Designing, experimenting and creating

This term is going to be centered around science and DT. Over the next 6 weeks, we are going to be taking part in a range of creative projects, including parachutes, landscapes, cityscapes, kites and tea parties...it's going to be so much fun! 

Week 1:

This week we read the story 'Egg drop' and focused on trying to help the egg achieve it's dreams by creating a parachute that can help it to feel like it's flying, instead of falling, without it cracking when it reaches the ground. To get started, we first learnt some new and important concepts, including air resistance and fair test. We came up with a plan of how to make it a fair test and got into groups to start planning and designing our parachutes. One group used tissue paper, and the other used a plastic bag. We can't wait to put them to the test next week! 

We had an egg-cellent time in Food Tech! Emily and Mel had an egg-off to see who's scrambled eggs were better...you wouldn't believe that it was a draw! The question still stands, who makes better scrambled egg, Emily or Mel?! 

Week 2:

This week, we put our parachutes to the test! But before we did so, we each made a prediction on what we thought was going to happen during the test, and whether we thought each parachute was going to achieve what we want it to. During the test, we stuck to our plan to keep it as fair as possible throughout and we used a table to record the results. We then came together and looked at our results, which showed that both parachutes were not as successful as we hoped. Therefore, we carried out a soft landings test to see which material we could use to add to our parachute to give the egg more of a chance of landing without cracking...it was newspaper! We added this to our parachutes and carried out the test again. We concluded that the tissue paper parachute was better at allowing the egg to fly and land without cracking! 

This experiment has been so much fun and all of the children have really got stuck into it! Regardless of the outcome of the experiment, everyone made a parachute to be proud of!

World Book Day!

Week 3:

This week we are looking at London Landmarks, such as the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye and the Shard. We previously learnt lots about these landmarks in term 1 when learning about England, and so we have been able to use this prior knowledge to create our very own model of one landmark in particular...Big Ben! 

The children worked in two smaller groups to create their own models; both groups were given the same picture of Big Ben to use as a guide and came up with their designs with this in mind. They used lots of junk and materials lying around the classroom to make their models, so they had to be really creative and imaginative in their ideas...which they certainly were! After they had finished constructing their models, the children evaluated their work; thinking about what went well, what could have gone better, if they had to make any changes along the way, if it looks like their original design and if they are happy with their final model. 

Again, just like our last experiment, all of the children worked super hard on this project. They put so much time, effort, ideas and teamwork into it and came up with two outstanding models that they should each be extremely proud of! 

This is the final product, aren't they brilliant! 

CURRICULUM DAY!

This time, it's all about the artist that our class is named after...Stephen Wiltshire! We got to finally look at his brilliant work and even had a go at creating a Wiltshire inspired drawing ourselves. We couldn't believe that he produced such detailed and big drawings from memory. He is extremely talented! 

Week 4:

This week it's onto another model, but this time it's something a little bit more personal to us...our bedrooms! We started the week by drawing and labelling our dream homes. We got to share them with each other, and it was great to see what each of us wanted to have in our houses. We then went on to coming up with a design of our existing bedrooms, before getting to work on creating them out junk!