Guess Who?

We returned back to school to find out that our school would be hosting the award ceremony for “Greatest Achiever”. We wanted to find out more about this so we looked at the nominees which were: Andy Warhol, Benjamin Franklin, Rama and Sita and Vivienne Westwood. We were asked to keep the trophy safe until the ceremony that night

Adventure Songs

Our songs this half term are ones that would've been played at the award ceromoney if it wasn't for the crime! 

Simply the Best - Tina Turner

I am the One and Only - Chesney Hawkes

World's Greatest - R.Kelly

We'll also be learning Electricity by Elton John - We have a feeling this would have been Benjamin Franklin's favourite song!

We came back to school to find our classroom turned upside-down and covered in crime scene tape! It turns out that the trophy had been stolen before the ceremony had even begun!

Clues had been left by the suspects. We investigated these and realised our suspects are actually the nominees!

We’ll be spending this half term interviewing the suspects and learning more about them to try and uncover who stole the trophy.

We knew we needed to put out a wanted poster to find the suspects so we wrote character descriptions about Andy Warhol and Vivienne Westwood so we could ask the public to help us find them.

We then spoke to our first suspect, Andy Warhol. He told us all about his art work ‘Pop Art’ we had a try at his work using pastel to colour in the same image each time with different bright colours.

We thought it would be fun to create our very own artist so that we could write a biography about them. Our artists had some very interesting lives.

We then completed a 3 colour block print! We decided to do food as our design just like some of Andy’s work. We started by drawing our food with the background onto polystyrene. We then printed this using bright colours. We then cut our print block up to allow us to print again but this time using different colours. The results were fantastic!

We then met Benjamin Franklin! He wanted to teach us all about electricity. He started by telling us about the different types of electricity and how it is generated.

He also told us the story of how he discovered electricity. He sent us his old journals and asked us to turn them into a diary for him.

 We then learnt about the differences between mains electricity and battery electricity. We worked together to sort the different appliances.

He then showed us how to make our very own circuits! We learnt about complete and incomplete circuits and made predictions on whether we’d be able to light the bulb.To test how much we knew about circuits already, we made one using ourselves outside. It took us a long time to figure it out. Once we completed our investigation, we went outside again and this time we worked much quicker in our groups. 

Then it was time to learn about insulators and conductors. We tried different materials within our circuits to see if they would allow the electricity to pass through or not.

We thought it would be fun to be just like Benjamin Franklin and write up our conductors and insulators investigations.

Our final stop on the electric circuit was switches. We learnt how switches worked and even created our own from foil!

When we said goodbye to Benjamin, we thought about what it must have been like the day he travelled into the storm. We decided to write a thunderstorm setting description. To understand what it would have felt like, we worked in our groups to create thunderstorm music outside. We had to think about volume and rhythm and how this would change throughout the different parts of the thunderstorm.

Our next suspects to interview were Rama and Sita. They told us their story and we learnt all about the different gods that are worshipped within Hinduism. We worked together to match the god with their power.

We then learnt about their 4 main beliefs: Dharma, Truth is eternal, Moksha and Reincarnation.

We then learnt about the special places of worship that Hindus shared. We compared what it was like to worship in a Mandir and worshipping at their shrines at home.

Finally, Rama and Sita told us all about the pilgrimages that Hindus venture on. We learnt about the Kumbh Mela where millions of people travel across the world so that they can pray in the River Ganges in India. We learnt that Hindus do this to wash away their sins. They also lay flowers and candles as blessing to the god Shiva. We had a try at our very own Kumbh Mela where we laid flowers, candles and pretended to wash in the river.

The next person on our suspect list to interview was Vivienne Westwood. After we’d spoke to her, she asked for our help to create a new purse or wallet. She was on the lookout for new designers! Before we began, we needed to create our very own logo! We looked at ones we already knew for ideas and then created our own.

We then needed to research existing products to give us some ideas and show how designs are dependent on what the customer would like.  

It was then time to design our purse! We had to speak to our customer and ask them what they would like to see on their purse and how important they rate the durability, cost, appearance, safety and if there was anything else they would like. We also made a paper template to help us understand how we would create our purse.

It was then time to write an advert for our purses and wallets to persuade people to buy them!

Then it was time to make our purses, we used our previous paper template to draw around and then sewed our creation together! The results were fantastic and our customers were pleased with our creations.

Vivienne then asked us to write instructions on how to make our purses so that she can continue to produce them. We made sure we used lots of fronted adverbials.

Finally, we needed to evaluate our purse or wallet. We asked our customer to fill in a feedback sheet so that we could use this to inform our own evaluations. They proved really helpful and we thought of ways we’d improve our design if we were to create it again.