Friday

We've had a lovely day today. 
We've been wanting to do rounders all week but it's just been so hot in the afternoons so we decided to do rounders first thing this morning instead. We absolutely loved it and now we have many more participants for rounders club every Tuesday after school. 
After rounders, we have been finishing our stories. After half term we will type these up and do our final editing to then share with you our final drafts. 
This afternoon Miss McMunn treated us for our hard work this week with ice lollies! We watched Britain's Got Talent and discussed more of the entertainment that goes around the world. 

Raps

Next term we are going to learn how to sing and write rap songs, researching into how these are used to entertain. To ensure we get plenty of time to practice we've begun to learn 'Hopeful' by Bars and Melody this week. I don't think we realised how hard rapping can be but we're definitely getting better! Keep an eye out after half term to see our own raps coming along. 

Can robots create emotions?

With our topic begin based around 'entertainment' we began to think about the different ways we like to keep ourselves entertained. We began to wonder.. could robots do the job of entertaining us?

We decided to build robots using Lego WeDo, and then programmed them to move, make noises, flash lights etc. and thought about whether we found them entertaining.

We realised that although we were learning and being engineers at the same time, we had the most fun of everything we'd done all week! Robots really can entertain us.

Gold Book

We've had a lot of gold book entries from Class 7 this week - it just shows how amazing everyone has been working!

Oliver - for always having an amazing attiude to his learning.

Phoebe - for amazing perseverance in maths. (unfortunately Miss McMunn didn't get a picture!)

Henley - for an outstanding first draft of his narrative opening.





















Tallulah - for amazing improvement in her word reading (again, Miss McMunn forgot the picture!)

Well done to all of you, keep up the hard work.

Planning our narratives

We spent this afternoon planning out our narratives ready for the week ahead.
There were 3 stations: character design, build a plot, preparation for the rest of the rubric.

We absolutely loved planning the plot using an app on the iPads called My Book Creator. We added backgrounds to help us when describing the setting along with notes for each section of the story (opening, build up, problem, resolution and ending).

Some children chose different ways to plan out their story including creating playdough characters and making a story motion as well as using good old fashioned white boards!

We will be using this to begin writing our narratives this week so keep an eye out!

What a week...

Miss McMunn has absolutely loved this week! Everyone has worked super hard in both writing and maths and we've really enjoyed our project work.

We've continued with our narrative skills this week, which have included writing sentences using relative clauses, higher level punctuation, expanded noun phrases and much more! Luckily, we are very prepared now for next week, as on Monday we will be planning our stories and then writing, critiquing and redrafting them for the rest of the week.

In maths, we've focused on multiplication and division skills. We didn't spend long on multiplication as we were amazing at it and we are going to use this knowledge next week, applying it to word problems. With divison, we had a recap lesson and then peer critiqued it. Most children used a pictorial method to support them on the first lesson and our peers then challenged us on the critique to use abstract methods next. Although this was tricky, everyone showed amaIng grit and determination.

We have been continuing to learn different styles of dance from around the world, critiquing them and trying to make our moves stronger with more flow. This is in preparation for our final video, which will be available for people to learn on YouTube and in our '25 ways to keep entertained' book.

What is sound?

Over the past two days we've spent the afternoons researching the questions 'What is sound?'
To begin our research journey we decided on some 'I wonder...' discussion statements and this helped us when deciding what to write in the search engine.



We realised there were lots of very big words that were difficult to understand so we started writing KS2 after our searches to ensure the content was accessible to children of our age.









We worked in groups of 3 and 4 and collated all our research from iPads and non-fiction books onto a large piece of paper. After we'd completed our research we presented our findings to the rest of the class - these were videoed and can be found on Seesaw!

Skills for our narrative

This week we've been working on skills from the rubric, in order to ensure our narrative is full of amazing features. Today our focus was on using a variety of punctuation. We are pretty knowledgable about using full stops, inverted commas, commas, exclamation marks and question marks, however, we're less confident in using brackets, dashes, semi colons and colons. So, for this lesson we began by using grammar books to figure out the exact use of these pieces of punctuation.





After this, we found sentences from our launchpad and rewrote them, trying to add in some more challenging punctuation. The outcomes were amazing! Keep an eye out on our blog and we'll post examples of this punctuation in our showcases.

Star Pupils

This week Miss McMunn was a bit naughty and chose two star pupils because both boys were just SO AMAZING she couldn't choose one!

Firstly, Oliver was chosen due to his amazing perserverance both at school and at Kingswood. It was a pleasure to see him facing his fears.


Secondly, I had to choose Billy based on the AMAZING week he had at school. A fantastic launchpad story written, which he tried really hard to achieve his target in. Not only that, but he has been working so hard in maths and even stayed after school to do even more maths! It's been lovely to see you working so hard with a great attitude to learning.

Maths - four calculations

Today we completed our launchpad of using the four calculations. We had to solve problems faced by a huge entertainment company, helping them to seat their customers for the best prices. This involved us using our addition, subtraction, multiplication and division skills, so that Miss McMunn could then tailor our learning around our needs. After this, we created a rubric to help us over the next few weeks, giving us targets to aim for. In order to create a rubric that was appropriate and relevant we used the Hartsholme Academy calculation policy. We then used the rubric to tick off what we had already shown in our launchpad, and was able to highlight areas we each need to work on over the next few weeks!

Hartsholme's Got Talent

This week we begun our project, 'What keeps the world entertained?' with our project launch, Hartsholme's Got Talent! We had watched an episode of Britain's Got Talent previously and used this to discuss what act we'd each like to perform. We then had the morning to practice and perfect our entertainment. The auditions were held in the afternoon and the judges, Miss McMunn, Mr Murphy, Miss Crockley and Mrs Smith gave feedback on each act. Each judge chose a golden buzzer act to go through to the final, and then they collectively chose two wild cards. The final included a magician, a stunt act, two dance acts, a singer and dancer and a football act.

Here are our winners!