Year 6 Science Static Electricity

By Mrs D WILKINSON10th March 2023

Year 6 had lots of fun investigating static electricity.

Static electricity is the buildup of the electrical charge in an object when it is rubbed against another object. Static electricity causes objects to stick together when they have opposite charges and repel when they have the same charge. Common examples of this include rubbing a party balloon on your head.

We thought we’d give it a go…

We had some enthusiastic volunteers…

Loving the new hairstyle…

 

Some objects such as wool, glass, human skin and hair are more likely to accumulate electric charges and have static electricity. Shuffling your feet across carpet, particularly in socks, is another way your body gains more electrons; they are released when you touch something such as a doorknob or another person.

As scientists the children were  posed with a problem.

How could they get tissue paper to move without touching it ?

Working systematically and collaboratively small groups carried out their investigation…

Getting there…

How could we attract more tissue paper?

This group were more successful….

They realised rubbing the balloon for different lengths of time to hold different amounts of static electricity to pick up more tissue paper worked.

And finally making a prediction….

What will happen if you rub a balloon on your head a hold it over a mixture of salt and pepper?

The science explained…

It’s not magic, it’s static electricity! Rubbing a balloon gives it a negative charge, also called static electricity. When the balloon gains enough static electricity, and it is brought near the mix of salt and pepper, the negative charge polarizes the salt and pepper. That is, it moves the electrons of the salt and pepper to one side, leaving one end positive and one end negative. The positive end is attracted to the negatively charged balloon, but because pepper is much lighter than salt, the pepper flakes will jump on the balloon, leaving the salt behind.

 

 

 

Static electricity does more than just make your hair stand up!!!

Y3 YOGA WITH LIESEL

By Miss L STEWART7th March 2023

We in Year 4 are loving, and look forward to our weekly Yoga lessons with Liesel in P.E. From practising easier poses such as the ‘Table, Cat and the Downward Dog’ to the more complex moves of the ‘Warrior 3, Dancer and Camel’, we are now working towards making our movements more fluid so that each pose flows into another.

We have been having a little fun exploring Yoga with Music this week…something which we really enjoyed!

 

 

 

To end the session, Liesel taps the ‘Chau Gong’ so that we can concentrate on the soundwaves and ground ourselves at the end of a session.

 

Namaste Liesel!

Fieldwork – hessle

By Mrs K SMITH7th March 2023

This week, Year 3 have had their geography field trip to Hessle.

We were all very excited to see how the town of Hessle would be different to our visit to the village of Brantingham.

Hessle is close enough for us to be able to walk there from school so we went on our field trip together.

In Hessle we noticed that there were lots more buildings than in Brantingham and there were lots more people around the area.

Hessle has a different land use to Brantingham. The village had lots of agricultural land but the town has more commercial and industrial land.

We carried out lots of field work during our visit to the town of Hessle. We carried out a traffic survey ensuring we used the same guidlines as we had in Brantingham such making sure we counted traffic for exactly 10 minutes. We also walked around the area identifying several features such as places of worship, post offices, shops, pubs and parks. Hessle had lots more of all of these features than Brantingham had.

We are looking forward to comparing our findings between a town and a village in our next geography lesson.

Fieldwork – Brantingham

By Mrs K SMITH2nd March 2023

This week Year 3 visited the local village of Brantingham to carry out some fieldwork as part of our geography lesson.

We walked through the village looking closely at all the different physical and Human features. We discovered lots of physical features such as the fields, the village green, trees and bushes. We discussed the types of land use in the area and talked about all the fields we could see with cattle such as sheep. We concluded that this land was agricultural as we could see the animals living on the land. As we looked at human features of the village such as the village hall and the cottages we discussed how this land was also residential.

On our walk around Brantingham, we completed a traffic survey. We recorded all the traffic that passed us in a 10 minute period. Lots of us thought we would see lots of cars but we didn’t. We passed a sign that said no HGV’s down a small country lane so we decided that we would not see a lorry, we were right.

Over the 10 minutes that we recorded we only saw a small number of cars, some of us saw a push bike and some of us saw a tractor. The roads in the village were very quiet. Whilst we carried out our traffic survey we could hear the sheep in the fields and the birds in the trees, it was very peaceful.

We finished our fieldwork off with creating a sketch map of the village so we can compare Brantingham with a town.

We cannot wait to go on our next fieldwork trip to be able to do a land, features and traffic comparison of different areas.

YEAR 4 JIGSAW – HEALTHY ME!

By Miss L STEWART28th February 2023

Year 4 have been exploring the concept of ‘Friendship’ and recognising how their own friendships have formed, and also changed, over time due to the passage of life.

Through discussion, we recognised that not all our friendships are the same in that we may value some friendships more dearly than others but agreed that this is acceptable.  From this, we mapped our own ‘Friendships’ on a ‘Concentric Circles’ mapping tool where we identified and named our ‘Best-Friends’ in the inner circle before moving outwards to map those who we consider to be ‘Close Friends’, ‘Occasional Friends’ then ‘Acquaintances’ in the outer circle.  We then explored the statement ‘Friendship is Fragile’ from which we all agreed that for friendships to last the test of time, we need to value and respect all of those we consider to be our friends now as well as  those we will go on to meet in the future.

Group Dynamics…

The children have also explored the concept of ‘Group Dynamics’ and identified that people often take on different roles in different situations such as leaders, followers and bystanders. We assimilated this concept to when we work as a group in our learning environment and highlighted the importance of including everyone to ensure that everyone’s opinions are valued.

Using our Jigsaw approach, we explored some posed scenarios to identify the roles individual’s were taking on and found that sometimes people feel pressured to act a certain way when finding themselves in a controversial situation. This enabled us to consider the term ‘Peer Pressure’ and concluded that when influenced or encouraged by our friends to do something we know is right in a positive way that this is healthy; however, when we are encouraged to do something that we may know is wrong but go ahead and do it just to ‘fit-in’ or ‘be accepted’ that this is not a healthy choice.

Great discussions Year 4!

YEAR 3 JIGSAW HEALTHY ME!

By Miss L STEWART26th February 2023

In this Jigsaw Piece, the children in Years 3 are exploring the concept of making healthier choices…

In Year 3 we began by discussing the importance of exercise and the benificial effects it has on our bodies, our hearts and lungs.  Before participating in star jumps, burpees, boxing moves, dancing and a little jogging on the spot we felt and measured our resting heart rate then compared it with our elevated heart rate after we had exerted ourselves! We found that whilst exercising our heart beats faster to pump the blood around our bodies and that our lungs work harder to take in more oxygen.  In addition we identified that exercising, whilst tiring, actually makes us feel good!

We then explored the suggested statement ‘Children need to be active for at least 1 hour a day’ and recorded/calculated the typical average timings of the regular activities we all participate in throughout the school day every day:

Walk to school –  10 minutes
Walk up and down the stairs at school  throughout the day – 5 minutes in total
Playtime – 15 minutes
Lunchtime – 1 hour
Walking home from school – 10 minutes

Our findings found that we certainly excel the suggested 1 hour of activity from the activities we undertake in a typical school day but as this is only a suggestion we can go on to do more if we so wish.

We then went on to explore the concept of calories, fats and sugars within the food that we eat and how these can affect our health. Firstly, we identified how we can make healthier choices by swapping out certain foods with something considered to be healthier:

Chocolate – Fruit
Icecream – Plain Yogurt
Crisps – Rice Cake
Muffin – Plain Popcorn

We explored a range of food packaging to identify the calorific values (energy) fats and sugars of some food types and noticed that the traffic light coding on packages makes these easier to identify…

We then played the ‘How Much Sugar Game?’ and tried to match a specified amount of sugar with one of the food items presented…it was not easy!

 

Once the amounts were revealed we were amazed to find that there are…

35g of sugar in an energy drink
22g of sugar in a bowl of chocolate icecream
17g of sugar in a flavoured yoghurt
8g of sugar in a plain biscuit

We all agreed that whilst we find lots of food items rather yummy, that we can try to make healthier choices and keep some of those foods which have lots of sugar, fats and calories in as a sometimes treat. Great work Year 3!

 

Charlotte Eldred

By Mrs K SMITH24th February 2023

Year 2 were incredibly lucky this week to have a visit from local artist Charlotte Eldred.

Charlotte told us all about her job as an artist and about the art she creates as well as all the amazing people she has taught.

Charlotte knew Year 2 were looking at the work of Julian Opie and she created a fantastic bespoke lesson for us based on his artworks.

We began by having a doodle session. Charlotte told us how this can help us feel calm. We used black pens and created lots of different patterns. Our doodles included lines, swirls, circles, zig zags, dots and dashes to name a few. We kept using different patterns until our paper was filled.

We then moved onto creating our own characters with our pens plain paper.

Charlotte helped us create characters step by step. We started with a round face before we added detail such as hair and facial features. We were able to draw on our own artistic skills that we have been practising when we have created self portraits.

We followed Charlotte’s instructions really well and created different characters, some with long hair and big noses, others with short hair and small eyes. We really loved being artistic and creating work we were proud of.

We loved our session with Charlotte and spent time afterwards looking at her website and all the amazing artwork she has created. We can’t wait to use the skills Charlotte has taught us and create some of our own doodles and artwork.

Year 4 PEOPLE WHO INSPIRE US – WHAT MAKES A SAINT?

By Miss L STEWART21st February 2023

Year 4 this term have been rather busy exploring and investigating the questions ‘What is a Saint?’ and  ‘How does a person become a Saint?’  In order to gain the answers to these significant questions we watched videoclips and listened to podcasts of children from other schools giving their own responses and from this deduced that a Saint is someone who is considered to be holy, kind, courageous and a special person who cared for and helped others in their lifetime. However, the children became rather confused to find that a person can only become a Saint after they have passed away therefore never knowing that they had been honored with such a title which our children thought rather unfair.

We then utilised our geographical skills and explored maps of our local and surrounding areas to identify locations which where named after significant Saints.

We identified streets (St Nicholas Avenue; St George’s Road; St Hilda Street), medical centres (St Andrew’s Group Practice), shopping centres and retail areas (St Stephen’s Shopping Centre and St Andrew’s Quay), churches (St Nicholas Church, All Saints Church and St Mark’s Church) and primary and secondary schools/Colleges (St Andrew’s Primary, St Vincent’s Primary, St Thomas More and St Mary’s College). From this we deduced that the councils who govern Hull and the surrounding areas must have recognised the importance of these individuals in order to name significant buildings and roads in our city after them.

The children then explored the lives of significant Saints  – Saint Andrew, Saint Francis and Saint Teresa (Mother Teresa) and considered whether their ‘altruistic cause’ made them worthy of becoming a Saint.

We found that while Saint Andrew is the Patron Saint of Scotland, that he is also the Patron Saint of Fisherman, Fishmongers and Rope Makers. This further enabled the children to make links with Hull’s fishing heritage and understand why Saint Andrew is an important figure for our city. In addition, it was identified that Saint Andrew was a Christian and a disciple of Jesus whose altruistic cause was to continue teaching people about Christianity after Jesus’ death even though doing so led to his own crucifixion.

Saint Francis was a man who in his earlier life was quite selfish and cared only for himself until he heard the voice of God, which led to him giving his wealth away to the poor to become a holy man who lived a simplistic lifestyle. His altruistic cause was to do God’s work and care for others rather than himself. He is known as the Patron Saint of Animals and the Environment due to his ability to talk with nature.

The story of Saint Teresa leaving her family and homeland behind to commit her life to do God’s work in order help those who were less fortunate in Calcutta, India posed the question of whether we felt able to ever leave our own families never to see them again. We felt that Saint Teresa’s altruistic cause to do this was something that we would find hard to do and unanimously agreed that Saint Teresa was a very special person indeed.

In conclusion, we felt that each of these three magnificent individuals were truly worthy of becoming a Saint and deservedly so for their altruism and dedication to serve others in their lifetimes.

We then went on to explore some ‘inspirational people’ who either hailed from Hull or came to Hull and made it their home, while considering whether what they did during their lives for the city of Hull made them either a ‘Hero or a Saint‘:

Bilocca (Fishing Safety Campaigner)
Jean Bishop – The Bee Lady (Charitable Fundraiser)
Clive Sullivan (Sporting Legend)
Sir Leo Schultz (WWII Air Raid Shelter Campaigner)
Phillip Larkin (Poet Laureate)
Amy Johnson (Solo Aviator)
William Wilberforce (Slavery Abolishment Campaigner)

After hearing the significant stories about these ‘inspirational people’ the children agreed that what they did in their lifetime had a considerable positive impact on our city and for this they were all Heroes: however, now that they have sadly passed away that they are all worthy of being recognised as Saints for their own altruistic causes to put the needs of others before themselves.

Well done Year 4 for your super attitude to learning this term!

Year 3 Library Time

By Miss L STEWART21st February 2023

Year 3 have had a wonderful time in our school’s fantastic Library today exploring the amazing genres of books it has to offer.  We ensured that we read the Blurb of our chosen book first to see if it captured our interest, rather than judging the book by its cover, before finding a comfortable spot to settle down and lose ourselves for a little while. We knew to treat our books with respect and place them back on the appropriate shelf once we had finished before choosing yet another book. Our quiet, hushed tone also allowed for everyone to enjoy their quality reading time too…we hope to visit again soon!