Rufford Park Primary School

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Weekly Update-29/4/22

Posted: Apr 28, 2022 by: Mr Kyriacou (n.kyriacou) on: Beech Tree Blog

Hello everyone,

We've had another excellent week. This week we have continued our new science topic called Forces and Magnets. We have been focusing on friction, what it is, how it occurs, where it occurs and how it can be  really useful. We conducted an investigation to find out how much friction would occur between car tyres and the different materials that it was driving along. For this we used toy cars, a launching ramp, five different types of surfaces for the car to move along and we also used rulers to accurately measure the distance that the car had moved along each different surface. The children understood that if the car went further, that is because there was less friction being created and they also knew that the less distance the car travelled, that meant that more friction was being created between the tyres and the material it is moving along. We discussed how we would make sure it was a fair in order to produce accurate results. The children absolutely loved the practical investigation and it was fantastic to see that all the groups achieved incredibly similar results, which shows how accurately they conducted the investigation. We then discussed the features of those surfaces and how that contributed towards creating less or more friction. Here are some images of the children conducting their investigation.

We have also been continuing our work with decimals, focusing on dividing by 10 and 100 and converting decimals into fractions and vice versa. They've all been working extremely hard and we have done a lot of practise on place value grids to really help them understand which way the digits are moving, by how many places and most importantly, what those digits are now worth after they have moved.. It's been so lovely to see children becoming increasingly confident with this method and using it independently for their work. Here we have a member of the class doing 529 divided by 100 and showing the movement of the digits accurately.

We have continued our writing work around The Story of Tutankhamun by Patricia Cleveland-Peck. The children are absolutely loving it and it's great to see such enthusiasm, which then translates into some super written work, such as the non-chronological reports that we have been working on this week. We also had a lesson, which revolved around distinguishing between facts and opinions and the final part of the lesson revolved around the class deciding whether they thought Tutankhamun died due to illness, by accident or through murder. Once they decided which category they wanted to be a part of, they had to discuss why they thought that and argue their case to the rest of the class. It was an excellent discussion, and they shared some super opinions with each other. Nobody thought it was an accident, they thought it was either murder or illness.

That's all for now :)

Mr Kyriacou :)