Designing a magnetic board game - 24/09/2019

Today we started to discuss and design ideas for a board game that included magnets. We looked at Snakes and Ladders for our main inspiration and thought of different patterns for the spaces on our board.

Most games used magnets to move pieces around the board, as our pieces were mostly metallic paperclips or other smaller magnetic objects.

Ordering Instructions - 23/09/2019

This week, we are looking at instructions to help us decide what type of language to use when we create our own board games. Looking at familiar instructions like a morning routine really helped us to find the correct language to use.

Examples of language that helped us were 'first', 'next', 'after that', 'finally'.

Designing a friendly robot - 17/09/2019

Today we had the fun task of designing a metallic robot that could help us around the house. Some of our robots were designed to clean the living room, others to pick the dog mess up for us, others to DO OUR HOMEWORK FOR US!!!

Making and testing spinners - 17/09/2019

Today we attempted to make spinners by cutting out circles from cardboard and pushing a pencil through the centre. We experimented by using different sized cutouts on different surfaces and measured the time spinning. 

The surfaces with less friction (table tops) allowed the spinner to spin for longer.

Building an F1 style cart - 16/09/2019

This afternoon we had a great time building a cart from cardboard strips, dowel rods and various other materials. We have a variety of styles of cart that we will be able to test in two weeks time to measure how friction affects objects that rub together (such as the wheels and the floor)

Designing playground equipment - 12/09/2019

First, we looked back through our pictures from the trip to the park and thought about which piece of playground equipment was our favourite. After that, we began to draw what our 'super' piece of playground equipment would be, such as combining monkey bars with a slide and a swing. Finally, we labelled the diagram with the materials the equipment was made out of and what forces affected it (friction, gravity).

There was even a hot tub involved!

Using data in Microsoft Excel - 10/09/2019

We brought the laptops into the classroom today to make bar charts and pie charts to show sets of data. We typed in the relevant numbers and created the following charts!

Base 10 resources - 10/09/19

Today we decided to practise using base 10 to help us during our place value lessons. There are small cubes that represent ones, thin rectangles that represent tens, flat squares that represent hundreds and 3D cubes that represent thousands.

Mighty Metals WOW event at the park! - 09/09/2019

Today we went to the local park to experiment with forces and kickstart our Mighty Metals topic! 

We completed parachute games - looking at the forces in action as the parachute is lifted up and down.

We moved around the park with labels of 'push' and 'pull' to show which pieces of equipment require certain forces. Also, we ran around with magnets and tried to find as many surfaces that were magnetic, such as the slide, the metal steps and the chain holding the swing seat.

Using the slide, we sat on three different materials to see how they affected the speed of our descent. (The red material was fastest!)

Lastly, we discussed the poles on a magnet and how a compass always points north. 

Place value practise! - 5/9/2019

Today we decided to practise more place value using dienes blocks. To challenge ourselves further, we discussed what would happen if we had ten X 100 'slabs'. We talked about exchanging between place value columns and found easier solutions to representing large numbers by exchanging ten X  100slabs with one X 1000 block.

Levers - 04/09/2019

Today we began to experiment with levers to kick off our Mighty Metals project. We discovered that the fulcrum is the point on which the lever is placed, such as in the middle of a seesaw. When we move the fulcrum towards, or further away from, the object we are trying to lift (scissors, glue sticks, calculators) the amount of effort needed to move the object changes.