Base 5 News

Blink and you may have missed it! This week, being such a busy one, has flown by once more. We experienced a high school English lesson with Mr Mottram joining us on Monday afternoon, experienced a rather wet parent picnic lunch, many of the children had their transition days and experienced their last town sports event!

As well as all this we completed our science and DT projects and began to wonder about what our next history topic would be and what skills and knowledge we would already be able to bring to our study.
In our science/ DT unit we had been testing, designing and making our mattresses for Mamo. This week we evaluated the final pieces, the chidlren had to look back at the design criteria that they had created for themselves at the beginning of the unit- had they done the job well? The children had to justify their judgements as they reviewed the prototypes. The children were very fair in their reflections and I think that Mamo would be very pleased with the results!
To begin our history unit we reflected upon the past- our past learning! We gathered together the skills we thought that we already had which would help us when we began to piece together new information on our new topic. The children came up with a range of skills such as; problem solving, team work and research skills. They did seem to all agree that the most important skill was to ask questions- to be critical; not always agreeing with what we are told- looking deeper into sources, artefacts and information. They then thought about what knowledge they had, what simple factual history knowledge did they have , for example ; The use of some metals and stones showed that the Stone Age had moved on and that they were now looking at a Bronze or even Iron Age, this also showed the children that there was trade, as new materials arrived. We then talked about how we could apply this to new learning, if metal was used it may tell us something about the geography of the country but may also tell us how progressive the civilisation was and also where it may fit in the chronology of the history of the world. They did a great job at this and I look forward to exploring our next ancient civilisation next week.
We also spent a little bit of time looking at Africa as a continent and then looked for Ethiopia- where was this? What can we learn about the geography of this place by looking at the equator- the lines of latitude and longitude? What about time zones- it seems close to the DRC ( the setting of Gorilla Dawn), but is it?
I hope you all enjoy the sunshine this weekend.