Cycle Animations

As part of our inquiry theme this term (Environment and Sustainability), we have been making animations of the explanations we have written.

We chose lots of different cycles, from food chains and life cycles, to the journey consumer products take. This involved us generating questions, creating success criteria, conducting research and organising our new learning into explanations (also designing and painting backgrounds/habitats, creating sculptures and learning to use animation software!).

This was a big process that tested our self management and organisation skills. We are happy with our results. Some of these are shown in the video below, which we played in assembly this week. The others can be viewed in our USpace galleries.

Ski Trip Video

Here is the What's Up Bromley? news clip that we played in assembly this week.

Our Mathletics Challenges

We now know that 'Mathletics' is the name given to many maths programmes and competitions across the world. However, we use this title for the maths challenge cards we have in our class.

The problems on the cards are colour-coded. Each relates to a maths strand (geometry, measurement or statistics).

We can choose cards to complete. Some tasks take longer than others and we have a checklist in the back of our maths books to keep track of which ones we have finished.

Mathletics allows us to use the maths skills and strategies we have learned to solve real problems. 

Many tasks require us to work in different environments, so having a learner licence is a great advantage.

Dodgeball

We are loving our dodgeball at the moment.

The game we play is a 'medic' adaptation of dodgeball. To win, your team must eliminate all of the players on the opposing team. When you hit them with a dodgeball, they must sit down. However, each team has a 'medic', who can run around and tag their eliminated players back into the game. This means that the main objective for each team is to eliminate the other team's medic, so they can have a better chance of winning.

We have created our own variation of this game, which we call 'dodgeball conquest'. Each team gets 2 minutes to arrange the junior school PMP equipment (mainly the large wooden boxes) to create a fort on their side that they can use to defend themselves. Most teams use their fort to protect their medic, who only comes out to tag their teammates back into the game.

This game is great at our year level because it has a high level of involvement from all players, is fast, promotes teamwork and caters for varying abilities.

Check out this video of us playing dodgeball conquest. You can see both teams' medics, Una and Kaiya, tagging their teammates back into the game…