As part of our Celebrations topics, Year 1 and 2 have so far enjoyed learning about Halloween, Bonfire Night, Remembrance Day and Diwali.

In the lead up to November 5^th (Remember, remember the 5^thof November…), the Year 1 children became aware that there were a number of safety concerns that should be considered before enjoying the annual celebrations at Bay Bistro.  Working independently and in pairs, Hummingbird class took the time to make safety posters, detailing things to be avoided, what to look out for and how to look after yourself in the dark environment.  The year 1’s enjoyed making BOLD titles, using number bullet points, bright colours and pictures to make their posters easy to read and accessible to all ages.

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Next Monday, 5th November, will be our 8th Annual Provo Primary Bonfire Night! As always, we anticipate a wonderful evening of fun, food, fireworks and (bon)fire for our Provo Primary families to enjoy!

Over the past 7 years, each Year 4 class has set about learning about the history of Bonfire Night to understand why a Guy is made for this unusual celebration. It has become tradition for the Year 4 class to then create their own Guy Fawkes as part of their Design Technology classes. And each year, among the crowd of children and parents, the Year 4 children huddle at the front to watch their hard work go up in flames!

To get us in the mood for this wonderful and unique event, we thought it might be fun to look back over the 7 wonderful Guy Fawkes made by Year 4 students between 2011-2017.

Enjoy some old photos below of long-since graduated students below as we throw back to Bonfire Nights past.

Our current Year 4s sneaked into the action when Mr Toby taught them in Kindergarten. I wonder whether this might give them an advantage – we can’t wait to see what they come up with this year!

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She was last seen dancing with the Prince at the Royal Ball and he is very keen to find her and marry her. Luckily, the children in Year 2 have made some wanted posters to try and find her. Please keep a look out, rewards vary from diamond rings, vacations, crowns, gold and even some dollars! Come and have a look at our wanted posters if you need a good description of Cinderella.

Year 2 have also been busy writing letters to the Fairy Godmother and writing diary entries about their time at the ball. We then spent time designing our own shoes before finally making them out of clay.

We had to carefully roll, cut, squash, squeeze and smooth the clay to make the perfect shoe! It took time and patience, and as you can see from the photos, a lot of focus too. We then carefully added on designs before painting them – they look fabulous! [Read more…]

Can you guess who is who in Year 6?

Please take a look at their fantastic portraits and see if you can decipher all the students in the current Year 6 class!

As part of our work in P.S.H.E, Year 6 have been following a scheme of work entitled: What Makes Me, Me?  One aspect of this unit of work demanded the production of a personal portrait which had to be annotated with words describing the personality of the individual depicted.

Students had to observe their facial features closely in order to attain a similar copy within their portrait.  This also enabled the children to appreciate their unique features; and to consider how similar or different they are to their parents, siblings and other family members.

Once the sketching element of the process was finished the children used oil pastels to bring the portrait to life.  Experimenting with a range of colours, tones and shades was messy, but fun work!

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Last week Year 3 questioned whether rocks can absorb water.  To test our predictions we used the pipettes to carefully place the drops of water onto each rock.

But how did we make this experiment ‘fair’? Well, we placed the same amount of drops onto each rock  – therefore the variable we kept the same was the drops of water, and the variable that we changed was the rock!

We closely observed what happened to the water. Did it sit on top of the rock, run off the rock or did the rock absorb the water? We found some interesting results, and amazingly many of our predictions were correct. Great observations Year 3 and such careful use of the pipettes – well done!

Just like a sponge, porous rocks have the ability to absorb water.  I wonder if they increase in weight and size as they take in water?  How could we measure this?  I also wonder whether they absorb other liquids – perhaps you can explore at home.

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There has been some interesting ‘I wonder’ and ‘I notice’ moments experienced during last week’s Numeracy lessons in Year 3. One of the tasks was to ‘estimate’ how many cubes or lollypop sticks were in a given pile. As the piles became bigger, we soon discovered how much easier it was to begin placing the objects into groups of either 2, 5 or 10, finally counting them using our times-tables knowledge – hurrah!  Our counts became much quicker and far more accurate; we certainly got better and better at both estimating and counting!

The class were also given the Cuisenaire Rods with some problem cards. The cards asked them to find out ‘how many different ways’ they could create the same length. They re-discovered that the numbers could be made using lots of different colour combinations – hence they could be made using different number combinations. After some discussion and sharing of findings, some of the children noticed that these patterns could also be related to the different ways of making even bigger numbers, especially when looking carefully at the value of each digit.

By the end of the week, Year 3 had become ‘estimation’ and ’equivalent’ experts! Good work, Year 3! [Read more…]