Monthly Archives: October 2017

Historical weather data in Excel

During Computing, Year 5 Kestrels have been looking at historical weather data using the Met Office’s archive website. The children learned about the closest weather station to Birmingham was Sutton Bonington. They also learned about what the weather stations are used for.

Mr Baddhan introduced Microsoft Excel to input some of the weather data. They were asked to use the sum and average formula in their spreadsheets. They then created various graphs to demonstrate the average rainfall in a specific year.

Our finished Ping Pong games

Today Year 5 Kestrels finished programming their ‘Ping Pong’ games using Scratch.

Mr Baddhan was very impressed with the final versions of their games.

At the end of the lesson, Kestrels tried each others games out giving feedback on each.

Here are a sample of a few completed games.

Sophie Memory’s Ping Pong Game

Will’s Ping Pong Game

Nila and Christos’ Ping Pong Game

Cara’s Ping Pong Game

Role Models

In PSHE Year 5 have been discussing role models and what makes a good role model. First of all we identified what a role model was, with the lovely suggestion that is is someone that you look up to.

Keeping that in mind, we began to discuss what features a role model should have.

The children were then asked to write about what a role model should be and who their role models are. Take a look at some of the work…

Creating a Ping Pong game – part 3

Year 5 Kestrels are close to finishing their Ping Pong games in Scratch. Today in Computing, Kestrels finished programming the ball sprite. The sprite was programmed to set score to zero when you click the green flag to start the game. The ball was then programmed to change the score by one point each time the ball touched the opposite side of the background colour.

The children used the variable block for the first time to create a score block for each player, naming the variables as player 1 and player 2.

Later this week, we will put our completed games on the blog here.

Starting something new

In PSHE Year 5 discusses how you might feel when they beginning something new. We had lots of ideas and soon figured out that there was a mixture of both positive and negative feelings, from feeling excited to feeling worried and nervous.

We then moved on to looking at ways we could overcome these feelings…

Callum also moved us on to coping strategies with his idea of counting to 10 and started a whole new discussion! Well done Year 5!

Creating a Ping Pong game – part 2

Year 5 Kestrels have continued to develop their Ping Pong games. Today, the children focused on programming the ball to move around the screen.

They used various new blocks, also understanding the x and y axis position of the sprite.

Kestrels showed great understanding of each block explaining how the blocks would impact on the game and if they were removed, how it would affect the game.

The blocks used included, ‘repeat until’, ‘point in direction’, ‘if on edge, bounce’, ‘forever’ and ‘switch backdrop to’.

We will have examples of the children’s games next week on our blog here.

Creating a ‘click sound’ program

During Computing, Kestrels class have been challenged to add sound into their program. Mr Baddhan asked the children to use their previous knowledge of Scratch to assign a piece of sound and then when clicked on sprite, the sound should be heard.

Mr Baddhan was impressed with the children’s knowledge of Scratch and some of the children were challenged to add more sprites with their sounds.

Some of the children’s work will be on this blog tomorrow.