The new adventure in Upper Key Stage Two began with them time travelling to the year 2119! The children first met Lunar Branson – the great granddaughter of Richard Branson. She had been working hard to continue his legacy and managed to launch a spaceship that travelled to Mars in the same amount of time it takes to fly to Spain. As a result, she was looking to launch a business offering holidays in space and that is where the children came in.

The children in Sycamore and Rowan the children were stunned with the fantastic accomplishment of the flight to Mars and felt that everyone should know about it. They therefore wrote newspaper reports detailing the flight. They imagined being reporters and completed a reporter’s journal with the key details (5 W’s). The children then collected some key quotes to include in their reports and looked at using inverted commas correctly. Finally, the children looked at an example newspaper report to support their understanding of structure and formality. 

In both Willow and Rowan, the children learnt all about the planets in the solar system. In Rowan, they concentrated on using conjunctions to join clauses. They completed a Burn 2 Learn where they had to match up two sentences with the appropriate conjunction. In Willow, the children focused on the use of passive voice in non-fiction writing and improving basic sentences to describe the planets. The children in each classes then wrote their reports.

In Willow, the children looked at all aspects of Earth and Space in science: how day and night is caused, about different time zones around the world and how shadows are caused. The children watched videos to complete research, used a globe and torch to bring what the discovered to life and used atlases to locate countries and work out their time zones.

The children also designed an experiment to understand how shadows are caused. Over the period of a day, they went outside to measure the length and position of a cricked stump. They used chalk to mark on where the shadow appeared at hour long intervals. The children recorded their findings in a table and then wrote an explanation of what they had done and learnt.