This morning we took part in a stay safe workshop that School Council had organised. We started off the morning by thinking about places outside that are safe and unsafe. We know if we are allowed out with our friends that we must stay in safe places such as busy parks, shops or friends houses. We should avoid quiet parks, forests and shouldn’t go out at night on our own.

After this we discussed what we should do if we are approached by a stranger who asked us for help. We know we should say ‘Don’t ask us, ask an adult’. We used role play to reinforce this idea. Lots of us would say ‘We can’t help, our parents are waiting for us.’

After this we talked about what to do if we are approached out and about by an adult that is familiar to us. We know that we cannot get a lift in their car without permission from our parents. Again, we used role play to act out different scenarios.

Next we learnt what we should do if a stranger tries to take us. We should Yell, Run and Tell a reliable adult such as parents, family members, teachers, the police or or other emergency services. We tried shouting as loudly as we could to attract attention.

Our final session was about how to keep safe online. We know that when using online games we should be wary about any chat rooms. Our parents should always give us permission to play these games. If we are unsure of anything we should zip it, block it and flag it. Zip it means do not share personal details online, block it means using the block tool on the game or walking away and not playing if we feel unsure, flag it means tell an adult. We should never meet somebody that we have talked to online. We listened to a story to understand this.

We have a parent workshop about internet safety run by the NSPCC on Monday 6th February at 7pm. Please contact Mrs Hobbs for more details.

Using Kodu, we have designed and created our own worlds. We could choose our terrain, add mountains or ponds, include trees, rocks and pathways.

We will add to these over the next week, programming our own games.

Today in English we read an extract from Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson. After understanding the text, we were challenged to answer some questions using quotes to back up our answers. We found this tricky and this is an area to work on. We must remember to keep reading books with an adult at home and discuss the text with them.

Our maps of South America were painted this afternoon and we plan to add detail next week.

We have started to explore persuasive writing, learning a model text and identifying persuasive devices. These include persuasive language, repetition, rhetorical questions and statistics. Today we worked hard in small groups to recite the text using a textbook map.

We tried our hands at fatastic basket ball.We found it really exciting and we weren’t too bad either! All of us got the hang of it after a while. Willow class hope to do it in the future because we only got to do it today.

#basket ball rocks.

This afternoon we had our second session with premier sports. This time we tried our hand at pop lacrosse. To start with we learnt some of the basic skills, progressing to catching and throwing with our sticks. At the end of the lesson we played mini games and started to understand some of the rules. We all absolutely loved this new game!

Recently in maths we have been learning about ratio and proportion. At the beginning of the week this led us onto a lesson about scale drawing. One of the parents kindly sent in some scaled drawings of plans that he had produced as part of his job as an architect.

In PE we have been inproving are hockey skills. Everyone learnt how to push pass. We used cones to make small goals to help us pass accurately. Then we went into small groups and played a game of piggy in the middle.

Today in art we covered our map of South America, which we had made a week before out of newspaper, with mod rock. It is the same material as  doctors use for casts. We were in groups of two and three and really enjoyed making them.