Year 5/6 had a wonderful day at The Tank Museum as they continued their learning about the end of WWII and the relevance of VE Day.

We worked with amazing two volunteers, Franz and Phil, who guided us in thinking about what life would have been like during the 1940s by thinking about rationing, air raids and the sort of tasks carried out by everyday people during the war.

In the afternoon, the children had a chance to explore the rest of the exhibits and were careful to learn as much as they could about each tank and spot how it linked to the era it sat within.

We had a fantastic afternoon in the sunshine during our first athletics PE session where we focused on sprinting. We reviewed the 'FAST' acronym to ensure that we were facing forwards, pumped our arms, had speedy feet and had an upright trunk. Having mastered our techniques, we also looked at our sprint starts and used our parachutes to ensure we were running with power. 

Owls really enjoyed their first session with Ben from Dorset Cricket Board as we focused on our fielding skills. We saw great progression during the session and we know how important these skills will be when we come to game situations in the coming weeks. 

Owl Class hugely impressed us with their DT work on structures as they designed and built playgrounds. They thought carefully about how to meet their design brief through their designs before using hacksaws and bench hooks to cut the wood to length and attach them using the glue gun. It was brilliant to see how many different components were included across all of the groups and how many of them actually worked as playground features. 

We had a wonderful final session of forest school as we put our work on fire starting to good use by toasting s'mores. We thought carefully about the 'fire triangle' and how to start the fire safely before keeping the fire going and learning about being safe around the fire. 

The children loved their forest school session this afternoon as many of them turned firestarters as they learned the steps to light a fire successfully. The other children worked collaboratively to build shelters using tarpaulin and camouflage nets. We look forward to applying these skills to further activities in the coming weeks. 

Some of the Year 6s enjoyed tackling a fractions and decimals tarsia puzzle. They had to find equivalent values and bring these shapes together to form a larger triangle - quite a challenge when dealing with recurring decimals and fractions which did not always use straightforward denominators. 

We had a great first forest school session today as we planted some new trees/hedging. We planted along the boundary of our forest school area, working together well as group to clear an area, dig, plant and then 'guard' the new plant.

Keep an eye from the village green to see how they grow over the coming years! 

We had a great time this week practising our baking skills ahead of the Christmas Fair next Friday where we will be selling stained glass biscuit decorations. We enjoyed working together in groups and were very successful in creating lots of lovely festive biscuits!

Our Year 5/6 children had a wonderful day at Longleat as they enriched their science learning by finding our more about how animals are adapted to their environments. They took part in a talk from the keepers where they were able to hold a range of animals, visited the animals in their enclosures and took a journey around the safari.

They were then lucky to be able to stay into the evening for the amazing festival of light which saw the children spotting different historical events as they took a 'journey through time'. Thank you to the adult volunteers who helped throughout!

In science this week, we were learning about the work of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. We learned about his work on the Galapagos Islands and extended this work by pretending to be the finches he observed. We used different types of 'beaks' to pick up sunflower seeds and quickly realised that we'd struggle to survive without the right type of beak!

We've been working with the Y5s from Foxes on our electronic and dance music unit which focused on looping and remixing music. We've used an amazing tool called Chrome Music Lab to create our own riffs and have then focused on 'Somewhere over the rainbow' as our base track to remix. We loved hearing the children all playing a remixed version of the song using their glockenspiels.

In DT this half term, we've been working on a unit called 'Navigating the World'. This has seen the children working on a project brief to code and design a exercise multitool which would be useful for exploring the world. Children used BBC Microbit controllers to create the working product before they created some amazing 3D CAD models using a piece of software called Tinkercad. We look forward to the children bringing all of their work together to present as if they were on Dragon's Den.

On Friday afternoon, Year 6 were lucky to be invited to Sherborne Girls' School for their Wonderstruck science workshop. They enjoyed learning about science with an added level of danger, noise and fire!!

In science this week, as part of their learning about the circulatory system, Y6 made some blood!! They learned about the different components of blood and their purpose, including red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets and plasma. We used cereal, marshmallows and raisins to replicate these and consider their makeup in the blood. 

We have loved getting to know our Hedgehog Class buddies as we've started this year and we've helped them to settle into school. This has meant that we've been there for them when outside, have helped them during lunchtime and enjoyed reading with them. It has been lovely to see how caring our oldest children have been and what good role models they've been to our newest members of the Trent community!

2023 - 24

We have had a great first day in Okehampton and the children were amazing; the children are just about settling down and the house is slowly descending into silence. We spent the afternoon just below the Meldon Viaduct as the children had their first taste of gorge scrambling. I think this went straight in as a favourite activity for the whole week for many and we wished we could have spent many more hours there! After dinner, we've enjoyed a camp fire and some time playing games outside - s'mores and marshmallows included, of course! We're hoping for a quiet night ready for cycling, rock climbing and high ropes tomorrow!

Our Year 6s represented us wonderfully at the DSAT Leavers' service this morning. They joined other children from across DSAT who were in their final year of school to reflect on their time at primary school and the next steps in their lives as part of a service led by the Bishop of Salisbury.

Well done to our Y6 children for their hard work during SATs week! To celebrate to the end of exams, we spent a great afternoon outside playing rounders and enjoying some ice lollies! Thank you too to our lovely Year 5 children who have been so independent and supportive of their peers. 

Year 5 and 6 have had a wonderful day at Shire Hall Museum. Our history learning this half term is all about how justice has changed since the Anglo Saxon times and our work today gave us a head start on this as we followed the story of Elijah Upjohn, an 11-year-old boy from Shaftesbury, who was tried at Shire Hall for crimes such as stealing trousers, rabbits and shoes! We then had a tour of the museum, including the cells, before conducting our own mock trial to track the events of Elijah's life.

Thank you so much to Anne and all of the amazing volunteers from Shire Hall, and also to the adult helpers from school who ensured the trip could go ahead

We had a great time with Mamta from Dorset Cricket Board who led a cricket session for us. She is a professional cricketer who plays for Dorset CC and taught us all about the correct grip for a bat and then developed our batting skills (and our fielding skills too as we ran around after our batters returning the balls!). 

We had a fantastic time on our spring walk. Walking through the local area, we were spotting signs of spring, but were seeing more of the impact of the very wet winter. We met up with our buddies to help them around their walk too so enjoyed sharing our wisdom with them. Thank you to the Casely family for leading our walk and for all of our adult helpers too!

We had an amazing World Book Day! We created newspaper articles which were inspired by our favourite stories as we reported on the events of the book. Keep an eye out for these around school over the next week or so!

In the afternoon, we enjoyed reading to our buddies in Hedgehogs and helping them to love reading. 

This half term in science, we're learning about how technology has changed over time. As part of this, we've been exploring technology which we may no longer see such as VHS players, floppy discs and rotary phones. We then thought about the first longer-distance communication which led us to telegraph machines and morse code. We created switches to allow us to control a telegraph using foil, pegs, paper clips and split pins! 

In our most recent theme day, we were exploring the arts. We loved the Bubble Bach concert before we then explored our drama skills by acting out elements linked to the Black Death, including learning more about the origin of famous nursery rhymes. During the afternoon, we created artwork which reflected a piece of music and came up with a whole variety of different outcomes!

We had a great time finishing our music unit all around composition. We explored musical notation, ensured we could identify different notes then used the glockenspiels to compose our own 8-note piece. 

We hugely enjoyed our maths day today as we took the chance to apply our understanding of maths to different areas of problem solving. We started by exploring the 'magic square' investigation which, whilst seeming very simple, had a lot of maths underpinning it, including the use of odd/even numbers and algebra. We then explored different investigations, including whether the Earth's population would fit on the Isle of Wight, whether all humans stood on each others shoulders would reach the moon, and whether we'd reach around the Earth if we all held hands! We then explored how to make 100 using 4 related numbers before finishing the day with some tessellation. Ask your child about what they were able to find out!! 

We really enjoyed being joined by Jean from Galliford Try who supported us in some team building activities. Once we had a chance to try on the PPE, we were building structures out of paper straws and sellopape. We were very impressed with the creations, including a slightly-wonky rocket, house, raft, bridge and prison cell!  

Year 6 loved learning about the refraction of light in science this week. We tried out different experiments to explore this, including 'breaking' a pencil in water and a disappearing penny! We then explained how light changes direction when it changes medium and how this tricks the eye. 

In our second computing lesson, we learned about how to add motors to a Crumble system. We learned about how to carefully connect them and then used our percentages knowledge to create movement. We then took on the challenge to create a dancing man with the motor making a dancer move back and forth, with sparkles adding disco lights!!

We had a great evening at the Sherborne area hockey tournament (even if it was nearly below zero!). We haven't played a lot of hockey this year so we were really pleased to see how well our players worked together as a team, and with their dribbling and passing skills. 

We hugely enjoyed our visit from the Dogs Trust as we completed a doggy detectives session to find out who was responsible for a child being attacked by a dog. We thought about that actions that were carried out to the dogs and how this led to them being provoked. We look forward to putting our learning into practice!

In our first computing lesson this half term, we started to learn about how to use Crumble controllers. We had to follow instructions carefully to ensuring the wiring was correct before then starting to code. We use 'do forever' and 'wait' commands to ensure that our LEDs did not just consistently light up, with many children managing to make a 'police' light with alternating blue and red lights. 

We loved creating a Bolognese sauce to end our DT work around adapting a recipe. We created eye-catching labels to stick to our jars and hope the children enjoyed eating them for dinner! 

We were delighted to have Nick from Bugfest in school recently as he supported Y6 in their learning about evolution, inheritance and adaptation. The children had a chance to hold a variety of minibeasts and creatures, including snails, millipedes and stick insects.