Drew has been looking carefully about World Cup teams, particularly the life expectancy (how old you can expect to live to). He has discovered that African nationals have a much lower average life expectancy.

For example,

In the Ivory Coast, you could expect to live to 48, Nigeria 47 and South Africa 49.

He now wants to know why this is!?

Success card stamps to anyone who can complete a facts page or poster explains why life expectancy is different around the world.

Good luck

Today we prepared and presented our Fairtrade presentations based on the point of views suggested in the Fairtrade post below.

It was very interesting to see how we worked together to produce our final presentation. Each group has a presentation creator, a researcher, a blogger and a motivator all with different roles to help achieve the end result. I was very impressed with how some groups used each role to support another and produce some high quality research. We ended up with:

3 power points, 2 iMovies and 2 piccollages. Some presentations were supported with additional posters as well.

It was an excellent way for us to share what we had found and to help us understand the concept of Fairtrade.

Well done everyone!

Here is a short video showing our afternoon's efforts:

Year 5 and 6 children celebrate with the winning cup after a tough battle for first place in the CNS High Five netball competition.

We have been working hard this morning completing our art for an upcoming, whole school, art exhibition.

Our art is based on Australian Aboriginal art and follows an under the water theme.

All of our work will be completed soon, framed and then displayed as part of the exhibition.

Here is a sneak preview:

Drew's effort is particularly effective. He has taken great care to follow the Aboriginal style. If he doesn't end up buying his own work, I'll be keen to snap it up for the classroom. Fantastic work Drew, see me for a success card stamp!

Thanks to the School Council, we were able to see and touch some interesting creatures. As you can see from our faces, we had an interesting (and sometimes scary) time.

A superb effort from Year 5 last week! Every single one of us achieved our weekly certificate from Mathletics including 7 silver!

Brilliant

Last week saw a fantasitc performance from the whole of Year 5. 31 of us achievled our Mathletics Bronze award for the week, and we also had one Silver award as well (for achieving 5 Bronze certificates)

Our combined score was 101,173 points which means we answered around 10,000 questions correctly last week, which is amazing! Our score saw us place 2nd in the UK and 10th in the whole world which we are all very proud of.

As part of this, Drew also featured in the daily charts for top pupil performances, finishing 2nd in the UK and 25th in the World!

I wonder how many certificates we can achieve this week. (I know some of you already have earned it in just one day! Wow!)

Congratulations to Drew for placing 95th in the UK for the points he earned on Mathletics in the last 24 hours (a full day).

Remember this is all of the children,in all of the schools in the UK, who have signed up to Mathletics.

A fantastic achievement Drew!

This week in numeracy, we have been using the popular iPad game 'Angry Birds' to help us revisit some of the mathematical concepts that we have found tricky in the past.
Through playing the game, we have looked at:

• Types of angles (Acute, Right & Obtuse).
• Probability / Chance words.
• Nets of 3D shapes
• Measuring angles.

Lesson 1
In our first lesson, we played Angry Birds and thought about the angles that we were using. We thought about which angles were best, to help us complete the level, and the chances we had at being successful for each angle type. This allowed us to revisit some of the language associated with chance and probability. We created posters in PicCollage to show what we had found out! (Some examples are shown below)

At the end of the lesson we revisited a QCA test question about probability and the language associated with it. Using the iPad app 'Socrative' we answered the questions again hoping to show improvement in our understanding.
Our Autumn Term QCA test results showed 30% of the class had been successful in answering the question correctly.
After our 'Angry Birds' lesson 70% of us were successful in answering the question correctly (90% answered 1 of the two questions correctly)

Lesson 2
In the following lesson, we created our own Angry Bird characters. Using the nets of 3D shapes, we carefully assembled our characters. We then created a poster for display, showing which nets turned into which shapes. Hopefully this will help us to recognise nets of shapes in the future and to understand what they are.

Our 3D Angry Bird shapes!

Lesson 3
In our third Angry Birds lesson, we sketched our own level designs. We then photographed our levels as well as the characters that we created in Lesson 2. Using PicCollage we were able to crop our characters (cutting away the unwanted part from their photo) and add them to our levels. Finally we were able to add the angle that we thought the birds should be fired at to have the best chance of completing our level.
We will be able to use a protractor (angle measurer) to measure these angles in the next lesson.

Lesson 4
In our final session, we measured the angles we had suggested on our own Angry Bird level designs. We used a protractor (angle measurer) to carefull measure the angle in degrees. We moved around the classroom trying to measure as many angles as we could. It was fun seeing all of the different level designs but getting to practice our skills in numeracy as well.

References:
For more fantastic ideas, many which have
been used here, check out these other excellent blog posts:

http://mrparkinsonict.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/using-popular-ipad-games-as-stimulus-in.html?m=1

"In our writing today, we have been using an up-levelling sheet to assess our own writing, giving our work a score. We have been looking at our sentences and thinking about how can improve them.
Here are just a few of the super sentences that have appeared in our books today.


"When, I went to the fabulous, amazing, theme park it was fabulous. However, it was lunchtime so we went to a burger place it was scrumptious in fact it was so nice it watered in my mouth. Whereas, I didn’t think the chips were nice" (Roan)

"Behind the candy shops gates, It smelt lovely. I could feel my tongue melting and different smells of amazing candy at the Candy Shop. My Mum told me "I shouldn't have any candy" therefore I didn't take any sweets. Instead of getting sweets I just watched. Anyway, I saw that peoples favourite sweets were lollies moreover bom boms" (Hannah)

"Deep inside the park, the romantic heart-shaped maze was beatiful and creative however, even though it was a hard decision, I didn't try to get through" (Tamzin)

"The amazing burger watered in my mouth however my brother did not like it! Would you like it? (Kieran)

"In front of the Scary Cyclops ride, the brillaint, fast, amazing rollercoaster clattered and clunked over my head. Therefore, I decided to ride it!" (Alicia)

"Another thing, when the mouth watering, lovely, warm chips passed by me I asked my Mam "Could we get some of them chips?" My Mam answered "yes however only if you eat them all!" When I got them, they were delicious. (Drew)

"In front of the dragon house, the unusually, huge, scary, fantastic rollercoaster roared like an alpah lion!" (Brett)

Our sentence score sheet:
(adapted from the fantastic ideas at http://mrparkinsonict.blogspot.co.uk/)

Yesterday, we worked hard to produce posters to remind us of our virtual visit to a theme park. (We used 'PicCollage' to to combine screen grabs of our park and text describing what it was like).

Today's job (22.10.13) was to create an advert suitable for tlevison advertising the park and all of its exciting features. Some of us chose to produce happy or feel good adverts, others chose to promote the scrarier and more thrilling parts of the park.

At first we collected images from the internet using 'Safari'. Then we captured photos and videos of ourselves role playing our theme park experience before editing some pictures using 'PicCollage' (we had great fun adding our own faces to the action shots). Finally, we used 'iMove' to create our final adverts ready to share.

Below are links to some example of our adverts.
http://5tanfieldlea.weebly.com/1/post/2013/10/drew-theme-park-trailer.html
http://5tanfieldlea.weebly.com/1/post/2013/10/rebecca-theme-park-trailer.html
http://5tanfieldlea.weebly.com/1/post/2013/10/jamiet-theme-park-trailer.html#comments
http://5tanfieldlea.weebly.com/1/post/2013/10/kieran-theme-park-trailer.html#comments

You can find many more by selecting a pupil name or scrolling though the blog.

We have been learning how to read grid references in our topic work recently. This week, we decided to put our skills to the test by taking a walk around the local area. Equipped with an OS Map and a handful of 6-figure grid references we set off on our quest to find out exactly what was at our referenced points. Working in small groups, we were successful and, as you can see from some of the photographs, had a great time in the process.
Do you think our map skills could help us in numeracy? And if so, how?

Use this fantastic song, performed by Year 5, to help you remember what mean, mode, median and range are.

Thankyou to Mrs Ovington for the suggestion.

X-Factor here we come!

This week we were writing an extra diary entry for Laura based on our knowledge of the events in 'The Wreck of the Zanzibar'.

Check out these 'super sentences' from this week's Big Writing!.

Can you spot why I like them so much?

As part of literacy this week, we have been preparing storm poems based on 'The Wreck of the Zanzibar'. There have been a lot of fantastic ideas in our writing including similes, metaphors and alliteration. Below is an example poem using only the ideas from Year 5's work!

We have been working hard developing grid method for multiplication this week.

In this post Drew and Rachel explain how we can use grid method for multiplying a 3 digit number by a decimal.