Tuesday 31 March 2015

Pictures of cubes 1

We've been looking at shapes made up of cubes this week. Here's a little of what 4G have been doing.
We've been drawing shapes we've made on triangle paper, then imagining some more. And we've made some six-cube shapes in red, yellow and blue too.
 
We used this drawing tool to do the same kind of thing online (but this time it gave us other views too.)
Here's the other ones we made:

Urban Landscapes - L S Lowry

L. S. Lowry (Laurence Stephen Lowry) was an English artist born in Lancashire, in the North-West of England.

Many of his drawings and paintings depict Pendlebury, the place where he lived and worked for more than 40 years.
Lowry is famous for painting scenes of life in industrial cities in the mid-20th century.

He developed a distinctive style of painting and is best known for his urban landscapes that show simple human figures - often referred to as "matchstick men" due to the way he painted them.

We looked at some of Lowry's paintings and chose one to copy.

We had already looked at drawing cubes and cuboids in Maths and we had to think about 'perspective' to give our pictures the feeling of depth and that some buildings were further away than others. This was quite tricky, but we tried hard and we have created some lovely work.



Some of us even had time to be inspired and sketch and paint our own urban landscapes in the style of L.S. Lowry!

Easter activity with DST

Today we had an enjoyable time making Easter cards with DST.


Here are some photos of us at work together:

Thursday 26 March 2015

Pick any number. We can make that number with four square numbers.

We've been carrying on our work investigating numbers. As we mentioned, Pierre Fermat had said that any number can be made by adding four square numbers.
We picked numbers and tried it out.

 We've made a big display of this in EC1:
Can you fill any of the gaps?

David Walliams

David Walliams is one of my favorite authors and right now I am reading Demon Dentist.
David Walliams has a website click Here to go there. Have fun!!

Maths Sites

Here are some maths sites I use at home to learn
Maths playground


this site is very interesting
Hit the Button

this site is very good and you can learn a lot
Snappy Maths

this is very mathy

Wednesday 25 March 2015

Harmony

Today in our music lesson we talked about when there are two melodies at the same time.
The two melodies make something new: harmony! 

(Is there now just one new thing, or two still, or are there three things in the music?)

We worked on two songs that have several parts. First of all Building, that the choir sung to us a few weeks ago:

Then we went back to the Baka round we learnt from Su Hart:

We still know how to do it! Yay!

And to round off, what wonderful leading in our Baka call-and-response:

Lentils of Spring

This is the thing I do to celebrate Spring.
Its some thing that Arabic people do, you can do it yourself if you have these things:

  • lentils
  • soup plate
  • water

First put the lentils into the soup plate without fill in it.
Next put some water until the plate is covered (make sure the water is blended with the lentils so that it looks like the lentils are filling the plate).
Now wait to see that the lentils grow as much as 16 cm high in just 9 or 8 days!

This is what the lentils look like at my house.
They are magnificent I wish I could keep them but since I am moving house I cannot.



  


Tuesday 24 March 2015

Monday 23 March 2015

Voices in the Park: 2nd Voice

We're reading Anthony Browne's picture book Voices in the Park. Today we focused especially on the 2nd Voice.

We looked at the change between these two pictures. They've been to the park and Smudge has cheered dad up a lot:



The changes are a metaphor for what has changed in dad's feelings. here we are talking about what we noticed in 4G:


We wrote some sentences about the change too:

AlonsoDad had felt bored, but now he was cheerful.Windows had been grey but changed shape after and turned colourful.
GabrielleDad had felt awful, but smuge made him happy.
NoemieDad had been sad; now he was joyful.What had been damage; was now a beautiful place.
AlyaDad felt jobless and grumpy, but Smuge made him cheerfull.
RodrigoAt first dad felt bored, now he was the happiest gorila in the
world.
What had been two sad paintings were now alive.
MarieDad had felt miserable but now he was enjoying things.The trees had been dead but now they were alive and beautiful. The pictures had been sad, but on the way home they were dancing.
Aditi Dad had felt dull, but now he was very cheerfulAt first he had been dim and now he was happy. At first the trees were bending and now the trees were twinkling
JamesDad had felt dreadful; now dad felt like superman.
GraciaDad had been feeling pathetic and jobless, but now he was joyful  and energetic
 What had been two sad pictures are now two happy people
CristinaHe had been unable to forget his sadness, but now he was feeling powerful.The dead trees were now with lanterns and the sad paintings were in love, all because of Smudge.
LuciaDad had felt bored, but now he was feeling fineThe trees had been dead, but now they had lanterns.
Samyak He had felt bored, but now he cheered up a lot.The lamppost was a local thing then it turned into a great big flower when he felt happy and all the trees were brighter than usual.The Mona Lisa was a statue then it started to dance.
NoahAt first he had been very bored and dull  but now he felt over the moon, all cheerfull.The streets had been dusty and the trees had been all dead with no leaves, but now the streets were clean and the trees are blossoming.
HollyDad had been grumpy, but now he'd cheered up lots.Dad had been gloomy, but now, Smudge cheered him up by talking to him, and also, the suroundings had gone from sad and gloomy, to happy and cheerful.
AnabelDad had felt pathetic;now he was energetic.But now what was a dying tree was now a tree with christmas lights all around.

Did you notice any more changes?

My escape from the landslide in the Pyrenees!

This weekend we were on the Airbus SLAT bus on the way to the Baqueira Ski resort (in the midi Pyrenees just over the border into Spain) when we found the road was blocked due to a landslide! The bus stopped and a lot of people got off to look.  We took a photo.
Then another landslide happened!   It was quite scary.  The bus we were on had to reverse to find a place to turn as the road was so narrow.
It was quite exciting and scary for the children (and for some of the adults too)!

Sunday 22 March 2015

MANATEES


In Florida,where I have lived 5 years, there are many Manatees. Manatees are herbivore Mammals and live in warm waters  ( lakes and rivers).
In the ancient times most people confused them
with sirens. It was  because of their tails  and  the fact that they got close to the ships.
The sad thing about Manatees is that they are endangered animals. One reason is that when the water is cold they die. Another reason is that the blades of the motor boat can kill them when they pass by.
When I was little I once touch them!!!!.

Saturday 21 March 2015

Our fruit juice cartons

Our tropical fruit juice boxes are finished now. What brilliant creations!

Friday 20 March 2015

We'll give you any number with just four squares

Pierre Fermat, who lived in Toulouse, wrote in 1638 that any number can be made by any one of these ways:


1. Add three triangle numbers.

These are the triangle numbers:
2. Add four square numbers.
These are the square numbers
49   36   25   16   9   4   1   0
3. Add five pentagonal numbers.
 These are the pentagonal numbers:
 4. Add six hexagonal numbers.
These are the hexagonal numbers:


We had a go at the easiest one: making lots of numbers with four square numbers. We all picked a number, and then thought hard about which combination of squares would make it (Zero is a square number too.)

The Eclipse

Today there was a partial eclipse. At first we watched it on a live feed from the Pic de Midi in the Pyrenees.
It looked like it was going to be too cloudy to see anything here at IST. Then, just after 11, there was a small break in the clouds. We had a look at the images made by a colander.
 
Do you see? There are lots of crescent shapes!
We were happy that we'd seen it!
In 4G we videoed each other (the sound was a bit quiet) talking about the diagrams of the eclipse that we'd made: