Giraffes@taddy

 This afternoon the Giraffes started to make reindeers for Christmas decorations. To do this they sawed the wood to make the body and head using a bow saw.  While others whittled the legs and neck. To finish the session we made a fire using a flint and steel and toasted marshmallows on the end of the sticks that they had whittled. It has been a brilliant afternoon, the Giraffes showed such perseverance when using the tools and are growing in confidence each week.

A room filled with concentration, smiles, fun and music.  Magical ukulele playing from giraffes and leopards this afternoon. It sounded fabulous.

 We've had a whale of a time this afternoon, despite the rain! We set up a game of 'smugglers run' where the 2 teams of children had to work together to smuggle the 'rum' from one 'barrel' on the field to another at in the corner of the woodland. They had to watch out for the pirate, who tried to catch them and either tip out the rum or ask them to complete a forfeit. I was very impressed with the lengths the giraffes went to in order to avoid being caught (throwing water at me, the pirate, top deter me from catching them in the future) and the way they worked together to try to smuggle as much rum as they could.  Well done leopard, I thoroughly enjoyed my afternoon with you.

Towers of multi link and smiles all round this morning while investigating equivalent fractions. Cool music too.

  Two of our Giraffes have organised a lunchtime computer club .  From the creative:  inventing outrageous hairstyles to logical:   problem solving games , they had a great time today. Well done Giraffes for organising this popular club.

  Giraffes have been busy changing sentences from active to passive voice today. First we identified the different parts of the sentence : subject , verb and object . We then swapped the sentence round to make the object the subject of the new sentence. We had to change the verb too.

Giraffes have been hunting down verbs in The Arrival. We then changed them to the present participle so that we could use them as  progressive verbs. After that, we used them in our writing.

Giraffes are already gripped by their new book, The Arrival by Shaun Tan.   Unexpectedly, it's a picture book with no words. However, that doesn't mean it's a simple book, it's full of detail.  Having shared part one of the the book on the whiteboard, we have been making inferences from the pictures.  We are intrigued to see what happens next...  

Our clay sculptures were on display as part of our exciting Pop Up Art Exhibition today. They looked spectacular! Some of the Giraffes helped to set up and run the exhibition. What a great job they did in assisting Art director, Mr Handley. It was lovely to see so many visitors popping in to see our work. Thankyou for your support.

This morning, working together on division led to lots of excitement as we explored how to find multiples of the divisor using partitioning.  Dividing by seemingly impossible numbers, suddenly became something we CAN do!  Showing great teamwork, Giraffes worked together to solve the problems. It was lovely to see you so enthusiastic and confident about your learning. Well done.

 We have been learning about series and parallel circuits this afternoon and making our own circuits. Isaac and Josh wanted to investigate how many bulbs they could put in parallel before they stopped working.  We have had lots of fun! 

Before you start reading this, you have to promise not to tell anyone... Inspired  by Professor Templeton, we have been busy inventing prototypes of our own. This is one of Ajax's inventions.  Lynda has invented T he Auto-Drying Dress-Operator or TADDO, which, she says is going to be the best selling dress towel in the whole world. If you want to jet off to different places and biomes, you will be able to use Freya's Automatic- Mysterious Wilderness-Teleporter. Isaac's Automatic-Farming machine with Self-Driving Tractors is set to  revolutionise  the world of agriculture. Shhh! ... don't tell anyone about these inventions. They are TOP SECRET!

  This afternoon we delivered 8 Harvest baskets to the elderly residents of Taddington. It was lovely to see them and to see their smile especially as some people have not had many visitors these last few months. We waved at them and told them what we were raising money for (at a distance of course!). We were lucky enough to get a little more money towards our goal of sending 2 cows to Africa.  We had a lovely afternoon and it was nice to do something good for the community.   

Inspired by our research yesterday,  Giraffes had a creative morning making their clay sculptures. We learnt how to fix all the elements of our design together really securely and by the end of the morning, everyone was very proud of their finished work.  From their responses, it is safe to say that they really enjoyed working with clay.                     "Can we do this every day?"           " When can we make more sculptures?" Once they are dry, we can paint the sculptures, ready for the school art exhibition. Well done to all the children who helped clean up the classroom too. Great job!