Egg incubator

EARLY YEARS

We have had an interesting week talking about the coming Spring and looking for signs such as birds, butterflies, insects, blossom and flowers. We learnt about where chicks come from and we are very excited about the egg incubator upstairs! We know that we have to take care of the eggs and keep them warm like a mother hen so that they will hatch chicks. During Springtime we see lots of different baby animals and we have been learning about them, too. In PSED we are learning about how to be healthy such as washing our hands, especially before eating. We are looking at healthy food that we can eat and we made a fruit salad in Cooking class. Everyone enjoyed chopping, peeling, mixing and eating too! We are asking children to think about kinds of fruit that they like and they can bring some for snack time too.

PRIMARY

This week we have started designing and making our games and toys with the materials we have collected over the last week. We were very focussed and surprisingly quiet as we worked in pairs making joins, holes and rules to games. The other highlight of the week has been the chick project, with 48 eggs in an incubator kept in the Year 3&4 classroom. We have to keep an eye on the temperature and the humidity level. We have started a new classbook, and we are now reading the first of the Harry Potter books together. In Topic we have been looking at naming and spotting different types of clouds, and this week we recorded 9mm of rainfall on Wednesday morning on our weather vane! We are preparing some weather forecasts from around the world ready for our next Project Presentation. In Literacy and Numeracy we have been carrying on with the same work started last week, writing diaries and stories in Literacy, and fractions and multiplication in Numeracy.

SECONDARY

English

On Monday we had a visit from a journalist, who came to talk to us about his profession and answer all the many and interesting questions the students had prepared for him. On Tuesday we had an in depth look at the four strands used to mark written work by the Cambridge board and how this can help us plan and check both fiction and non-fiction writing. We revised and planned our next magazine articles with this in mind, before going to the library. Regular reading of different types of texts is a sure way to bring improvements to our own writing.

MATHS

This week I have given back the exams and I have started new chapters: Level one is doing Number and calculation, learning about multiples, factors and starting with prime numbers; Level 2 is doing operations with fractions with same or different denominator; Level 3 is doing equations with one unknown.

With Geometry, Level 1 is learning about triangles: equilater, isosceles and scalene depending on how many sizes are equal. Level 2 is learning about Congruency and Level 3 is learning how to inscribe a square and a hexagon into a circle.

PHYSICS

This week we have done the exam of Chapter1 about Forces and Chapter 3. We have started to learn about the Seasons and why it is that the days get longer now and shorter in the Autumn. This is because the Earth rotation axis is tilted!

CHEMISTRY

This week we have finished the Chapter about alloys. After doing the dynamics of Expert Group and Home Group we have worked in pairs to sell a Bike Frame, simulating we were different companies. The properties of different alloys are a consequence of mixing different metals and in different percentages, it depends the use you want to give.

BIOLOGY

Friday we have done the exam of Biology related to Chapter 2 about Microorganims, useful or harmful, infectious diseases and Making Conclusions out of given Data: Table, Graph....

GEOGRAPHY

With meditation music in the background we started the class in a different manner, we all focused on our breathing for the 5 first minutes of the class and then, being more relaxed we continued with the present unit, maps. We saw the first existent aerial photograph, taken in 1860 over Boston. We compared this photo with a current photo of the city. It changed a lot! We also learned about maps with grids, and how to find grid references on a map.

HISTORY:

Referring to our previous class in Women’s International Day, each student presented in front of others the research and work they had done on a woman. Thereby, we got to know many things about important women in History: Christine de Pizan, Wangari Maathai, Anne Frank, Amelia Earhart, Frida Kahlo and Sojourner Truth.