FAIRTRADE FORTNIGHT

Sit down for breakfast, stand up for farmers!

This week sees the launch of Fairtrade Fortnight across the country.

The theme for this year is breakfast. 

Have you ever thought about where your breakfast comes from? Where did the sugar on your cereal or in your jam come from? Or the raisins in your bowl? 

What about your orange juice? What about your favourite cup of tea or coffee?

As Martin Luther King famously said, ‘before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world’. Despite our dependence on farmers and workers for the foods, drinks and products that we love, about 795 million people are undernourished globally.

The people who grow the food we take for granted can’t always feed their own families. We can support farmers and workers to put food on the table for their families by harnessing the power of a Fairtrade breakfast.

At Kings Copse, we will be busy planning lots of activities to help raise awareness of Fairtrade over the next couple of weeks and beyond. Children will take part in special activities in their classes and the Fairtrade group have planned some activities too.

As always we will be holding our very popular 'Bring a Fairtrade Snack' to school event. Also we will be asking children to bring in any wrappers with the Fairtrade symbol on to help us make a colourful display. 

We would particularly like wrappers with a breakfast link but any wrappers will be appreciated!

As an extra challenge this year, Kings Copse have signed up for the JTS Rice Challenge! JTS has challenged schools, as well as other organisations, to sell 90kg of rice – the amount of rice sold that would enable a Malawian farmer to pay for a year’s basic secondary education for one child. 

There will be more about this soon!

Wildern Conference

To launch the event some children from Year 5 and 6 attended a Fairtrade Conference at Wildern. We learnt lots about Fairtrade and took part in some really interesting and fun activities. 

The children were great ambassadors for the school 

and we were very proud of them. 

They really enjoyed one particular challenge which involved making, packaging and presenting a new Fairtrade Breakfast bar. I am very proud to announce that Kings Copse won the prize in the best presentation category. 

Well done team!

Maths Parent Workshop

Following on from our successful visits to Year 2 and Year 4 during maths week, Year 3 were keen to continue their experience of being maths teachers.

As a class we focussed on different methods for addition and shared these with our peers in the classroom. The children were asked to have a go at teaching a classmate the methods they felt confident with and then finding someone who could help them practice a method they found tricky.

We invited parents in to see the different ways we solve problems. Maths methods have changed a lot since many parents were at school and this was a great opportunity to see how the children now solve problems and the methods and resources they use.

Many parents were introduced to dienes for the first time and discovered how the children use blank number lines and partitioning to solve 3 digit problems.

The children really enjoyed working together and loved sharing methods and vocabulary with those parents who were able to come in. I know the parents who did come in felt they learnt a lot from working with their children which is great.

We appreciate is it is not always easy for parents to be able to make it into school during the day so a big thank you to those parents who were able to make the session. 

If you were unable to come in, 

perhaps you could ask your child to explain some of the methods at home!

Maths Week

Year 3 had so much fun during Maths week!

 

We were very lucky to be taught some new Maths strategies by the Year 4s- we found it tricky but really good fun.

 

 

 

 

 On Thursday, our Maths theme was Shape.  We looked at 3 shape books and loved the way that the illustrations in the book had lots of different shapes in them.

As well as other shape related activities, we challenged ourselves to create our own shape pictures.

On Friday, our Maths focus was measurement.  We read the book 'Funny Bones' for inspiration.

 

We carried out an investigation to see if people with longer legs could jump further.  We had to use lots of different skills, including adding two measurements if the jump was over the metre ruler.

 

We really enjoyed carrying out the investigation and representing our data in bar charts.

 

We found out that it is not true because some of the people with shorter legs could jump quite far and, even though she had the longest legs, Mrs Phillips did not have the longest jump.

 

Maths Week - Part Two!

We've continued to have lots of great fun during maths week and used 'The Rabbit Problem' to investigate lots of maths problems and activities

RABBIT HUTCHES

We made a 3D net plan of a hutch for a rabbit to use. We needed to use an appropriate scale to decide how long each part should be. We then used our plan to make a 3D scale model of the hutch.

         

   

WHAT IS AN AVERAGE CARROT?

Taking inspiration from the many carrots that feature in the book, we decided to investigate what an average carrot is like. We measured the length and weighed various different carrots and then used this information to find the mean length and weight.

     

   

CARROT COCKTAILS

We also made our own carrot cocktails using carrot juice and orange juice. To make the carrot juice, we needed to strain the carrot pulp to obtain the liquid. We used different percentages as a ratio (e.g. 20% and 80%, 40% and 60%) to try different flavour combinations. We needed to measure each quantity carefully after calculating the ml of each liquid. After we had made each cocktail, we did a taste test and graded each cocktail out of 10!

MATHS TRAIL

We also needed to use our orienteering and maths skills in PE. We used our map to find various maths challenges around the school grounds. We needed to answer each one before moving on to the next. Some tasks involved us to measure length, weight and capacity, other tasks tested our knowledge of the time and other puzzles involved us navigating a course and adding up tricky totals!