Sycamore

Welcome to Sycamore. It is your final half term in year 5 or 6- your final term at Westwood for some of you! It is going to be very busy with lots of end of term activities including the show and our trip to Lightwater Valley. Our term at Hogwarts will be continuing for a little longer but then we are going to become Stranded Scientists! Scroll down to view the exciting activities we have been completing within this adventure.

Underneath, you will find a link to our weekly spellings and homework. Every Friday you will be given your homework, times tables book, reading book and spelling book. Your books need handing in the following Thursday. We will also have our spelling test and times table tests on Thursday.

Cornet Concert 17.7.19

After a year of learning the cornet, we performed for the whole school. Our favourite song was 'Oh when the Saints' and we marched in time to the music as well as playing.

The Sound Of Music - July 9th 2019

Our end of year production was fantastic! The children have all worked very hard since January attending rehearsals and learning all their lines and the end result could not have been better! A huge thank you to all the parents who came to see it.

Our Star of the Week Award goes to.... Alice!

This week Alfie received the British Values award for Tolerance

Star of half term went to Jessica!

Click a link to see what else we have been doing!

Science Day Extension....... Tuesday 26th March 2019

Wilf's Grandad came into school to help us blast the rockets, which we had made in class, off into space. We took our writing buddies up with us and while we pumped the rockets with air our writing buddies held on to the release string until just the right moment when they could release the rocket into the air! Wilf's Grandad made the rockets go even further by filling the rockets partly with water. It was great fun and a huge thank you to Mr Minney for coming in and spending the day with us

Science Day 14th March 2019

We set up an experiment, in the school hall, to show why we have day and night, why we have shadows and how the shadows can change depending on where the light source (Sun) is in the sky.

World Book Day 2019

Writing Buddies

Our new adventure has started........

We were heading off on our summer holidays, sailing across the English Channel, when suddenly disaster struck! A huge storm left us with no communication or ship! We hunted in the wreckage for suitable materials to build a raft to take us to safety.

Burn to Learn - Science - Definitions of Properties

We quickly worked out that out of the materials we had salvaged, we needed to use the ones that were buoyant and waterproof.

Stranded - Science - testing our rafts....

The next problem was to get to safety, the nearest town was Filey. We managed to locate Filey on a map and learnt many facts about the coastal town.

Locating Filey on a map

We tested out the properties of the materials we had salvaged....

Our rafts were amazing. After experimenting to see which worked better, we wrote an advert for the rafts.....

Continuing our scientific investigations into properties of materials, we took a look at solids, gases and liquids.

We then learnt how to separate saltwater....

We also managed to have a look at some of the features of a coast line and coastal town.

Monday 15th April 2019 Spring 2 Adventure!

Our adventure began when we all received a mysterious letter.

Inside we found our Hogwart's acceptance letters!

We quickly went to the Great Hall, where we were sorted in to our new houses: Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw.

Then we wrote a diary about our journey to Hogwarts. First we wrote some quotes from the people we met on the Hogwarts Express.

We also wrote noun phrases to help us describe the Great Hall.

After, we learnt how to make prints. We designed new house crests, transferred the design on to polystyrene tiles then rolled acrylic paint over them and printed the designs in our house colour. The results were amazing!

Professor Partridge then took us out for our first flying lesson. We learned how to make the broom fly and levitate however the brooms we used weren't very good so we decided to design a new broom and wrote adverts for them.

Once we had designed our broom, it was time for us to have a go at playing quidditch. Even though our brooms weren't really flying, it was great fun and gave us a real feel of how it would feel to play in a real quidditch match!

Afterwards, we watched Gryffindor take on Slytherin in the first match of the season. It was our job to report on the match therefore we had to make sure we paid attention, made notes and gathered some quotes from people at the match.

Once we had gathered all the information, we wrote our newspaper reports.

Then, it was time for our first-ever potions lesson! We had a go at making a potion, mixing together the various ingredients. We were introduced to many different ingredients: unicorn urine, dragon blood, basilisk venom and snake eyes. After, we wrote instructions for how to make our own potions.

We heard there had been an escape from the wizard prison, Azkaban: Sirius Black was missing! We used string to create a stamp of him and made wanted posters so people were able to recognise him.....

After, we wrote a description of him making sure we described everything about him: what he looked like; how he behaved; what he sounded like.

We then imagined two creatures had been sent into the forest to search for Sirius Black. We wrote a story about their adventure.

While in the Forbidden Forest, we saw some magical creatures. We all saw something different so we drew pictures of them and wrote some key details about them.

After, we wrote a report telling the reader everything they needed to know about the creature.

For our latest adventure we are going 100 years into the future to the year 2119....

We started by thinking what schools, housing and clothing and transport would be like in the future.

We discovered that in the year 2119 it is possible to travel to other planets in the same way we would to other countries in 2019. We decided to help Lunar Branson set up her holiday business which would take tourists to Mars. We designed our company name and logo.

Once Lunar's company was up and running we wrote a news report about Lunar's incredible trial journey to Mars. Before we started, we worked on punctuating our speech quotes correctly.

Next, we took a more detailed look at the planets while taking part in a burn 2 learn to collect all the facts and match them to each correct planet picture and name. Then, using the facts we had learnt, we wrote a detailed report on three of the planets. Before we started writing the report, we practised improving our sentences and using a passsive voice.

One part of the Solar System is the Sun, so we learnt about why we have day and night. After we looked at how the Earth's rotation affects time across the world.

Then we decided to carry out an investigation into why shadows change size and position throughout the day. On a sunny day we managed to go outside and complete the investigation. Finally, we wrote up our findings. Can you see how the shadow turned 90 degrees which is a quarter turn. This happened during 6 hours, which is a quarter of a day!

After we found out that the spaceport needed to launch rockets was going to be built on Middleton Park. Some of the local residents were angry about this. So we considered both sides of the argument: the pros and cons to having the space port in Middleton. Finally we wrote a balanced argument showing both sides.

In reading, we read an explanation about spacesuits and answered some questions about it. Using what we had learnt, we designed our own spacesuit with special features.

As our adventure came to an end, we were given a story title - 'Lost in Space'. We generated ideas about how we might get lost in Space and how we would get rescued.

Lost in Space storyboards

Tremendous Tudors

This half term we received an email from Mia Storey, who works at Temple Newsham House. They had found a mysterious family tree with missing people and wanted our help working out who the missing people were.

We recognised the man in the middle as King Henry VIII and realised that this must be part of a Tudor family tree. We learnt some key events and put them into a chronological order during a Burn 2 Learn session.

After we started writing a description of Henry VIII. To help us, we thought of some fronted adverbials to improve our writing.

Using our fronted adverbials, we wrote character descriptions about Henry VIII

During a Burn 2 Learn we discovered lots of facts about Tudor houses

We then drew tudor houses and using water colours we painted them. Next we labelled our drawings and wrote adverts for them.

We learnt about the Battle of Bosworth. Before writing an eye witness account about the battle we did a Burn 2 learn to help us improve our verbs. We had to find four different options to replace each of the underlined words.

Next we designed Tudor purses. We sketched out our design first before making the purse out of felt and embroidery threads....

After we had made our purses, we looked at the types of food eaten during the Tudor period. To make things interesting we had a taste test: cheese, egg, ham, turkey and Tudor soup!

Jousting was a popular sport between knights during the Tudor period. We held our own tournament....

On February 14th, we made jam tarts ready for the Tudor feast on Friday 15th....

Finally, we invited our parents to come and sample some Tudor jam tarts, look through our books and try out jousting!

UKS2 Christmas Concert - Wednesday 12th December

River Rescue - Autumn 2

The children returned from the holidays to find the classroom awash with rubbish and a mysterious letter! The letter was from David Attenborough – who the children learnt is a famous broadcaster and naturalist. He was writing to the children to ask for their help…

Their task was to learn all about the devastating effects pollution is having on the rivers of the world and how people can try and help solve this problem.

Before getting to work, the children wanted to know more about David Attenborough so they completed a burn 2 learn to make a timeline of his life. They then wrote biographies all about him.

Then we wrote a biography about his life.

After looking at how Pablo Picasso used collage in his work, we decide to re-use our rubbish to make a collage. We used David Attenborough and the amazing work he has done on the importance of keeping the oceans clean as our inspiration!

We found out that pollution in our oceans is a global issue. After completing a Burn 2 Learn, we were able to identify some rivers from across the world and share some interesting facts about them.

We thought about how authors open stories in different ways by completing a Burn 2 Learn.

Then we started to work on a story about a magical land with a river running through it. First we labelled pictures from the book 'Journey' about how a character would be feeling. Then we began describing the magical world and added relative clauses to make it interesting.

In reading, we read a poem called "A River's Story". There was some tricky language in it so we completed a Burn 2 Learn to match up the words to their meanings. Next we answered both comparison and inference questions about the poem.

We also drew pictures illustrating what the river was like before it was polluted by the factories.

To understand how a bottle ended up in the Irish Sea, we learnt about the journey a river takes from source to mouth and imagined the bottle had been dropped in a stream whilst visiting Ingleborough Hall.

During a Burn 2 Learn, we matched pictures of features of rivers to their names and descriptions.

First we thought about what the river is like at different stages: the upper, middle and lower course. After we wrote some non-chronological reports about the journey a river takes.

We looked at different types of pollution that affects rivers and worked out what could cause it.

Sycamore's Autumn 1 Adventure

Our adventure began when we met Osmund and Hilda, who are brother and sister, and live in Anglo-Saxon England in 793AD.

They offered to take us around their village and teach us all about their life. First however, we needed to fit in with the locals so using a computer programme we generated our own saxon names. Using clay we made name plates.

Next we designed our outfits....

We created a clay plaque with our Anglo Saxon name etched into it.....

Next, we completed a Burn 2 Learn to find out some key facts about where the Anglo-Saxons came from and where they settled.

Then we completed maps to show what we had found out .......

Osmund and Hilda wanted to find out what it was like for their relatives when they travelled to Britain. We imagined we were leaving Denmark, Germay or the Netherlands and tried to picture the scene.

As a group we came up with lots of noun phrases to describe the scene. After we wrote setting descriptions.

Osmund and Hilda wanted to learn about the journey their ancestors would have taken. Their mother had a diary belonging to Alfred and Elga, distant relatives. Unfortunately it was so fire damaged it needed the gaps filling in. First we thought about what we would pack now if we were leaving home and what the Anglo-Saxons would have taken. Next we learnt how to use fronted adverbials to open our sentences in our diary in different and interesting ways.

After that we thought about all the negative and positive feelings that Elga and Alfred might have experienced.

Then it was time to write our amazing diary....

We have been looking at what an Anglo-Saxon Village looks like. We made nets of cubes and made our own Saxon homes.

A popular Anglo-Saxon game is Taefl......it was lots of fun to play!

Next it was time to try some Anglo-Saxon food! Five lucky(ish) children completed the blind taste test of some Anglo-Saxon food: plums, honey, bread, carrots and barley water.

We also learned about some of the other dishes and types of food that the Saxons ate......we designed a menu including them.

After we had written out formal invitations, we held an amazing Saxon feast and our parents and families joined us!

Whilst on our adventure we read the story of Beowulf. It is from the Anglo-Saxon period and after reading it we drew storyboards retelling the main parts.

Osmund and Hilda received some news of invaders. We completed a Burn 2 Learn to find out who they were......and found out they were Vikings! We used watercolours to create pieces of art depicting the Viking's journey over to England.

To really understand how Hilda and Osmund live we visited Danelaw Dark Village for the day. We lived like Anglo-Saxons and learnt how to farm, grind flour, protect the village and making clay lamps. Take a look at what we got up to! There are also more pictures in a link at the top of this page.

Osmund and Hilda were then received news that their village was under attack from the Vikings. However when they got to the weapons store the weapons were all gone! During a Burn 2 Learn we helped them find their lost weapons...

Weapon Evaluation

After, we wrote a setting description describing the battle between the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. We planned our descriptions using our senses.