want them to be in. Most groups took pictures of both staff members and the people not in Bude. Once everyone has finneshed taking their photo's, they merged the photo's into on picture on the t-shirt. Right know the t-shirts are beng made for the Year 6 leavers. I think this made most people very excited to get there t-shirts back.

After lunch, the childrens got into different groups to plan a stop motion film we are going to present to the infants. We had to choose a children story, and if they wanted to do something made up, they first had to write a script for it wich some groups did. After they chose the story, they had to paint a back ground for the film wich took most of the afternoon but it gave us just anough time to play basketball. The rules were first team to score stays on and the team who canceeded the goal comes of for another team. There were three teams wich made it easy to know who was coming on when there was a goal. This was so much fun, I lost count of the points but I think everyone had a lot of fun for a day. For the final half an hour of the day, we did singing assembaly wich I think calmed down after a really fun day.

However, we still were excited because we have had (and played) the Nintendo Wii in our classroom. On the Nintendo Wii, we did a contest to see who could get the highest score on Wii Sports bowling it was pretty close but there was a winner, I know everyone can't wait for more Wii contest.

Egyptian Location Study

Today Year Six have researched Egypt for their production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. We had a big piece of black sugar paper to present our research but we had to make it look eye-catching beacuse they will be put up in the corridors.

In our reaserch we had to research geographical features (for example research on Cairo), education in Egypt, land usage and economy and produce. The task was very hard and it was difficult just to find a readable map. Some of our points were comparing Egypt to Great Britain.

We have found out that Egyptian houses are very different to the houses in Great Britain- their houses are joined and some are placed on top of each other!

I enjoyed it very much and would like to do a lesson like it again.

Egyptian Location Study

Literacy

Today, in Literacy, we were writing out our film storyboards in neat on our secondary school transfer booklets. The storyboard was to represent how we would film the opening of Abomination. Although the booklet only said to write the storyboard, our teacher gave us the oppurtunity to film the opening for ourselves.

The recording was fun and even though we did'nt get to go with who we wanted to, everybody had a good time. My group even had a boy dress up as a girl and recorded him to show to the rest of the class (Iwould'nt have liked to be him)! There were some slight problems as the videos could'nt be put together on a certain program but we quickly resolved that and the films/photo stories were soon finished!

Although my group was filming, four of the other groups were creating photo stories and everybody agreed that from the ones we watched they all managed to tell the story well.

As we have now finished this activity I hope that the other activities will be as fun as this has and the ICT being brought into literacy was a good idea too!

assembly and maths

Today we saw an infant assembly telling us about what they had learnt and how different people help us. A good example of this is the fire brigade and the coast guard.I found this assembly very intresting.

Afterwards we got to do maths where we had to create a car using £10,000. We had to find out how much it would cost to make and decide how much we should sell our cars for to make as much profit as we could. make.

We have to make at least £1000 profit on each car we sell. Finally our teacher checked our work so then we filled in the success criteria based on what we thought we had done. I found the session very fun, and yet challenging for my brain.

Abomination Photo Stories

Today in Literacy we finished making our Abomination photo storys. We had already taken our photos the previous day and then we had to put them into photo story and edit them. To do this we had to first had to download our pictures to photo story. We then added text to help tell the story. Penultimately, we added speech using mircophones and finally we added some music to fit the story. We have enjoyed making our photo storys because it gave us a chance to use our schools digital cameras, microphones and advanced programs called photo story and movie maker. These were some pictures used in our photostory:

Literacy: Movie making

In the past few weeks, Year 6 have been doing a transition unit on a book called Abomination, by Robert Swindells. As one of the units, we were asked to create a storyboard about Abomination this can then to be turned into a movie.

In the morning, we learnt about all the types of camera shots like extreme close up and mid shots. This came in useful when we were filming in the afternoon. After that, we were given a sheet with four quadrants on. Each quadrant had a different picture in including an eye, an ear, a camera and a face. These represented four aspects of film;what was seen, what was heard; camera positions and character emotions. We watched a short animated film called 'Lifted' that featured an alien getting his abducting licence. We wrote what the film used in each quadrant and after everyone had finished, they were handed in to the front and we discussed what a film needed to be successful.

During the afternoon we began storyboarding our film in six frames and an overall description of the beginning of the novel. The groups took a long time to storyboard! After a long time planning groups were sent off to find the perfect location for shooting. The enviromental area was a popular choice for the beginning scene as the hill suited the act of Taylor Hill perfectly. A few groups were asked to film but most were asked to represent the story by taking pictures of the scenes that they had storyboarded.

I think that the lesson was a good change to normal literacy activities and there should be more lessons like this as they are two subjects in one. Literacy and I.C.T!

Today's maths lesson!

Today in our maths lesson (The first lesson of the day) we had to do an investigation called 'Four Slide'. It involves addition and organising your numbers in systematic order. We had to organise our work as a tree diagram so it could be easier to read. As you can see to the right, there is a picture of how the tree diagram was started. It was an investigation so we had to make an observation and a prediction and afterwards check if your prediction was correct.

We had to create a tree diagram to show our findings of the investigation. On the left, there is a photo of my tree diagram of showing all the possibilities to move the counter, through four slides. There was a sheet with a 3x3 grid on it filled with the numbers 1-9 and we had to find all the possibilities to make a sequences with the counter starting on the number 5. For instance 5, 2, 1, 4, 7 is a sequence and these were the rules:

1) You can only move your counter up, down, left or right not diagonally.

2) You couldn't move to the number you were on before but you could come back to it later. For example, the sequence 5, 6, 5, 2, 1 would be breaking rule No.2 but the sequence 5, 6, 9, 8, 5 would be appropriate because you are allowed to use the same number but just not together

I felt that today's maths lesson was a bit easy but I am looking forward to tomorrow's lesson as it will be a challenge because Part 2 of the investigation is 'Five Slide'. There will be a lot more possible outcomes to find and theories to test.