After School Tennis

After school every Wednesday, a group of children from year 3 , 4 and 5 go to the hall and play tennis. So-far we have done forehand, backhand and volley. Each session there is a player of the week and they play the instructor!

Class 4 Maths and Literacy

In class 4 we have been doing symmetry in maths, we have learnt to do it in Horrizontal, verticall, and diagnally also how to plot points in eather 1 or 4 quadrants, witch is in co-

ordinates. We have found it really cool, we have all been moved into silver which if you don't know its great!!!



In Literacy we have been analysing stories, so far we have been through War of the Worlds, The demon Headmaster and Room 13, we have gone through and looked for V.C.O.P witch means Vocabulary, connectives, openers and punctuation, and what makes it a type of genre.

Class 4 News!

Lots of things have been happening in Class 4 recently or will be happening very soon:

1) Our Learning for Life Academy is about to start again - We have our largest selection of choices which are: "Think Quest", "Knitwits", "No Dice", "Pop Art & Riveting Reads", "It's A Mystery", "Creative Crafts Part 2", "Making the World a Better Place" and "Carry on Camping". If you want to know more about these cryptic titles visit our LFLA blog.

2) We have announced the winners of the website design competition. The winners will now take part in the ThinkQuest Challenge. It was decided that the a piece of homework would be the fairest way to decide on who would be on the team. Mr Marshall "blind" marked them, and narrowed it down to 9 possible contenders. He then spent time interviewing and managed to narrow it down to 6, with the 3 remaining finalists as reserves.

The winners are: Oliver, Harry, Angus, Joya, Eleanor and Ellie.
The runnersup: Ella, Grace and Dharani.
Honorable Mentions: Hannah, Eleanor, Ashley, Harvey, Megan, Daniel, Jonathan and Matthew.

Mr Marshall said that it was very, very hard to come to a decision and he wished that he could have a 34 person team.

3) We have a new assistant in Class 4. Mr Beck will be working in the class until the end of the summer term.

Stay tuned to more of what's going on in class 4.

More Machines and Inventions

Here we are showing our inventions to the school in celebration assembly. Mr Marshall really liked the homework machine made by Alex.

Machines and Inventions

As promised here are the inventions Class 2 made on Thursday. They were realy interesting. There were some fantasic ideas.

Multiskills!

All children in Year 2 and Year 4 went to a Multiskills festival at Haybridge on Friday. They rotated around the activities and had a go at many different skill areas. These ranged from football to table tennis, basket ball to relay events. Everyone had a great time!

Robot Week in Class 1

As part of their topic of 'Machines and Inventions', class 1 have set up a factory for making robots. They have developed their technology and design skills and have produced some wonderful inventions. A special thanks to the parents who have worked with their children at home to produce some wonderful models and which have then been brought into school. Here are some examples of the structures that the children made in school.

Four children received Headteacher's awards for their collaberative work to produce the robot that they names R2D5. Are these children going to be the engineers of the future?

Are you depressed?

Today is, apparently, the most depressing day of the year. Here's an article from CBBC Newsround:

If you found it hard to get out of bed on Monday and you're feeling grumpy you're not alone - it is officially the most depressing day of the year!

Experts used some complicated maths to work out that Monday 21 January is the day when people are most unhappy.

It's because Christmas is over, the weather is miserable and lots of people have broken their New Year Resolutions.

All this means the time of year makes people more gloomy than they might be at other times.

Top tips to get help you through the day include smiling at everyone you meet and doing some exercise.

And if you've messed up your New Year's resolutions, put it down to a mistake, and then start them again.

Do you feel depressed? What do you do to make yourself feel happy?

School Council

In our school we have a school council. The elected members of the school council are: Chloe, Holly, Megan, Harry, Arran, Eleanor, Eleanor, Ellie, Joya and Megan. The age range is between 5 and 11.

A school councillors job is to take ideas from children and take them on board if they like the idea they might use it.

School council help out with loads of fundraisers.

There are 3 key jobs: they are the Secretary, Chair person, Treasurer and Vice Chair Person.

If you are in our school and you have a problem and no one else can help, or a suggestion please don't be afraid to tell one of the members 0f school council, as that is their job!

Activity Club Info

Activity club has started once again after the christmas term (hope you all had a really nice christmas) it was a big hit. But this time we have changed it a bit we are now only doing three weeks for key stage 1 and then three weeks for key stage 2 and then we start all over again we are also at the start of every term we are going to send out a form so we know who is coming. Please tell your class teacher if you want to go.

LEGO CLUB

LEGO club has started up again. After the christmas term. It has been a big hit this time but I haven't beaten the record which is 32. So I will try to beat it this term.

I am going to do keystage 1 LEGO club on the 23rd of January which is a wednesday.

Think Quest Homework

Last week Class 4 started a piece of homework that they actually wanted to do!

Their task was to design a website - Mr Marshall would then choose the 6 best designs. The winning designers would then form the Blakedown Think Quest Team. They would then have to build a website and enter it into the Think Quest Competition.

Think Quest is an international Web Site Design competition for children from ages 9 - 19. The top prizes involve an all expenses paid trip to the Think Quest show in SAN FRANSISCO, USA!

Mr Marshall said he'll put the winning homework designs on the blog.

You can visit the thinkquest website by clicking here, once there go to the library to look at the different winners from last year.

Class 2 Theme: Machines and Inventions

As part of our theme on Machines and Inventions Class 2 have found out about George Stephenson. He invented a locomotive called the Rocket. George entered it in a competion and he won! He went 29mph.

We are in the role play area. We are taking a journey on the Rocket.

We are going to create our own inventions next week so watch this space!

Science: Push and Pull

Today we went over to the park for the last time as it is and used all the equipment to demonstarte pushes and pulls. we used lots of pushes and pulls. Here are some photographs of Class 2 investigating.

Health Website

To go with our Healthy Me learning connections topic, this website has lots of excellent games, articles, information and pictures. Have a look! (link below)


http://kidshealth.org/kid/

Healthy Me

Our current Learning Connections topic in Class 3 is called 'Healthy Me'. We are learning all about what is inside our body and how it functions to keep us healthy. We have learned lots of yucky facts too. Did you know that if you laid all of the blood vessels in the human body from end to end, they would go twice around the earth! Yuk!

Bubbles

Class 1 have been having great fun exploring bubbles. We used lots of unusual things as bubble-blowers. The potato masher produced the best bubbles. Now we are going to create a dance based on what we found out about the bubbles.

Extreme Sports!!!

On Friday, six children from Keystage 2 went to an Extreme Sports Festival at The Glades leisure centre in Kidderminster. They could use either skateboards, rollerblades/skates or scooters at the event. When they got there they were met by a large array of ramps, jumps, halfpipes and rails that they could use to practise skills and tricks on. Everyone was a bit nervous at first, but with the help of Jenna Downing (Professional Inline Skater) they were all soon attempting to skate up to the tallest ramp! Everyone did really well and Eleanor was given a prize for her determination. Well done all!

Our Vital Statistics!

We've been keeping an eye on our web stats:

• Since June 2006 we've had 10286 visitors
• Since June 2007 we've had 7386 visitors
• Since October 2007 we've had 3782 unique visitors from 69 different countries
• Throughout 2007 we posted 106 items
• Between September and December we posted 72 items
• The most unique visitors we have had on one day is 116
  

This year will be even better!

New blog address

You may have noticed that we have changed our URL address (the text in the address bar at the top of your browser). Our blog can now be found at:

www.blakedownblog.com

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to all Blakedown Bloggers and our readers from around the world!

Make sure you visit our blog regularly as there will be lots more changes this year - we're going to be podcasting, directing and producing our own video podcasts, we'll be setting up some specialist blogs, and...a few other things that we're keeping quiet for the timebeing.

So, watch this space!