Week Ending 07/04/17

Another week, another busy time!

In Topic this week we have been learning some more about our friend, Sir Isaac Newton. We discovered this week how Sir Newton was able to take apart light and put it back together again by the use of a prism.

A prism is a piece of glass, usually in a triangular shape which is used to refract light. By this, Sir Newton was able to show that white light is actually made up of many colours. People in his day believed that the colours that came out of a prism were not from the white light which shone into them, but were housed within the prism itself. Sir Newton, by using two separate prisms showed that if the two refracted lights were put together, one over the other, they would produce white light. If the colours had been residing in the prism only this would not be possible. By this, he expanded our knowledge of light and changed our way of thinking - forever.

If you would like to understand more fully how Sir Newton applied his ideas, please see the video below:

To understand why Sir Newton is so popular and revered amongst scientists, please see the video below:

If you would like to test yourself on your knowledge of Sir Newton, feel free to try this TEST. For more information on Sir Isaac Newton, please follow this LINK.

In English this week we have been looking at the principles and idea of Onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia is a word which phonetically imitates, resembles or suggests the sound that it describes. This means that the onomatopoeic word sounds like the word that it is. We started our investigation into this by creating an Onomatopoeia Word Bank where we thought of a number of words which sounded like what they were. These included: bang, whoosh, crash, zap, swish and bop!

We then wrote our own onomatopoeia poem! We had fun while learning how to express our ideas in both a poetical way and a way for the reader to understand the idea of onomatopoeic words. We came up with some rather random, interesting and funny lines in our poems. Amongst our favourites were:

I come to a concert and I see my cat

She jumps on the stage and says,

"Meow! Aoo! Smash! Dash! We will have some cats!"

And,

A logical log crashed into a frog

and a frog crashed into a fog

and the fog crashed into a mug

If you would like to play an onomatopoeia game, please click on this LINK. And if you would like to have a try at your own onomatopoeia poem, have a look at this picture below for inspiration:

Finally, in Maths this week we have started to look at coordinates: how you draw them, their implementations and applications. At first we could not understand, apart from games we have played that use them, where else they would be used. We then started to draw our own maps before laying on top of it a grid system of coordinates. By doing this we then started to see where coordinates would be used in life and why they are so important. We are looking forward to discovering more about this!