The Planet Suite

We have started composing our own planet music. We listened to some music from the Planet Suite by Holst thinking about what instruments the composer used and for what effect.

Next we began to plan our own music. First we thought about what instruments we would use to create the sounds that we wanted to make. we have also started to write our music down using simple notation.

Planet Artwork

We have been busy researching the planets in our solar system. We decided which planet we wanted to research and then got googling! We found out a number of facts such as what our planets look like and are made of, their temperature and their distance from Earth and the Sun.

We used our research to produce a pieces of artwork.

Alanah and Lucie work on producing Saturn


Luke working on his


Callum painted the Earth

Chloe's blue hand after smudging and blending

Planet Saturn

Crazy Rotations

This afternoon we learnt about how day and night are made. We learnt that the Earth rotates on its axis once every 24 hours. When our part of the Earth is facing towards the Sun we have day and when we face away we have night.

We worked with a partner to demonstrate this - one of us was the Sun and one of us was the Earth. We used scientific vocabulary in our explanation. It was quite tricky stuff!

Have a look at this animation:

http://www.onr.navy.mil/focus/spacesciences/observingsky/motion1.htm

The Earth and Beyond

It is science week in Formula Base and our topic is The Earth and Beyond. We are finding out lots of interesting facts about the place of Earth in our solar system. For example today we found out that the Earth is 150,000,000 km from the Sun.

To get some perspective of this distance we made a scale drawing of the sun and then using a scale of 150m = 1,000,000km we used a trundle wheel to measure how far the Sun would be from Earth (Mrs Thornton was the Earth spinning on its axis!). The field measured 50m so we worked out that if we walked down the field three times this would be 150m and would represent the distance of the Earth to the Sun.

We thought that 150m might be approximately the distance to Tesco from school so if you multiply that by 1 million that is how far it is to the Sun! Wow!

Pantomime Time!

As part of our literacy work we have been learning about stories from other cultures. We have been reading One Thousand and One Arabian Nights by Geraldine McCaughrean. In this book Shahrazad tells King Sharhryar a story every night to postpone her execution. It includes stories like Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba. As many of theses stories are often reproduced as pantomimes we thought we would write our own.

We decided what we thought the features of pantomimes are and drew up a list. We used this list to write our pantomimes, always checking that we were including all the features.

As we got more excited about our work we decided to act them out. This actually helped with our writing and we began to edit and improve our work as we went along.

When we performed our pantomimes to the class there was lots of booing and hissing to be heard!