Blog by Helen Mackie

We learned how to use an atlas. We found Brazil in the index then used the grid references to locate the capital city, the Amazon River and Amazon Rainforest.

Years 3 and 4 had lots of fun at our Christmas Part this morning. We had croissants, pain au chocolate and fruit then went into the hall for dancing and games. We even had a snowball fight!

We had a fantastic day at Kepplewray. The weather was kind to us and we all joined in with orienteering, den building, bush craft and team challenges.

We used boomwackers, glockenspiels and violins to investigate pitch. We discovered that the shorter the boomwacker (or note on the glockenspiel the higher the note. On the violins, the thinner the string the higher the note. Then we each made a set of panpipes using straws.

We listened to (and joined in with) some brilliant stories!

We have read Jack and the Beanstalk and talked about Jack's problem in the story that he may face. One problem is that he may drop a golden egg on the way down the beanstalk. So we designed and made landings for golden egg and tested them. Only 1 out of 4 eggs cracked!

This morning we designed and built a boat to try and help the Gingerbread man get across the river without being eaten. Some of us made boats out of salt dough and some of us used foil. All of the salt dough boats sank straight away. The tin foil boats sank more slowly, one of the tin foil boats…

We looked at food webs in class today We read all about different species and habitats and worked out where they fitted into food webs.

We enjoyed listening to some stories and poems this morning. Jane from Cumbria Library Service visited to read to us.

We learnt about Egyptian hieroglyphs, we tried to write a massage without using any words or letters. Then we decoded a message and wrote our name in  hieroglyphs.

Today we have mummified tomatoes.

First, we washed our tomatoes, then we scooped out the insides.

We made our own natron by mixing salt and baking powder and filled the tomato with it.

We will watch them for a few weeks to see what happens.