Lots of dials!

After the brilliant creative dials we made at school, it was time to go for a dial hunt at home. Thanks everyone for the great drawings and photos of dials and scales of all kinds!

Can you tell what all of them measure?



If you see any more interesting ones, take a photo and send it to us, or draw a picture!

Ring of Fire

Thanks to everyone who came to our assembly today.

Here's our version of Ring of Fire (apologies to Johnny Cash):

Fire is a burning thing
And it makes a fiery ring
Bound by wild desire
I fell into a ring of fire

I fell into a burning ring of fire
I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns
The ring of fire
The ring of fire

The taste of lava isn’t sweet
When tectonic plates like ours meet
I fell for you like a child
Ohh, but the fire went wild

Thanks to Miss Ash for the camerawork!

Fizz Buzz

Playing Fizz Buzz on the pitch after assembly:

Our volcano paintings

The volcano paintings that we worked on are finished now, and we've shown them in assembly.

They are fantastic - really showing the explosive chaos of volcanoes!

Here they are.

From 4B:



 and from 4G:

Volcano synonyms

We've been using the thesauruses to find synonyms and near-synonyms:

Here we are creating our volcano synonym mobiles:

Volcano art

We've been working with Miss Whittaker on a number of techniques to use in painting a volcano. Here we are busy painting:

Weighing websites

Here are some websites to practice weighing and reading scales. Click on the picture to have a go at home.

Eruption!

Our volcano had been oozing red-hot lava:

Watch the video!

Today it really erupted!



Here are some of the pictures:

Weighing

We've been busy weighing pebbles today!

We measured with different scales, to be really sure.

Unusual dials, meters and gauges

We had a look at various dials and meters.

and considered how we would measure things that are not usually measured. A meter for how funny something is:

We asked, what would the very first mark on the dial mean? What units would you use to measure how funny something is?

A gauge for cleverness:

 A dial for the level of friendship:

Here are our meters and dials. We took time to think about what each division means. What would the very first mark mean?

The dials sometimes seem to suggest that you can have too much of a good thing.

Wishing is fine until you get up to about 360 fairies; above that level it becomes dangerous!

Don't get bitten - the scale of the bite might shock you!

How intelligent are you?  Take the test using this scale.

Beware of homework - this scale gives you fair warning.
 

Multiples of three, multiples of five

These last two week's we've been looking at patterns in the multiples of three. We spotted quite a few in this hundred square:

Rose and Holly spotted how the numbers in any one diagonal (almost) all have the same total if you add up the digits. Alya spotted that the number of coloured squares in the diagonals are in a pattern.

We have a hundred square in our playground too. Here's 4G being the three and five times table:

We've been playing a game called Fizz Buzz!

Just the three times table is Fizz:

Add in the five times table and you've got Fizz Buzz:

Have you tried playing it at home? How did it go?

Taking a line for a walk

The art work we were working on is up on the wall! It looks great!
Have a look at our "taking a line for a walk" pictures here:

James Hutton

We watched the first seven minutes of this video in class.



Up to James Hutton's time, everyone thought the Earth was just a few thousand years old. James Hutton looked at lots of patterns in the rocks where he lived in Scotland. He observed them closely, drew pictures of them, and thought about them.

He noticed how the rock wasn't just in lots of layers, but sometimes the layers were broken by other rock coming through from volcanoes. This made him wonder if deep down in the Earth it is really hot. 

He saw this on Arthur's Seat, Edinburgh - basalt from a volcano, wrapped round other layers of rock:

And he came to realise that the Earth would need to be not thousands, but millions of years old for there to be enough time for all this to happen!

What is a volcano?

The two classes got together to come up with questions about volcanoes:

You might see them better on the MindMup app:

Volcanoes on MindMup

After that we worked in pairs to come up with some kind of definition.
Here are some of 4G's:


In 4B we worked on a definition together:

A volcano is a mountain that erupts spitting out scorching lava.

Volcano Alert!

What would you grab if you were given no warning and only had two minutes to pack a bag? In Year 4 we did just that! We asked parents to surprise their children with the instruction that they had to evacuate quickly and that they didn't know when they would be returning home. Without parental help, the children made their choices about what they would take with them, with some surprising and not-so-surprising results! Here we are showing our partner just what was in our bag:

 





Here is a closer look at the contents of some of our bags:

We had a lot of fun sharing this experience with each other.