Year 4: Wingardium Leviosa!

Witches and wizards entered school full of excitement on Monday and were immediately sorted into their houses by the Sorting Hat and given their official wizard names. Hedwig had delivered letters from Dumbledore asking the children to create Mandrake Silencers for the Herbology Department at Hogwarts.

The children got straight to work with their STEM partners, creating designs for structures, using 3D shape nets to make prototypes and identifying the best soundproofing materials. 

As well as this Year 4 took part in the whole school "Curly Wurly" Science investigation, they made predictions and recorded their results in a table and on a bar graph! Can you believe the winning team stretched their curly wurly an impressive 2.10 metres!

Thank you to Mark Warland, one of our parent STEM ambassadors, who visited us at Hogwarts this week to teach us about Space! You really inspired us all!

We can't wait to see what is in store in Week 2!

We had a fantastic time engaging in STEM fortnight as a whole school. From making boats, a visit from a Pirate Ship Captain to exploring electro-magnetics by creating Star Wars gloves, each class had a brilliant time engaging with their class topic. 

We were also lucky enough to have some fantastic visitors in school from Technology Tom to Adam Shore, a scientist from Kielder Observatory who came and carried out interactive workshops with each class.

Some of our parents who work in STEM based fields, were kind enough to come in and share with us information about their jobs and how they relate to STEM. We were so inspired when finding out about all of the different working sectors within the STEM area. We thank you all so much for giving up your time to come and inspire us all.

The children were energised and inspired by the two weeks of fun, learning and challenges resulting in some fantastic pupil voice feedback. We will be taking this on board for the future of Science at Corbridge First and also how we set up STEM activities in the future.

Thank you to all of our visitors for your enthusiasm and knowledge. 

Nursery

 

In Nursery we explored how we could help the Gingerbread Man escape from the sly fox after deciding that we did not like the ending to the traditional tale we read. After a lot of discussion, from bridges to sticky webs that could shoot out of the Gingerbread Man's wrists, the final decision was to create a boat for him to cross the river safely in. 

We looked at a range of different boats, from ferries to canoes to speedboats to see which would be the best design for the Gingerbread Man to use. 

We then had to decide what materials we needed to construct our boats. We explored many materials to see if they were waterproof, strong and could float. Each of these three properties were explored through mini- investigations and the winning materials were used in our constructions. 

Once we had made our boats, we invited our families in to watch us launch our boats for their maiden voyages- it was so exciting to see them in action!

 

Our STEM visitor was Rachel Mitchell who got us all excited when she came in to share with us her job in ecology and conservation- especially when she brought out the animal poo!!

We were so excited to find out about the many different animals which live around us, we have decided that we would like to have a bat box placed on the school grounds to create a safe house for them to live in. 

Thank you for inspiring us and giving up your time. 

Year 3

 

Year 3 had the theme Star wars for their STEM project and we answered the question ‘Is the force with you?’

They created their own electromagnetic gloves -  designing their glove, sewing it together and attaching their electromagnet. We then carried out a range of investigations to move magnetic objects with our glove - also discovering how to make them stronger.

In Year 2, we looked at the STEM problem; How can you move a car without touching it? Using this problem as a stimulus, we experimented with using wind, magnets and even rubber bands to move a car. Some methods were more successful than others, but we always remembered the important message; Try and when it fails, try it another way.

We were delighted to welcome Technology Tom into our classroom, and he taught us about wind resistance and how that can be a big help and a detriment when moving a car. We created our own cars using foam and a sail then experimented using a fan, straws and even our own breath to move them.  We also welcomed a STEM ambassador into a classroom, who taught us all about our bodies and give us a peek into the day-to-day life of a GP. It was fascinating learning about how important this profession is in our community while also looking at how STEM is so vital in that field. 

We ended our exciting fortnight by inviting families into the school. We taught them some of the ways to answer our STEM problem and finally had a big toy car race.