Year 3 Truro Museum & Cathedral 2019
Year 5 Find Their Way Around Orienteering
Month: March 2019
Penpol, it’s NASA calling!
This week, on Monday at 2pm our time (10am at the NASA space centre in America) Year 5 had the opportunity to Skype call with an actual NASA scientist (he even has the email address @NASA.com which Mr Pollard and Mr Wise were very impressed by).
The children had a range of excellent questions to ask Martin, whose job it is to look at molecules floating into the farthest reaches of our universe. These included ‘Which is your favourite planet and why?’ ‘Have you ever seen the NASA supercomputer?’ and the ever interesting ‘How do you go to the toilet in space?’
It was interesting talking to Martin as he is based in America and works for NASA. I learnt that there is a difference between types of meteor and also that it takes around 13 years to become a NASA scientist! – Fifi
We are very grateful to Martin for giving up his time and hopefully he has just had a hand in giving someone a lifetime of interest in the subject.
Cooking with Chartwells an enjoyable treat for Year 5 and 6!
Last week, Year 5 and Year 6 were fortunate enough to have a cooking masterclass with Karen from Chartwells. After talking about cuisines and dinners from around the world and different types of foods it was over to the children to create some delicious, healthy food of their own, in the form of rainbow wraps.
They’re called rainbow wraps because there are lots of different coloured vegetables inside it to give it colour – Lily
Thanks to Karen for coming in, who will now be doing more cooking with the other classes in the school in the coming weeks.
Class 6 travel back in time
Class 6 travelled back in time last week when they visited The National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, to hear all about the Titanic and how she met her fate by striking an iceberg.
The children enjoyed meeting the Captain Edward John Smith, dressing up as survivors, making their own sailing boats and having time to explore other areas of the museum.
” I enjoyed meeting the real Captain Smith” – Amelia
“I loved making and sailing our boats” – Riley
” I loved looking out to sea using the binoculars” Hazel
“I enjoyed going back in time” – Jasmine
How can we Recognise Fake News?
‘Fake news’ is a huge topic at the moment and believable but untrue content online has become more and more commonplace. Luckily, this week in our E-Safety lessons we are learning all about being Internet Alert, which means recognising what is real and what is fake, as well as being able to develop strategies to keep ourselves safe from false and misleading information.
To start our sessions the children were issued a research task, to learn as much information as they possibly could about the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. If you haven’t heard of this rare animal then I wouldn’t be surprised, especially as it’s completely made up. In a sneaky twist, the children were actually researching from a fake website, trying to learn how some octopuses can live in trees when the children all know that they actually live in the sea.
This proved an excellent introduction to the fact that, sadly, not everything you read online is true. This particular website was made many years ago as a way of teaching children this very lesson.
The children then explored the concept of mis-information and fake news further, discussing how photographs and even videos can be misleading and not always what they appear to be. We discussed how this related to the idea of phishing too, which we learnt all about in our E-Safety lessons last year.
"I thought the tree octopus was very convincing because all of the facts sounded pretty real and the picture looked very convincing. It showed me that not everything that looks convincing is actually real."
The children have once again shown themselves to be very aware of how to stay safe online and also able to hold sensible and mature conversations with their peers about how they can help each other to protect themselves online.
"I learnt that not everything that we see online is real. And that we should always watch out for scams and fakes."
We finished the sessions this week with a game of Reality River on Interland as a way to recap our learning and to ensure we are all making the right choices when it comes to understanding what is real and what is fake.
