Hello and welcome to our class Blog. A place where you can keep up to date with all the wonderful learning that your children are doing.
Our teacher is Mr Searson and our class teaching assistant is Mrs Chadfield.
Today we had an excellent visit from Sarah Champion MP. She was very interested to see our learning about Freedom. Sarah gave a brilliant talk about her role as MP and how she became the Member of Parliament for Rotherham. She talked about modern day slavery and how Parliament and British democracy works. The afternoon finished with an excellent question and answer session.
Some of our work based around Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
We have been writing instructions on how to make chocolate milkshakes and chocolate cake. We have also created information leaflets about the story of chocolate from the ancient Mayan indians in South America to modern day companies such as Cadbury.
In our religious studies we have been exploring Judaism with a special focus on the feast of Passover (Pesach) and the Shema Prayer.
Here is some of our work about the story of the Passover featured in Exodus and the Seder Meal which is eaten on the evening of the Pesach. It is featured on our whole school display.
We had an excellent taster day at St Pius. We experienced lots of different learning in a secondary school setting.
In English we got to create our own Fractured Fairy-Tales. We had great fun changing characters behaviour, twisting and distorting plot lines and generally having fun making our own versions of well known tales/stories.
We had great fun exploring the countries of the world using this year’s World Cup as a starting point in a Geography session.
We also got to experience working in the Technology labs. We designed and made our own key-rings using a variety of plastics and machinery.
We made beautifully tasty upside down cakes in Food Technology!
Our class had the privilege of performing the final part of the Easter story on the day before Good Friday. We retold the story and events relating to the Crucifixion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. It was beautifully presented and very thoughtful to allow people the chance to reflect on Our Lord’s great sacrifice which he made for us.
In order to celebrate the feast of St Joseph, we arranged a Spanish Fiesta. St Joseph’s Day is also Father’s Day in Spain so we decided to celebrate our patron saint’s day in style.
Our class decided to create a Spanish buffet based around traditional Spanish cuisine.
We learned all about the Spanish language related to food and created menus, games to encourage others to learn the names of Spanish food.
Then we cooked it with the help of one of our class parent’s who is a chef…Thank so much Mr Barnett, you were fantastic! We learned all about the ingredients, how to prepare and present the food.
This is our completed Spanish feast!
We washed all this wonderful food down with a little Sangria whilst listening to traditional Spanish guitar songs played by Alejandro.
After planning and designing our textile panels we have been learning different sewing techniques.
As part of our studies about the Suffragettes, we visited Weston Park Museum at Sheffield to learn about people and protests. We learnt all about different local people who have campaigned for change in South Yorkshire. We saw banners, badges, slogans, artwork, newspaper reports, photographs, video and much more from 200 years of people and protest in our area.
We also learned about people who campaigned for change through political campaigning and democracy such as the Suffragettes, Chartists & trades unions. These are some of the banners and textiles were used to spread their message/persuade others to support their cause.
We also visited the Graves Gallery to explore Grayson Perry’s huge tapestry called ‘Comfort Blanket’ based around the theme of Great Britain. We will use all these ideas about slogans, images and persuasion to create our own textile panels for our own class tapestry based around the theme of ‘Freedom.’
We have had a fantastic World Book Day! We also took part in the Great St Joseph Book Swap!’
As part of our Design Technology project based around textiles, we have been exploring various tapestries, banners and medieval wall hangings. We are now designing our own panels for a whole class tapestry about ‘freedom’. We looked at the Bayeux Tapestry, Trade Union banners and religious textiles for inspiration.
As part of our Science project we have been exploring forces. Here we are carrying out a challenge related to gravity and air resistance. We were given a piece of A4 paper, the challenge was to create a design that would be slowest to fall to the floor.
We learned that the bigger the surface area, the larger the air resistance. The winner was the one with the largest surface area!
In PE we have been learning all about position, direction and location via orienteering. It has also helped to develop our Geography skills too. We also had to communicate and guide others which was very challenging!
This year we will be learning how to play the violin with Rotherham Music Service. Its been great fun…
\
This afternoon we have been continuing our research about the suffragette movement and the ‘Votes For Women campaign. We have been creating research questions, scanning and skimming for relevant information on the internet as well as making notes of historical facts, dates & key names.
This is part of our new thematic learning project about the idea of freedom.
This is a mysterious old suitcase we found left in our classroom last week! We explored the clothes, artefacts and literature it contained in order to find out who it could have belonged to. Can you have a guess?
Here we are at work!
We had some special visitors in school recently to help bring our learning about mountains to life! They were representatives from the Woodhead Mountain Rescue Team. They brought their Land-Rover Vehicle, all their equipment and some beautiful and clever Rescue Dogs. It was a very interesting talk and experience. We learned all about what people do on mountains and what happens if things go wrong!
As part of our learning about Catholic communities we visited St Marie’s Cathedral in Sheffield.
We learned all about how the Cathedral is the centre of our Diocese of Hallam. We explored the many chapels, learned all about the cathedral’s history and experienced how music and singing play a huge part in the Eucharistic celebrations.
We also participated in activities about the Liturgical Year during which we got to dress up in vestments and explore the various colours that relate to each part of the church’s calendar.
Afterwards we explored artifacts and symbols related to the activities, sacraments and day to day life of the cathedral.
We recently had a fantastic sports taster day at St Pius. We took part in lots of different activities to develop our agility, as well as our running, jumping and throwing skills. We also got to compete in small team games which was great fun. We all demonstrated excellent levels of fair play and team work.
As part of our thematic learning about natural disasters, we held a ‘Disaster Day.’ This gave us a chance to try out lots of scientific and technology skills. As part of our survival tasks we had to clean dirty water using sieving, build a raft by joining materials, build a stable shelter, create a workable trap for food as well as use electrical equipment left over from our plane crash to create a circuit to light up a rescue signal.
The stable structure for our shelter was achieved by experimenting with various shapes. The most stable was a triangular prism.
We separated materials by using sieves to remove the larger materials such as leaves and rocks. We made funnels out of old bottles and used tissue as filtering paper to remove the fine dirt.
We found that we had to work as a team to create our rafts. The best way to secure the poles was to weave string between them and secure it tightly to avoid them splitting apart. It required lots of discussion and problem solving.
To catch food, we created cages with trip wires and collapsing supports. It took a lot of patience and resilience to get it right.
We successfully made circuits to get the bulb to light as part of our rescue signal. This would be visible at night time. We also added a switch so we could save our battery power. We decided to use reflective material to create a message that would use sunlight to send a signal in daytime.
In the Autumn term we explored changing materials and solids, liquids and gases. We had great fun mixing materials and observing changes. We also experimented with heating, cooling and burning to change the state of materials. We noted that some changes were reversible whilst others were not reversible.
Buenas Dias!!!!! In Spanish we have been learning how to greet people, introduce ourselves and talk about colours, animals and how to count to 20 in Spanish.
Click Here To Practice Your Spanish
Can you complete the Hour of Code Challenge? Solve all 20 puzzles to improve your coding skills.
