Red Kites Class

Welcome to Red Kites' class page! 

Week beginning 13th March 2023

This week, year 5 were working on their Design and Technology unit for the term. They were given a design brief that asked them to protect our new vegetable patches by designing and creating a reflective plant protector to ward off any pesky creatures and keep them from eating our delicious produce. Before coming up with some design ideas, we had to carry out some market research which involved asking some of the keen gardeners around school some survey questions to make sure we were not only fulfilling the brief but also meeting the requirements of our customers. We had a great time designing our plant protectors and practising new skills such as sawing and then on Friday afternoon, we made our protectors! Whilst some of the stages of our make threw up some challenges, we all persevered and finished Friday with some fabulous animal-themed plant protectors ready to keep an eye on our vegetable patches!

10.3.23

Today in English, we have been learning about subordinating clauses. We firstly discussed what they needed to include a main clause and a subordinating conjunction linked to a subordinating clause. We then wrote out some sentences on puzzle pieces, each piece was a different part of the sentence. We then cut them out; this enabled us to see that when we move the subordinating clause around, the sentence still made sense, but we had to remember our comma, if the subordinating clause was at the beginning!

8.3.23

In English today, we found out that Liam and his friend Florida went to a car garage to test drive a Porche! Liam managed to convince the car salesman that he was old enough to drive a car, given his height, even though he didn’t have a license to show him! We went to visit our very own ‘Eynsham Primary School car garage’! We used our best adjectives to create the most ambitious expanded noun phrases about the cars.

02.03.23

It was World Book Day on Thursday! The Red Kites had an amazing day dressing up, buying books with their vouchers, reading with the Year 1s, sharing our favourite books and designing book vouchers. We also listened to Shymon read to us in Ukrainian, he was then clever enough to translate it back into English..Awesome! I am just so proud to have a class that love reading as much as me! 

27.02.23

Today in English, we have had our hook lesson into our new English text ‘Cosmo’! We were challenged to create our own Theme Park! We firstly looked at some promotion videos for different theme parks to give us ideas for ours. We had to label our theme park and give it a name. Here is my creation!

WC 30th January 

This week in Geography, we were learning about contour lines and what they represent. To illustrate this, we made models of hills using card and foam pads to demonstrate the equal elevation between each contour line. We also compared contour lines of a mountain in North America to the hill at Wytham Woods, noting how both the scale between the lines and the distance between them told us the difference between the two. The final models looked great and reminded us a little bit of Kandinsky's art that we've been studying too! 

WC 30th Jan '23

On Friday 27th January, Year 5 were very fortunate to be invited to the Sheldonian Theatre to see the Oxfordshire County Youth Orchestra (OCYO) perform. The orchestra played some classical pieces of music linked to our topic of Earth and Space including Gustav Holst's Jupiter, which was excellent. The children had a great time learning how to conduct, identifying the instruments in the orchestra and taking in the whole experience. 

W.C 23th Jan '23
We had a gross but exciting time in Science this week! We learnt all about the human digestive system and made our very own! Please ask your child all about the process.

W/C 16th Jan '23

Please see Year 5s brilliant Kandinsky exploration lesson. 

W/C 9th Jan '23

This week in Maths we have been looking at Perimeter. We have all found it very challenging! The first step was to find the missing length of the rectilinear shapes and that add up all the lengths. Today we used rectangles and large printed shapes to understand the concept in greater depth. 

W/C 5th Jan 23

On Friday, Year 5 spent some of the afternoon working on some art for our new topic displays. This term we will be studying ‘Earth and Space,’ so our task was to create some planets to display in our classrooms. To start with, we recapped our current knowledge of the planets in our Solar System, before using oil pastels to create some realistic looking planets. The children spent some time practising using the oil pastels before transferring their skills to the planet cut-outs. The planets for our display were also to scale and we were surprised by how small Earth was in comparison to some of the larger planets like Jupiter and Saturn! We were really impressed with Year 5s collaborative work on the planets, they look fantastic on our displays and we’ll be referring back to them and adding facts as we work through the term!

Nov'22: Today in English, we have been learning about how to be persuasive. To do this, we were set the task of creating a verbal tv advert of either ‘Why school uniform is unnecessary’ or ‘This is the best plastic cup ever!’. We created the advert in our groups, then all the groups came together on the stage, and we all performed our adverts. We had to decide on the winning group-who were the most persuasive. We decided that a persuasive advert would: change people’s opinions, have rhetorical questions, address the listener and be exciting. We will continue our persuasion tomorrow when we analyse a model text.

November '22

Over the last two weeks in Year 5, we have been working on our D&T unit for this term. Our design brief was to recreate a meal using food that was rationed during WW2. After carrying out some research, we decided to make Welsh Rarebit. Our main task to make this meal was to bake some bread that could be used as the base of the Welsh Rarebit. Before making our bread today, we spent some time last week practising the skill of kneading with some salt dough and writing out our chosen bread recipe so we knew which equipment and ingredients were needed. Today, we made and baked our bread before we recreated the Welsh Rarebit with a cheese sauce and some Worcester sauce. There were some mixed reviews of the final meal, but Miss Rayfield and Miss Cook were really impressed with our breadmaking skills overall and really enjoyed cooking with you all. 

November '22

Yesterday, the Year 5s had a fantastic day at Didcot Railway Centre. We were really impressed with everyone’s efforts with costumes, including some fab gas mask boxes and masks! At the centre, the children immersed themselves into tasks which gave them a sense of what it was like living during the war and being evacuated. They enjoyed helping divert trains on a model railway after bombings, working together to extinguish fires and making their evacuee tags and ID cards. Lots of children’s highlight was experiencing an Anderson shelter during a bombing like the Blitz. The sound effects and volunteers really helped the children to get a feel for what an air raid was like, they even had to crawl out of the tunnel after discovering the main exit had been blocked by rubble! After lunch, we had the opportunity to go on a steam train like evacuated children would have during the war. The guards alerted us to a ‘bomb on the line’ and the children were excellent at taking cover as was instructed. We all had a fabulous day and we were really proud of taking such a lovely bunch of Year 5s on the trip!

10/22 Rationing Tasting

In our history lessons this week, we were learning about the rationing of food that took place in WW2. In Thursday’s lesson, we got to try some of the foods that were either rationed or eaten as part of day-to-day diet during the war. We learnt how important food was to the war effort, and after reading some facts about each food (for example, we heard about one lady who got fined £45 for throwing her leftover bread to the birds instead of using it!) we got to have a taste! We tried milksop (bread soaked in milk), Spam, Mars bars, cucumbers, radishes and carrolade (apple juice with carrot puree). Carrolade and radishes were surprisingly the most popular whilst the Spam got some mixed reviews! We also had a go at making some butter from leftover milk, but despite lots of shaking, we learnt that making butter from milk takes a lot of hard work!

This week, 11 children from Red Kites were lucky enough to be invited to the Eynsham Day Centre. It was a very heart warming experience for all involved. We spent our time telling jokes, playing dominos, planting flowers, playing parachute games, helping to lay tables and even eating biscuits!! I felt very proud to be their teacher. Great job lovely Red Kites. We're looking forward to our next invitation where more children will be able to visit. 

This afternoon, Red Kites and Hawks went to the school’s allotment on Old Witney Road together.
After walking very sensibly to the allotment, we asked the children to go and have a wander around
the allotment to see what they could see and what they thought could be done to improve the
space. We agreed that it needed some attention, especially with some weeding and watering but
also came up with some excellent ideas of how we could make the allotment more user and wildlife
friendly! We were really impressed with some of the ideas for attracting more wildlife, such as
birdfeeders, hedgehog houses and planting more flowers to add colour but to also attract butterflies
and bees. Other suggestions included having a watering rota and making the paths clearer so it was
easier to get around. After making our assessments and discussing a to-do list which our school
councillors are going to discuss, the children had 5 minutes to play in the park before we headed
back to school. What a lovely afternoon, thanks Year 5!