We started our new topic From Bean to Bar by looking at this picture-

We talked about who these creatures are and where do they come from? We talked about Roald Dahl  creating the original characters and the film makers of the original and new film reading the descriptions and using their own imaginations to decide what the creatures would look like, how they would move and speak. 

Mrs. Hunter set us a challenge-

In small groups can you create a world for an Oompa Lumpa? They live with Willy Wonka in his factory but where did they come from? What would grow on the trees there? Is it a hot or cold place? Is it an island?  What would their houses look like? It could be a picture, a 2D model or a 3D model. You can use craft materials, draw your ideas or use recycled materials?

We had a discussion about the people who played the Oompa Loompas in the original film. We talked about them having dwarfism a condition they were born with and the children are keen to explore this further. We will talk about this in philosophy sessions. 

We used our Oompa Loompa worlds to inspire us to create our own stories. Some were new versions of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and some children have created their very own stories.

We have found out about the characters in the story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and have created our own character wheels.

Every week we are going to work with Mr. Fowles on an exciting Science experiment or investigation. This week we have use Alum to make a crystal seed. We have hung it on a string in the liquid Alum and we are waiting patiently for it to grow.

We enjoyed working with Mrs. Grey on Friday. We had to estimate how many M and M's were in a bag. We then created a tally chart of how many different coloured M and M's were in the bag. We used the information in the tally chart to create our own bar charts. We are learning how to read information in charts and graphs and how to create our own.

We had some super ideas related to our philosophy question this week-
What would happen if money was replaced with M and M's? What are your ideas related to this question?

We have developed our sketching and painting skills drawing the characters from Charlie and the Chocolate factory in the style of Quentin Blake.

Mrs. Hunter set us a challenge in Maths today.
You have 36 chocolates how could you arrange them in a box?
What shaped boxes would you need? Here are some of our workings out. Mrs. Hunter was very impressed with us as we we used pictures and diagrams to show the layouts of the chocolates. We used our knowledge of sharing to divide and our times table knowledge and the array method to multiply. Some of us even worked out how we could have double, triple and even four layers of chocolates in a box using 36 chocolates.

Harry Ryan created a triangle layout starting with 1 chocolate on the top row and 11 chocolates on the bottom row. He knew that the numbers he had used were all odd numbers.

Holly used rows of 8 chocolates in an array and realised that it would not work she did not give up and worked out that she could move the row of 4 left over chocolates up the side to create an array-
9 x 4 =36

Elva created a step shape using rows of 3.We evaluated our learning using DR ICE. Deep thinking, role modelling, impact, challenge and engagement. Looking back at the activity and thinking it through helps us to see what we have learnt and what we could work on next time we have a similar challenge.

It is World Book Day! We came to school dressed as our favorite book characters- look how amazing we look.

We created our own character descriptions of the character we came to school dressed as and presented it on a collage of the character.
We have decorated our classroom door as Willy Wonkas Factory.

We came back from lunch and found that our carpet was a real mess. We decide it was a crime scene and began to write down notes and collect the evidence.

We all wrote an official Police report. We had to write down the facts about what we could see. We did not talk about who we thought it might be until the day after. We had lots of ideas, Miss Bates because she has been learning about China and has dragon in her roon so the scales might be hers. Skippy the Dragon who visited us during our Castles and Dragons topic. We  also thought it could be one of the Roald Dahl characters we  have been reading about- Willy Wonka, Matilda, Angelica Sprocket. We thought long and hard and then we came to the conclusion the it must have been The Enormous Crocodile. We checked the clues and it all made sense- he was looking for children to eat!!! We made WANTED posters to tell people what he had done to our classroom and to warn them that he eats children.

Look at the amazing ways children have presented the facts they have found about chocolate for their homework.

Elva has made her own mini sweets out of play dough and molds. They look fantastic. Are they for the Oompa Loompa's?

We have been learning all about how to show information in charts. We all had to think what our favourite chocolate bar was and draw it on a small square piece of paper. We learnt how to show this information in a bar chart.

We were all then given an segment of a circle. We used a key to colour it in the correct colour to show our favourite chocolate bar. We have learnt that pie charts can also show you information. It was interesting to find out that the most popular chocolate bar in Year 2 is Galaxy. What is your favourite?

In Science we are learning about Plants and Animals. We have used the TASC wheel to think about what we already know, what we want to find out and how we will do it. We have been on a walk of the school grounds to identify different plants. We have chosen a plant to grow ourselves and have written instructions to tell  other people how to plant them.

This week we have noticed frogs in our pond and on Tuesday frogspawn was viable. By Thursday the pond was full of frogs and we could hear them all croaking at each other. Have a look when you are next at school.

On World Book Day Amelia came to school dressed as Angelica Sproket from Roald Dahls story- Angelica Sprokets Pocket. Mrs. Hunter and most of the class had never read this story so Amelia brought it in to share with us. We enjoyed the story and thought of lots of things that rhymed to go in her pockets. We also noticed that in one part of the story there was a long list and Roald Dahl had not used commas (that is because he was such a good writer he could bend the rules)
We wrote our own versions of the story using commas in a list and created a beautiful display using Amelia's dressing up costume.

We have started  a new Science topic all about plants. We have enjoyed looking at different types of plants in our school grounds and create a map to show trees, evergreen trees and bushes and new plants growing from seeds and bulbs. We have planted our own seeds in pots in the classroom and could choose from different types of flowers and vegetables. We are watering them daily and are waiting for the seedlings to grow. We wrote our own instructions to tell people how to plant a seed.

KS1 are having a Sunflower competition to see who can grow the largest sunflower. We need to think about where to put our sunflower so it grows from a seed into a seedling. The seedlings have now formed and we are transferring each of them into their own pot so their roots can spread. We are hoping to grow ours bigger that Miss. Challinor's and Miss. Bate's class sunflowers. We have used the internet to find out about the life cycle of a sunflower and have presented it in different ways to show other children can learn from us. Some of us used Pic Collage, 2 simple on the net books and others drew their own pictures.

We have used the TASC wheel to help us to design our own chocolates and the packaging that they come in. We have learn't about 3D shapes,  their properties and what their net would look like to create the packaging for our Chocolate bars.

Thank you to Isabel who has brought in a Chocolate Fondue set for us to use. We enjoyed melting the chocolate with the candle, dipping our marshmallows into the melted chocolate and eating it alongside a piece of chocolate. We were in our own chocolate world.

To finish our Chocolate topic we had a special visitor called Oliver who is a Chocolatier. His dad has a real chocolate shop and makes all his own chocolate.
He brought in a real Cocoa pod for us to see and real cocoa  seeds. We learnt about how the seeds are  ground down into coco butter and coco solids, they then mix this into milk to make chocolate. White chocolate does not have coco solid in it and dark chocolate has coco solid but no milk. Milk chocolate has coco butter, coco solid and milk in it.
We also learnt about tempering chocolate. This is the most important part of  the process in shaping chocolate. You can not get it too hot or the chocolate will burn. We need to heat it enough so the butter in the chocolate melts and the chocolate is shiny.

Our new topic is The Big Freeze! We started our new topic going on our own expedition to Antarctic. We came to school in warm wooly jumpers and we found a rucksack on our carpet. We found lots of different things in the rucksack and had some brilliant ideas as to whom the rucksack belonged to.

We decided that the rucksack belonged to an explorer. We wrote a diary entry as if we were explorers in Antarctica. On our expedition we met an emperor penguin who needed our help to build him an igloo. We all helped to make an igloo out of ice cubes but we had more fun making them out of marshmallows. We worked in teams- one person was the engineer, one was the builder and one was was the architect- it was difficult getting the marshmallows stacked and working out what shape the roof needed to be. The slope on the marshmallows helped us to keep the roof in place. We talked about how penguins keep warm compared to how humans keep warm and decided to write instructions- How to make hot chocolate whilst on an expedition?  We had to remember we have no electricity. At the end of our expedition we made hot chocolate and ate our marshmallow igloos. We are very excited to start our new topic.

We have also been finding out  who lives in Antarctica, what the weather is like and what countries and oceans we need to cross to get there. We have written our own non-fiction booklets about the animals that live in Antarctica- they are full of facts and have fantastic illustrations in them.

Learning about The Titanic has been very interesting especially finding out how an iceberg caused the unsinkable ship to sink. We have found out about the class system, how the ship was designed and what it would have been like to sail on the ship. We have taken part in lots of different activites to help us to develop our thinking using the hats to help us to find out facts, talk about how we feel, explore possibilities and develop our ideas and think if and why something will or won't work and why. We have sketched pictures of the Titanic, make 3D models and created a whole class picture using different media.

We also had a challenge to answer this question- How could we save the lives of 500 more passengers who sailed on the Titanic? We spent a full day on this enquiry. We use the sharing method to work out. We did lots of problem solving- If 800 people fit in 16 lifeboats how many lifeboats would you need for 500 people? Children showed their working out in different ways with lots of children choosing to use the sharing method. We have decided to make our own model life boats and have design four different ones. Everyone will now choose the life boat they would like to make.

In science we have been looking at change. We had to find a solution to the question- How can you get polar bears out of the ice quickly? (We also found out that polar bears do not live in Antarctica) We found out lots of information sharing ideas from each other as well as looking on the internet. We used the TASC wheel to help us to plan our own investigation staring with what we already know and moving onto predicting and testing out our ideas. We have found out that we would use heat to melt the ice the quickest. This started a good discussion about how we would get heat to Antarctica. We then thought that salt would be  easier to get there and this did help the ice to melt quickly.

Harrison has made Antarctica with his dad. Look at the detail he has used and the labels about all the animals that live there. 

Holly and Elva showed us their penguin dance and we all joined in. Some boys came to ask if they could do a street dance for homework instead of a penguin dance. It was very cool and they had some fantastic moves- watch out Diversity!

Isabel Fahy has built her own Titanic ship out of lego. She has worked very hard to choose the correct size and shaped pieces of lego to create the curves and edges of the ship. She has also made her own iceberg.

Adam has built his Titanic ship out of card. He has worked very hard to create the shape, adding extra boxes for levels and tubes for funnels . He has painted to add colour.

Holly Hopwood's grandma has been very busy making Holly a fantastic costume so she can pretend to be a  First class lady on board the Titanic. She had a beautiful dress, scarf, flowers for her hair, a bag with a mirror in it and a fan. She looked amazing. Holly also researched what life was like for First class passengers on board the ship. 

Mrs Andrew has worked on a fantastic art project over the last half term with the children. The class was split into small groups and each group created a section of the Titanic picture using different medium- pastels, paint, collage, charcoal etc  It looks brilliant in the cloakroom of our classroom. 

We have written some fantastic newspaper report about the disaster and we have displayed them in our classroom on our Titanic display. We have also drawn some super sketches of the Titanic, they look amazing.

We are enjoying our philosophy sessions and are really following the rules to enable us all to feel a part of the discussion, respecting each others ideas even though they may be different than our own and also learning that our ideas may change as we listen to different peoples explanations.

We have had some good debates about- What love is? and- Whose fault was it that the Titanic sank? 

We have put our ideas about what love is on our thinking tree.