Mr Roper's Class

Balloon Magic!

We used balloons to explore different states of matter: solids, liquids and gases. First of all explained the difference between each state using balloons filled with ice, water and air. Then we answered questions such as: What happens when you heat a gas? and Does a gas weigh anything?

One of us even remembered that plasma is a state of matter!

Here are some of our favourite books that we wanted to share.

We are reading the 13 Story Treehouse today by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton. We are making a book big full of activities we have been doing based on the novel. Here are some of them.

There are 13 different rooms in the 13 Storey Treehouse. We invented room 14!

Magic

Our topic for this half term is magic. We will be reading the first harry Potter book and doing some activities based on that as well as learning about the magic of science.

Click here to see the knowledge organiser.

To start our new topic, the children learned some magic tricks. Maybe you have seen some of these at home already! Remember, you can't ask the magician how they work - it's magic!

Drama lesson based on Taming of the Shrew.

Dance the Day Away

Here are some of us "busting our moves". Unfortunately no pictures of Mr Roper's "Dad dancing".

Electricity

This is our new topic for the first few weeks of the Spring term.

Static Electricity Experiments

We investigated different ways of generating static electricity and what it could do. As well as bending water and helping to tidy up breakfast cereal, we also rubbed balloons on our heads to make our hair stick up. Our apologies for the hair styles that came home!

Making our first circuits

We investigated different electrical devices and whether they used mains electricity, battery or both. The children were encouraged to think about why different devices had different sources of electricity.

Stories

Our new topic is Stories

An important aspect of Hugo Cabret is the emerging cinema scene that was happening at the time. We watched one of the silent black and white movies cited in the book: Le Voyage Dans Le Lune which you can watch below. We used some of the backgrounds from the film as an inspiration for our own background pictures developed in sketching pencils and charcoal. Here are some examples:

Le Voyage Dans la Lun (A Trip to the Moon) by Georges Méliès (1902)

A Trip to the Moon (French: Le Voyage dans la Lune), alternately Voyage to the Moon, is a 1902 French black-and-white silent science fiction film. It is based loosely on two popular novels of the time: Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and H. G.

We have been reading Hugo Cabret by Brian Sleznick which is set in 1930s Paris.

We investigated the setting using Chromebooks and tasted some French food.

Here are some our favourite books. Maybe there is something here you would like to read. Some are trickier than others, so check out the blurb first.

Tree Planting

We all enjoyed reading Firework Maker's Daughter by Phillip Pullman

Indonesian Wayang Kulit puppets. Firework Maker's Daughter is set in Java, Indonesia.

Making spreadsheets and graphs on Google sheets with our own data

The Stone Age

Our new topic is starting now. Check the knowledge organiser for this topic to see some of the things we will be finding out about.

Our trip to Woodland Adventures

Cave Art

We experienced what some of the difficulties of cave art may have been. We climbed under the tables and drew our pictures on the underside with only the dim orange glow of a flame (a torch with orange tissue paper attached to it) to help.