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“Penpol pupils are curious, creative and courageous learners. Our school community believes in authenticity as the foundation of deep-rooted learning. Through our rich and relevant curriculum, we nurture community-minded, forward-facing international citizens of the future.”
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.
‘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.
We are spending this half term focusing on the internet and how we can keep ourselves safe whilst online. Over the next six weeks we’ll be looking at online safety from a variety of different aspects, starting with looking at the information we choose to share online.
We’re basing our work on the Be Internet Legends project from Google, which builds on the lessons the children had last year.
To begin with we are looking at our ‘Online Persona’. This is how you appear online to other people, based on the information we have chosen to share. We’ve talked about the risks of over sharing our personal data and also the way other people might see what we’ve shared and draw conclusions about us.
This learning has been very thought provoking for the children and has seen us address lots of really interesting topics in whole-class discussions. A particularly interesting activity has been to ‘create a persona’ for a made up person, by giving them loads of personal information and then choosing what should and shouldn’t be shared online with the world.
Below are several of the characters that have been created this week, along with lots and lots of personal information. This information could range from general facts like their favourite colour right down to specific details like their date of birth and their phone password.
The children have then used the highlighter tool to mark green any information which they would feel safe sharing online with the world, or red for any information which they think should stay private. We talked about how information can be changed from red to green later on, but can never be changed back from green to red as when it exists on the internet, it can never really be deleted.
“You should never share really personal information online, even with just your friends. Always tell a responsible adult at home if somebody is asking for personal information that you don’t want to share.” – Zara
“I have learnt that sometimes when you post something other people can get sad or upset if I’m not careful. So in the future if there is a photo I want to share I will go to the people in it and make sure they are all right with me sharing it.” – Ethan
“I have learnt about keeping myself safe on the internet and learnt to always tell your parents or teachers or family about it if something silly comes up on Youtube.” – Poppy
Year 5 are currently preparing to make rockets in class, but one pupil has already got experience in this,creating a fantastic child-sized rocket, made by herself, her dad and her grandad!
I really enjoyed making it, though I wasn’t pleased that ‘We love MCFC’ was written on the side. – Freya
Let’s hope the other rockets can turn out just as well. Watch this space!
Related to our science topic this term of space, both year 5 classes have created experiments using balloon power!
Initially, the plan was to investigate whether a balloon with a larger straw (exhaust) attached to it would travel further than one with a smaller straw, though in the end a completely different result was proven, as Lola will now explain:
The string we used in the first place was wool so it was fragile and had too much friction, but when we used a different kind of string that Mr Wise gave us it worked perfectly well and traveled over a metre each time, as it had less friction.
Thank you Lola! Sometimes we enter science experiments expecting one thing and we then unexpectedly out something else entirely!
On Wednesday, Year 5 zipped up to Hayle Academy for a fantastic, fun filled STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) morning. The children had an excellent morning learning how to cook, make solar powered cars, do advanced maths, science and art.
As well as this being an opportunity to learn some fantastic new skills, the children were able to acquaint themselves with the ‘big’ school, meet new people and meet the teachers that they might be taught by one day.
A fantastic time was had by everyone and the children came back with smiles on their faces and freshly cooked muffins in their bags.
Aliens…do they actually exist? This is a question which has been at the forefront of space exploration since the first human was launched into Space in 1961. This question is precisely what Year 5 are in the midst of learning about, having started reading ‘The Jamie Drake Equation’, by Christopher Edge, this new term.
Year 5 have explored in Science the ideal conditions for Extra-Terrestrial life forms to exist in our universe, referred to in the book as the ‘Goldilocks Zone’.
The Goldilocks Zone is neither too hot nor too cold.
Once accepting the fact that our universe is incredibly vast, all students were in agreement that in some corner of our universe, life must exist. With this in mind, both classes in Year 5 immediately began designing their own aliens in their French lesson, labelling and talking about them in French. Each one of their creations have been unique in their own way, with exceptional use of French vocabulary which would be impressive even for a GCSE French student.
Mon Alien 1
Mon Alien 2
Mon Alien 3
Mon Alien 4
In Science and Literacy, we have also looked at different attributes which are essential in order to be an astronaut. Year 5 students have completed their own mini astronaut application and were interviewed by their peers on why they would be the ideal candidate to send into Space on a mission to discover alien life form.
This week, Year 5 students will be finalising their applications and delivering a persuasive group presentation on why their group would be the ideal team to be sent into Space. Year 5 students will also be interviewing a NASA employee via Skype over the next couple of weeks in order to find out more about what it would be like to work at America’s Space Agency.
Look out for presentation videos to follow over the next few days!
This year, for the for the third time, we gave every child in Key Stage 2 the opportunity to design and refine their own 3D models on the computer, which we then printed out using our state-of-the-art Makerbot 3D printer.
This year the children had greater design freedom than ever before thanks to the fantastic new ‘Scribble’ tool on Tinkercad which lets the children draw their very own designs on screen, alongside their library of 3D shapes which the pupils have used previously. This tool was hugely popular and has resulted in us creating some really personal and unique decorations.
We’ve made a short video below to show the process of making our decorations, followed by a very large gallery underneath of every single decoration we printed this year!
This year we printed two hundred and twenty different decorations, which took a very very long time! You can see all of these decorations in the gallery below – see if you can spot yours…
This year there have been so many lovely designs and each one is completely unique. They’re all brilliant, but are there any that you particularly like?
What an amazing half term it has been. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to our Extreme Reading Challenge. It has been incredible to see the exciting adventures your reading has taken you.
Infant and Junior winners will be announced this Friday.
Over the last two weeks each class in Key Stage 2 has taken part in the Hour of Code. For those unfamiliar, Hour of Code is a worldwide event which encourages school children to spend an hour having fun by problem solving through writing code.
Each year some amazing activities are created and this year schools around the world got to enjoy spending an hour Dance Party and coding their characters to dance their favourite moves.
But enough of me talking about it, here’s a fab video of the children enjoying choreographing their very own Dance Party!
– Mr Woolcock
This is the second year we’ve taken part in the international Hour of Code – you can read more about the children’s Minecraft adventure last year below:
