Stanningley Primary School

Due to budget restrictions we could not go and visit the Alps, which we have been learning about, so we brought some of the Alps to Stanningley. We learnt about the positive and negative effects of tourism on the area and enjoyed looking at some of the many summer and winter pursuits on offer. We drank Gluhwein on a sleigh ride on the Austrian Alps, had a snowball fight and enjoyed a selection of Alpine cheese, meat and, of course, chocolate! We then rounded off the day with some traditional dance from France, Austria and Switzerland.

We have been conducting an experiment to see what materials work well as heat insulators. We have been trying to decide which materials will keep a hot drink warmest for longest. We have been recording using a mixture of thermometres and data loggers.

We have been finding out why we get night and day. We used a torch to represent the sun and our friends heads to be the earth. We were very careful not to shine the torch in each others eyes! We found out that wherever the sun shone it was daytime.

We had a great Christmas Dinner today, served by the teachers. We also played some party games with our PE elf!

In music today we had fun using the Boomwackers to make Christmas tunes.

Marcus from St Vincent's gave us a great session on internet safety and then the following week talked to us about the dangers of getting involved with gangs. He gave us lots of practical advice to keep oursleves safe.

We learnt that people used to think that the Earth was the centre of the universe[a geocentric view]. We now know that it is actualy the sun [a helioecentric view]. We had fun recreating these models in the playground.

We investigated the friction that different surfaces gave by using a tyre and a weight. It got pretty muddy!

We had a visit from Mrs Kingdom who told us how to be safe around trains. We learnt that we should stay away from train tracks as they are incredibly dangerous. Thne we looked at different jobs withing the railways and had fun dressing up!

We have been screenprinting today. We designed patterns based on the Kente cloth designs we have been studying.

Today we wore odd socks to celebrate the fact that we are all different but that that is ok. This was the start of our Peace Week, were we do lots of activities to think about treating each other respectfully.

We looked at how we can increase an objects area to increase its water resistance. We also looked at the shape of different boats to see which cut through the water better.

We have been investigating air resistance by making parachutes of differnet sizes and seeing how long it took them to fall to the ground.

Today we voted for our new school councillors.

We have been writing persuasive speeches to convince our classmates to vote for us as their new school councillors. We then performed these to the class.

This term we have been improving our cricket skills with Jordan from Chance2Shine Cricket.