Designing Stable Structures

Welcome to Year 3's wonderful structure designs.

Having looked at a range of real photo frames, we decided to experiment with what a standing structure has to have. We used card, lego, kinex and straws to make a piece of floppy paper stand up. 'Strong' shapes like triangles and rectangles were found to work well, and when a problem was found - we made changes to fix it.

Enjoy! (we did).

Terrific Titanic Tour

This week Year 5 explored Southampton to discover many of the areas that were affected by the sinking of the Titanic. It was a fascinating morning!

The children discovered that out of 800 crew, 750 came from Southampton. Also, in 1912 a local school was severely affected by the sinking, in fact every child in that school lost at least one relative.

Year 5 were shown that the best way to see the history of a city is just to look up! As you can see in the pictures the children took, many of the buildings in Southampton existed in 1912, even though at eye-level they look modern.

We visited the docks where the Titanic left, the train station many passengers arrived through and the hotel where first class passengers (including Bruce Ismay, the owner of the White Star Line) stayed the night before the ship departed.

All of year 5 learned so much on the tour - if you bump into a year 5 pupil, please ask them to tell you the story of the Slade brothers and what happened when they spent too much time at the Grapes pub!

Where was Oscar...?

I also went away in the summer holidays, but not quite as far as SAM, who went to Sweden...

There is a small prize if you can guess where I was when I had my photograph taken...



Be very careful to read the question properly!

Hej från Sverige!

Hej!

(That's how you say "Hello" in Swedish!)

I went to Sweden during the summer holidays to a little town called Värmdö, which is near Stockholm, the capital city...



As you can see from the map, this part of Sweden is made up of thousands and thousands of little islands, so there's lots of water... - change to the satellite view and zoom in for a proper look round!

What do you think the Swedish words on the safety ring in my photo mean?

from SAM



PS I am in both photos, I'm just a little harder to spot in one of them!

Keep up to date...

Don't forget that there's a special page on the blog where you can keep up-to-date with this week's news!

Here's this week's news...

As an incentive to watch, there will be a small prize each week for the first person to answer a question about the week's news. This week's question is:

How much is the prize for the winner of the pylon design competition?
(Teachers: you're not allowed to enter!)

Our Young Leaders!

We had special assembly when sixteen Year 6 children put themselves forward as House Captain candidates. This is a very prestigious position in Oakwood, as there are lots of responsibilities and challenges ahead for anyone who wants to take on this role. Four candidates for each house put forward their reasons for wanting to be a House Captain, explained the skills and attributes they thought would make them effective in the role and also suggested how they might be able to help improve the school during their tenure.

 

The assembly was also attended by Southampton City Councillor Keith Morrell, who was very impressed with the hustings and said he was relived that none of the candidates was up against him in the city council elections. He was convinced they were of such high quality they would give him a run for his money! We'll be announcing which children were elected as House Captains and Vice House Captains soon.

Miss Minchin for Headmistress?

Thanks to generous donations from the Oakwood Schools' Association, we welcomed four multi-talented performers from M&M Productions into school last Wednesday!

Our visitors not only drive and unload their own van, set up the stage, operate the sound and the lighting, but they perform an hour long show, with nearly a dozen characters - what stars!

Our show was the Little Princess, which told the story of how a girl escaped an evil headmistress with the help of her father and her friends.



Seeing high quality performances really helps children when they come to perform in assembles and plays themselves - and these are always special occasions at Oakwood!

Thanks M&M! We are looking forward to welcoming you back after Christmas!

WOW! Start to Year 4

Year 4 are off to a fabulous start:

They have already been to visit Fishbourne Roman Palace, which really hooked them into their Roaming Romans topic.

They have been writing an historical story of the life in the Roman Army in the form of a diary, generating plenty of vivid vocabulary (WOW words) to describe chores such as cooking duties and cleaning the Roman toilets!

They are beginning to settle into the routines well and have been incredibly well organised.

We are all looking forward to their Roman Feast day on 28 September. They will be researching Roman menus, cooking and sampling examples of Roman food!

Year 5 visit the Southampton Boat Show

Year 5 have already been on their first trip of the new school year.

As part of their Titanic topic work they visited the World renowned Southampton Boat Show.



The first 'port' of call for the children was to climb aboard the luxurious Sunseeker and Princess boats and explore these £2,000,000 vessels!


They had a guided tour of one of the RNLI's rescue boats, they even got to sit in the crew's seats down below! They saw boats, boats and more boats around the Marina; Yachts, catamarans, and even one shaped like a shoe.


Later on they explored Solent Park and got to see all the various exhibits, they espically liked the University of Southampton tent which had some marine artefacts from the ocean floor.

Finally they picked up their goody bags from the Daily Echo stand and made their way back to school.

Year 5 Boat Day

Year 5 have had a fantastic start to the year with the brilliant Boat Day!

The day started with a boat construction challenge. Could the children use only a piece of sugar paper and folding skills to make a craft that would float for at least ten seconds...?


Most of year 5 were successful and we saw many truly creative creations!

After that, the children were taught how to create an origami boat. Luckily, Year 5 had some experienced Scout experts who were able to help Miss Beavill and Mr Ackland to teach the rest of the classes. In the afternoon, everyone used their artistic skills to create some fantastic stormy sea pictures. Please see our gallery below to see the great day we had!

Smile Year 3!

Year 3 have had a wonderful start to the year!

Have a look at our pizza making skills and art work inspired from the artist David Hockney.

We had a fantastic day launching our new topic 'Smile'!