Year 5/6 Design and Technology club have been investigating structures and have been constructing models of the Tyne Bridge. They had to build secure bases to support the towers and then investigate how to create the through arch bridge supported between the towers.
The whole school thoroughly enjoyed a stunt show display from Bike 3Sixty as part of our healthy lifestyles week. They reinforced the importance of safety, particularly wearing a helmet when riding a bike, and the performed lots of stunts which we were very impressed with. After the session, some children took part in a skills session with Ian and Grant.  Children were taught some basic stunts and skills; some children were even taught how to perform a wheelie properly. Everyone had great fun.
4CL were invited to visit The Word.
We were given a guided tour of the building, we saw the library, a 3D printer and the telescopes which gave a wonderful view over the River Tyne.
We went into the new Open Zone and worked with Lego.
We made different models and then programmed them to do tasks using sensors and motors all linked to laptops.
We had a look around the exhibition dedicated to Sir Ridley Scott who has directed films such as Alien and Bladerunner.
Year 5 were visited by Julie, a fire-fighter from the Tyne and Wear fire department on Wednesday 23rd November. We were told loads of important and interesting information linked to fire safety, including: information about the fire triangle; the importance of testing smoke alarms to ensure they will wake us at night in case of a fire and shutting doors downstairs at night to stop fire spreading if one was to occur. We know that it is dangerous to start a fire on purpose and that it can lead to criminal charges and can hurt or kill people. At the end of the visit, Harvey was chosen to try on the specialist fire-fighting clothes while Julie told us how and why they were designed in the way they were. We learned loads and were given a task by Julie, to think about a fire escape plan for our house if a fire were to occur which we are looking forward to doing.
COMING HOME
We discussed what the word ‘home’ means and how it can have many different meanings to different people at different times in their lives. We then thought about what we could see, smell, hear and feel when we thought of home and created a ‘Word House’.
During the story we talked about how the robin would have felt at different points and what type of character he was.
After reading the story we made some Christmas bird cakes to hang from trees to help birds during the winter.
Tuesday 15th November
LO: To understand haiku and to write our own.
We were lucky enough to have a poetry workshop with Explore Learning. We talked about haiku poetry, its origins and format. After learning the names and symbols for correct and incorrect in Japanese, we answered questions about haiku to check our understanding. In our beautiful booklets, there were some traditional and modern pictures to help us to generate our own ideas for our own haiku poems. We wrote a poem in our pairs and then one individually. They were so lovely, we decided to copy them up and carefully illustrate them for display. You can see them in the Year 4/5 corridor.
Year 4 were grammar detectives. We did work on verbs, adverbs and adverbial phrases.
Year 4 enjoyed learning more about the Anglo Saxons when we were visited by two people from Durham Oriental Museum. We enjoyed looking at artefacts from Anglo Saxons times and we also wrote using quills just like Anglo Saxons monks would have done.
