We love showing off our learning here at William Barcroft! During the week beginning 27^th March we hosted a special Learning Showcase event for each year group. This involved a special assembly to showcase what has been learnt in a wide range of subjects over the term, and then an opportunity for parents to enjoy some refreshments whilst the children showed off their books. Our amazing parents responded fantastically to this new event and all 4 year groups had a packed audience! These showcases will now happen at the end of every term.

On Monday, 30 children from our school attended a netball festival at Havelock Academy. This festival aimed to improve students’ skills in netball and improve their knowledge of the game. The session was carried out by Havelock staff. The effort by the pupils were second to none and every single person improved their netball skills by the end of the session. It was a fantastic opportunity to enable more pupils to go out and represent William Barcroft. Massive well done to everyone who attended, you were amazing!

Last Friday, Year 4 learnt how to be a Fine Chocolate taster – experiencing a  workshop delivered by Cocoa Encounters. The children learnt many new skills and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. They learnt about how cocoa plants are grown, they ground, then tasted coca beans and found out which countries grow cocoa beans. They used all their senses to smell and taste flavours within chocolate and watched a video explaining the chocolate process undertaken by a local chocolatier (Duffy) based in Humberston. The children had the opportunity to ask questions which were answered by Kathryn (World chocolate tasting judge). Positive comments were received about the children’s impeccable behaviour and enthusiasm throughout the sessions.

In the final 2 weeks of Spring term we had some special visitors here at William Barcroft. They arrived in eggs and left as beautiful fluffy chicks! The children loved watching them hatch and even got a chance to hold them once they were big enough. We learnt all about how to look after them and how to change their environment as they moved through each stage.

This week, the whole school enjoyed a Saint Patrick’s day celebration which culminated in an exciting parade put on by the children after spending the afternoon making accessories to walk with. They also learnt about the origins of the day and why it is celebrated by many Irish people all over the world. As well as this, the children learnt about different Irish traditions and what makes their culture unique.

Please check our Twitter page for pictures of the day…

@WBJJuniorSchool

Awe and wonder filled our school, during science week; in all year groups the children became scientists and followed a variety of enquiries.

The children in year 3 investigated the effects of light and shadows: they followed enquiries to discover what happens when light is reflected; they investigated the effects of the light from a light source being blocked and looked for patterns in shadows.

Year 4 built circuits, which they controlled with switches- they were able to trouble shoot and fix any circuits which stopped working. They had a fabulous afternoon investigating insulators and conductors by testing real life objects.

In year 5, the children investigated forces: they learnt about the force of gravity and who discovered it. Lots of links were made to real life and careers. They researched the best materials and shapes for a parachute to have maximum air resistance. They absolutely loved following an enquiry to test how the surface area of a parachute affects the air resistance, which was a question they came up with themselves.

The children thoroughly enjoyed sharing their love of science with their parents/carers, during our science week. A buzz filled the air, in all sessions: the year 5 children were engineers designing bridges; year 4 became electricians and built a buzz wire game; year 3 were physicists exploring light refraction by building periscopes.

On Friday 3rd March, William Barcroft celebrated World Book Day! The children were invited to wear clothing that represented an adjective! We had some amazing outfits in school including colourful, festive, sparkly, purple and trendy.  We even had an author visit in school, Stuart Rowson, who shared his fantastic new book, Izzy and the Tumble Thunder, with us. He shared the story of his childhood growing up in Grimsby and how he became an author. We all enjoyed a tasty hot chocolate and read as much as we could – it was a fantastic day!

Year 3

Today we celebrated World Book Day! We listened to the story of Mr and Mrs Twit and all of their silly tricks! We made our own dirty beards and acted out as Mr and Mrs Twit. We also met a local author called Stu Rowson who has had an incredible career working for the BBC. We loved hearing about his experiences and he has inspired us to pick up a book or begin writing! Please enjoy reading with your child this weekend and talk about your favourite books. Take a look at our wonderful outfits and try to guess our adjectives that we have dressed as!

Year 4

4V read The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse. We really enjoyed reading this book! We loved the storyline throughout, but also the fact that each page is a valuable quote that can stand alone. We enjoyed focusing on a few key pictures and ‘reading them’. Looking at the characters emotions and how they might be feeling about it! We also tried to recreate some of the pictures in the book ourselves. 4S read The Witches. We enjoyed starting this book! Whilst reading, we learnt how to spot a witch and then drew our own scary witches! We did lots of reading of this book as we were enjoying it so much! 4BL read The book that eats people. The children created their own page for the book( inspired by the style) for our own class version of the book. some versions include Mr Blake being eaten!

Year 5

In 5S, the children enjoyed reading extracts from Tom’s Midnight Garden, which is a book they chose themselves following reading an extract during Whole Class Reading. They discussed the key themes within the story: time, friendship, love and loss; using these themes they created a piece of artwork, which also celebrated their love of reading. In 5A, the children read ‘Here We Are’ by Oliver Jeffers. We read the beautiful book that encourages togetherness and created fantastic art based on the book as our inspiration. In 5HS, we read The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore! This is an amazing book sharing the love of reading throughout the life of Mr Morris Lessmore.

Year 6

In 6S, the children were so excited to learn that we were able to read the third instalment to the Aveline Jones series: The Vanishing! We read throughout the day as much as we could, created art based on the spooky descriptions In 6F, we carried out our activities around Gangsta Granny by David Walliams. We produced a diary entry from Ben’s point of view staying over for a night with his Granny. We also recreated some of the images of the key characters including Ben, Granny and Mr Parker. In 6B, we read the sequel Catching Fire to our English text The Hunger Games. We enjoyed designing a costume for Katniss in the second Hunger Games and reading as much of the book as we could! We even want to read the third instalment!

On Wednesday 1st March, 35 of our pupils participated in a Cross Country event at Weelsby Woods. The event had over 1000 children participating from over 30 schools. We had some great success in some of the races. This included our highest ever finish by a year 3 pupil, coming in 6th place out of 144 pupils. Massive congratulations to Esmai! Everyone who ran was amazing and showed true grit and determination to finish the races. A lot of notable mentions including Zoe in year 3 who finished 14th and Georgia who finished 12th. In Year 5, Lillie-Rose finished 25th which massively improved on her place last year. All members of staff were impressed with how the children behaved and yet again they represented the school brilliantly. Well done everyone!

Year 4 had a fabulous time at Woodside Wildlife Park  as part of our rainforest topic. We enjoyed seeing lots of wonderful animals and hearing lots of great facts about a wide range of animals including ring-tailed lemurs, wolves, red pandas, meerkats and otters. The immersive rainforest section was extremely exciting as we got to see some of the animals we have been learning about in our topic! We also got to see the tiger feeding and penguin feeding which we loved! The children really impressed the keepers with their knowledge of deforestation and conservation. It was a thoroughly engaging and enjoyable day provided by the fantastic guides at Woodside!

As a part of our topic in in Year 3, we had an immersive day learning all about Natural Disasters. First, we learnt how an earthquake would happen and created our very own simulation to see one in action. Then, we worked fabulously in teams to build buildings that were earthquake proof using spaghetti and marshmallows- some really were strong enough to survive an earthquake! Next, we learnt about the real life effects of natural disasters and how they put people in danger. We imagined that we had experienced this and acted out our thoughts and feelings in some role-play and hot-seating. We finished the morning with an incredible workshop from Lab Rascals who helped us to create our own volcano structures which we then erupted using dry ice and boiling water. We all had so much fun trying to create the biggest eruption cloud and we could even hear the ‘magma’ bubbling away on the inside of the volcano. To finish the day, we painted miniature volcanoes and placed them on a giant world map, helping us to locate famous volcanoes around the world and spot the ‘Ring of Fire’.