Mardi Gras

Last week Elaine Geddes, music teacher, came into our class to talk about her Carnival experience in Rio de Jeneiro. She took part in the procession with a Samba School and wore a very elaborate and colourful costume. Here you can see it being modelled!

She also brought along samba drums so that we could have a go at learning the rhythms of samba music.

We made carnival masks in art using a variety of materials and colours. You can see them in the slideshow below. There will be a prize for the wackiest and the most beautiful one as judged by Ms Dennison.

Pick up 3 Pieces

Would you feed this to your child?

This is what birds and marine creatures are feeding on!
Watch this video to see the effect our rubbish is having and why we need to keep clearing our beaches.


MIDWAY : trailer : a film by Chris Jordan from Midway on Vimeo.

The cup dance!

Some of the girls have been practising the cup dance which requires a lot of cooperation and skill!
See how they got on.

The Churchill Barriers

The Churchill Barriers were very important to the defence of Scapa Flow in World War 2 so we have been investigating how they were built and who built them.
We had a go at making our own models using wooden blocks of different sizes.

making the models ...

completed and painted!

Steel drums!

This term we are looking at Carnivals and Mardi Gras celebrations around the world. We've been researching the types of music, costumes, feasting and dancing involved.
Last week we visited Papdale School to listen to their steel band and to have a go ourselves. Ms Geddes gave us some music to try on the steel drums and it was amazing how quickly we learned the different parts and put it all together as a recognisable tune.
Have a look at the slide show of us below and watch the video clip to see how we sounded after less than an hour of playing time!

Slide show

Playing our tune - can you tell what it is?

We are making colourful carnival masks in art and will post photos of them when they're finished. 

We learned that certain colours have meaning during the Carnival celebrations so we are making some designs using those colours for a display.

Purple Represents Justice. Green Represents Faith. And Gold Represents Power.

Playground Design

As an introduction to a real life project that we will be tackling soon, we tried out a challenge to design an imaginary playground.
Working in groups we each had an area of the playground to measure. Next we decided on a scale to use for our plans which we were drawing on squared paper.
We needed to design a piece of playground equipment to put in our playground. to do this we used multilink cubes.
The designs needed to be drawn in plan, side and front view.