Fire! Fire!

We are becoming historians this term and stepping back in time to 1666, using a range of sources including online images of artefacts, art and a variety of texts, to learn all about the events of the Great Fire of London. We will be looking at how it started, why it spread so quickly and how it was stopped. Along the way, we will learn of individuals that played a significant role at the time, such as King Charles II and Samuel Pepys, and how the catastrophic fire influenced and shaped the rebuild of London into the city we know today.

As part of our history lessons, we are using an educational game developed by the Museum of London and partner organisations, to follow the story of the Great Fire and view primary evidence and artefacts from the time. If you would like to explore further at home, it can be found at The Great Fire Of London - The Great Fire of London

Linking to our history topic, we will be using fiction and non-fiction narratives to inform and inspire our writing of poetry describing the fire, and then a news report, retelling the events of the four days as they developed, which will become the basis of our class assembly at the end of term.

In design and technology, we will be using our knowledge from our Fire of London research and Camo day last year, when we got to climb on a real fire engine, to design and build a fire vehicle of our own. Some clean junk modelling will be needed for this! (small boxes eg tissue boxes, cotton reels, straws, small plastic pots, cardboard tubes). Thank you in advance for your donations!

Finally in science, we will be looking at how the features of everyday materials determine their usage, and how some solids can be manipulated. We will be celebrating scientists that have developed new materials and had a large impact on our lives as a result, such as John McIntosh, including making our own waterproof fabric and designing a coat for the future.

At the end of term, we will be presenting an assembly on our topic and would love to invite our parents and guardians to attend, so that we can share some of what we have learnt about the Great Fire of London. More details to follow nearer the time! We hope you can make it, we are going to have a lot to share!

Using questions to organise and sort

In computing this term, we have been considering different forms of asking questions, gathering and displaying data. We explored decision or binary trees, asking yes and no questions, to understand how a computer identifies a single answer to a question.