Trying out our vaults

We tried some simple vaulting today.

We tried squat ons and straddle ons to get onto the vault

and we tried straight jumps, tuck jumps, star jumps and straddle jumps when we jumped off.

We love gymnastics.  Some of us are really good at it!

Penguin art

We made gorgeous penguins in art.

We will make really interesting pictures with them later in the week.

Today (Thursday) we put our penguins in their ideal habitats (we have been talking about habitats this week in SESE).

Don't they look so happy!

DanZing classes

Please click on the picture below to see notes given to your child recently:

Latest note: Note about DanZing classes  (Monday, January 25th, 2016)

A great log house

Look what we made during golden time.

Snowmen

We made some really nice snowmen with paper collage.

More gymnastics

We had great fun playing our version of "traffic lights"

Our gymnastics are improving.

Today we tried cartwheels and backward rolls.

We also did some beam work.

It was great to have some real gymnasts who could show us what to do.

Look at this really interesting roll we tried!

Traffic Lights

We had a look at something just outside our school that was designed and made by engineers.

Can you guess what it is?

It is a set of traffic lights.

 We are investigating engineering in our local area:

 We discovered some things:

• when the green light shines for cars, then the pedestrian light shines red
• when the red light shines for cars, then the pedestrian light shines green
• the lights turn from green for cars, to orange, then to red.  After red they flash orange (and the pedestrian lights flash green!  This means that cars can drive IF there are no pedestrians, but the pedestrians get the right of way first.  After flashing orange the cars get a green light once more.
• We know we can only cross the road if the pedestrian light is green, and must wait on the path if the pedestrian light is red.

We are going to design and make some model traffic lights of our own for art this week!

Back in the classroom we chatted about different colours.

First of all we had a look at the primary colours of paint: red, yellow and green.

We tried mixing these and got orange paint when we mixed red and yellow, purple when we mixed blue and red and green when we mixed yellow and blue.  We got the colour brown when we mixed yellow red and blue.

We talked about not being able to make black or white from the primary colours (or grey or pink.)

There are different primary colours for light.

Here they are:

We tried combining colours to get other colours:

Now, for our traffic lights filters we had a look at different kinds of materials:

Opaque materials won't let any light through so they won't be any use at all.

Transparent materials will let all light through but won't be coloured so they are no good either.

What we need are translucent materials that will let some light through but will allow us to have colours on our light filters.

Crepe paper is translucent,

Ordinary paper is opaque but acetates are translucent.

Tissue paper is translucent but felt is not.

Maybe we will use these when we design and make our traffic lights tomorrow.

We will also need a light source. 

We will be talking about natural and man made light sources tomorrow too.

Our materials are sorted into opaque (felt and craft paper) and translucent materials (tissue paper, crepe paper, acetates)

We made some stained glass traffic lights using the acetates,

and toilet roll traffic lights using crepe paper or acetates.

Our traffic lights on the window use a natural light source (the sun) to light up.

At PE we enjoyed a game of traffic lights where "green light" means "go", "orange light" means "prepare to stop" and "red light" means "stop".

We wrote all about our traffic lights:

Look at the lovely accounts we made of our investigation into traffic lights.

We found this colour sheet with our magnetix.

It shows examples of primary colours and translucent colours.