Today, we watched the BBC Live Lesson which featured Charlie Higson and Frank Cottrell Boyce who were introducing this year’s 500 Words writing competition. Schools around the country were also tuned in to gain writing tips and advice on how to create interesting and exciting stories. It generated a great deal of enthusiasm in The Eyrie and we couldn’t wait to start planning our own stories. We are looking forward to entering this competition.

As we have been learning about Neil Armstrong this term, we decided to end our topic with a fun food activity. Food is taken into space in a dehydrated state because water would add too much weight to the rocket creating much higher fuel costs. As the astronauts can make their own water in space, they add it to rehydrate the food so that it can then be eaten. We decided to make our very own astronaut chocolate pudding.

Our Dance sessions this term are in two parts. In the first half of each session, we are working on contemporary dance routines based on the topic of Space, using our imaginations to create rockets and then visiting the Moon, before exploring alien planets in other galaxies. In the photo, you can see each of our groups travelling through the multiverse in our spacecraft.

We went to Lifeskills at The Create Centre in Bristol where we took part in activities set in realistic scenarios, experiencing difficult or dangerous situations in this safe environment and learning how to deal with them. The settings included houses, a road, a shop, a dark alleyway, a river and a railway line. In the photo, you can see the shop where we were taught about the difference between ‘Use by’ and ‘Best before’ dates. They also short-changed us when we paid for our items and we learnt to always check that we have been given the correct change before leaving the shop.

We enjoyed trying out the games that each group had made. In the photo, can you see that the bulb on the left has lit up? This means that a complete circuit has been made by the wires touching. It wasn’t as easy as we thought it would be! It was great fun though.

At the Term Two Awards Assembly, the subject cups were handed out. These were our nominees for the Maths, Science, Art, Music and PE cups. As you can see, our class landed the Science Cup! We were very proud of all of our nominated Eagles who took to the stage.

In English, we have been learning the story of It’s A Wonderful Life from the well-known Christmas movie. In the film, George Bailey is saved by his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody. George says to Clarence, “You look like the kind of angel I’d get!” This is because Clarence hasn’t earned his wings yet. This got us thinking about what our own guardian angels might look like. As a Learning Log challenge, we were given the task of creating our own guardian angels, describing their appearance and stating what their main roles would be. There were a lot of guardian angels being used to help with homework! As you can see, some children made models of their guardian angels.

Et voila! The Christmas cakes were finished and ready to be taken home to be shared with our families, who we hope were very impressed with our final products. This has been a wonderful DT project. We have all learnt a lot about the history of Christmas cakes, the traditions involved in this festive food and the skills and cooking techniques required to enjoy success. We are reliably informed that they tasted delicious and were definitely a hit!

The following day, we were ready to decorate our Christmas cakes. Firstly, we poured a little orange juice onto our cakes to help to keep them moist. We then added a thin layer of jam which would be the ‘glue’ to stick a layer of marzipan onto the cake. We rolled out the marzipan using a rolling pin and then lay it on top of the cake to completely cover it.

The cake mixtures started to be formed very professionally. In went the flour, sugar, eggs and butter. Each group were using different types of dried fruit, depending on what they liked and what their own specially created recipes specified. In the photo, you can see some zesting going on. There was a rather pleasant citrusy aroma in the classroom at this point!

There was a lot of Maths involved because we needed to accurately weigh out the correct mass of each ingredient. Can you see the half-sized baked bean tins in the photo? These would become our baking tins. The bottom of the tins were loose so that we could carefully push the cakes  up and out after they had been cooked. We lined the tins with greaseproof paper.

We have had a wonderful time in The Eyrie this week making our Christmas cakes. Thank you to all of the parents who enabled this to happen by donating the ingredients. We couldn’t have done it without you! Everyone has really enjoyed this whole experience. It has been fun, creative and rewarding. This is us getting ourselves set up at the start of the process. Remember that some of us had to go and get our dried fruit, which had been soaking in orange juice in the fridge overnight.

We made electrical quiz boards. We thought of a good Christmas question and wrote four answers for it, only one of which was correct. When the wire touched the metal clip next to the correct answer, the bulb lit up. Only the wire leading from the correct answer would complete the circuit. The other four wires were hidden behind the flap of cardboard. This team’s question was: ‘Everyone is familiar with mistletoe. What is the colour of its berries?’ The four answers were red, white, green and yellow. Which answer do you think lit the bulb?

Our Design Technology project this term is focussed around Christmas cakes. We will be baking our own Baked Bean Tin Christmas Cakes later on. However, we began by investigating products to collect ideas. We tasted three different brands of Christmas cakes: Mr Kipling Christmas Slices, Morrisons Iced Christmas Cake Bar and Sainsbury’s Iced Rich Fruit Cake. We used technical vocabulary to describe the sight, smell, touch and taste of these three different cakes.

In Term Two, our focus in art lessons is Tone. We looked at various portraits drawn by the artist Kathe Kollwitz. She was a German artist who was known for her portrait work and the clever use of tone she used to create them. We studied a range of her portraits before attempting to copy them, using the skills we thought she might have used. We discussed using our pencils in different ways to create different tones and also using hatching or cross-hatching as alternative techniques to create tones. In the picture, you can see Kollwitz’s portrait in the top left. The other two sketches were brilliant attempts by Luca in copying her work. He really did a superb job!

Thank you to everybody who visited our World War One Exhibition recently. We hope you enjoyed looking at our artwork. The Year Six Eagles were given the task of creating World War One pictures through using pencil. We were allowed to put one bit of colour onto our sketches. This wonderful picture was created (appropriately enough) by Poppy.

Each of us in turn walked over to the War Memorial carrying our wreaths. We had spent a lot of time researching information about the soldiers who died and considering what we might want to write on the special tribute cards which are attached to each poppy wreath. Please visit the War Memorial in Timsbury to see our seventeen wreaths (alongside the others which were laid on Remembrance Sunday) and to read our tributes.

In Art, we looked at images of Winston Churchill before creating our own pencil portraits of him. After that, we studied the work of Pierre Emmanuel Godet who uses single continuous lines to create faces of famous people. His work includes John Lennon, Michael Jackson and even Darth Vader! We had a go at our own one line drawings of Winston Churchill. Godet includes little images of subjects from the events of that person’s life in his portraits so we attempted to do that too.

Our finished World War Two dance routine looked fantastic. After working on creating movements linked to key themes (e.g. the Blitz, evacuees, Dig for Victory, in the shelter, on the battlefield etc.), we paired up and synchronised our actions to create a visually more interesting performance. The range of different levels and speeds, the partner work and the use of space showed how well we had developed as dancers since the beginning of this unit of work. We were also able to demonstrate good musicality, matching our movements to the rhythm of the music track accompanying us, which was London Can Take It by Public Service Broadcasting.

Congratulations to our Term One Award Winners! Everybody in The Eyrie has made a superb start to Year Six but these were the six lucky children to be specially rewarded for their Citizenship, Curiosity, Responsibility, Enterprise, Determination and Friendship.

Lord Woolton promoted recipes that worked well with the rationing system. The most famous of these recipes was the Woolton Pie, which consisted of carrots, potatoes, parsnips and cauliflower with a pastry crust. This is what we made and the Eagle Chefs did an amazing job, with all the pies turning out spectacularly well. They looked amazing. Thank you to all parents for contributing the ingredients. We had a really fun day thanks to your help.

We walked to the War Memorial in Timsbury with Mr Fiddes from the Royal British Legion to see the names of the seventeen soldiers who lost their lives in World War One. We will be back here on Sunday 11th November to play a very important part in Timsbury’s Remembrance Day Service, with seventeen of our Year Six Eagles laying a poppy wreath for each of these local heroes. We also walked to the cemetery and paid our respects at the grave of Private Moxham, the only one of the seventeen to be buried in the village. We will meet at the War Memorial at 10.30am on Remembrance Day and our part in the service will be completed by 11.30am.

The Year Six Eagles are very honoured to have been asked to play a very important part in this year’s Remembrance Day commemorations on November 11th. Seventeen children from our class will be paying tribute to the seventeen soldiers from Timsbury who lost their lives during World War One. We will be researching information about these local heroes before writing our own fitting tributes which we will then perform on the day, before laying seventeen poppy wreaths in their memory.

We had an amazing time at PGL in Osmington Bay in Dorset. We enjoyed lots of different experiences and all of our instructors were very impressed with us. It was a happy week of fun and challenging opportunities which will have helped to build our self-esteem and confidence. It was great to be a part of Team Eagles!

This is the Zip Wire activity at PGL. The zip wire was in an amazing location at the Osmington Bay site, on a hill overlooking the English Channel with wonderful views across to Weymouth and Portland Harbour. We all enjoyed our trip whizzing down to the bottom of the hill but not so much the walk to the top again, pulling the rope and harness back up with us!

This is the Aeroball activity at PGL. This game involves scoring points by throwing balls into your opponent’s hoop whilst bouncing on a trampoline. Each team consists of two players, with each individual aeroballer having their own sealed bouncing compartment. It was a fun but exhausting session!

This is the Tunnel Trail activity at PGL. We enjoyed playing lots of different games which involved scrambling through the underground tunnels. The tunnels had different diameters, meaning that you needed to adopt different crawling techniques to travel through them. It was a lot of fun!

This is the Giant Swing activity at PGL. Two people sat in the swing while the rest of us pulled the rope like a tug of war team to take the pair backwards and upwards as high as they wanted to go. Then, one of the pair pulled the release cord and they were launched forwards at speed, sending them high above the Osmington Bay centre. The views from up there were amazing. In the photo, you can see Portland in the background.

This is the Abseil activity at PGL. We had to climb the ladders inside the tower to reach the top. Our harnesses were attached to the ropes and then we leaned back and walked down the outside of the tower to the ground. The tower was very high. Some of us pushed off with our feet as we descended and tried the jumping technique rather than walking. You feed the rope through the carabiner attached to your harness to control the speed of your descent. It was great fun!

When we arrived at Osmington Bay, we walked down to the beach to have our lunch. We enjoyed searching for unusual pebbles on this beach and also looking at the amazing views across the English Channel towards Portland Harbour in the distance. We would be kayaking over there later in the week.

As part of our current topic of The Battle of Britain, we are creating a World War Two dance performance. We scattered lots of books containing interesting photographs of different aspects of the conflict around the hall floor as inspiration for ideas. Our task was to create a range of dynamic movements based on how the people in the photographs might have been feeling. On the screen, you can see that we were playing the video for If War Should Come by Public Service Broadcasting at the same time, as the music for our performance and as a backdrop for our dance.

The Tour of Britain featured a team time trial for the first time this year. It took place on stage five in Cumbria, covering 14 kilometres from Cockermouth to Whinlatter Pass in the Lake District. We found out about the different equipment and different tactics used during this test against the clock. Afterwards, we went outside to carry out our own team time trial. Can you see how we stayed in lines, closely behind each other, to keep in the slipstream and become more aerodynamic?

The first day of the brand new school year saw the Tour of Britain cycle along North Road in Timsbury. Our whole school turned out to cheer loudly as the professional cyclists, including Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas, passed by. It was an exciting and unique experience and one we will never forget. As we waited, police on motorbikes and people in team cars waved to us. Eventually, the race appeared, led by a breakaway group of four riders, with the peloton 54 seconds behind. They still had 47.2 kilometres to go before they would reach the finish line in Bristol.