For the second half of the year at Step Up, we won't have a different theme every week - we'll be running lots of continuous projects! Numeracy - today in numeracy, our project was about all different kinds of charts and graphs. Beginning with pie charts, we investigated some data about people's favourite things, shoe sizes, and masses. Students did a great job of inputting all of this data into pie charts! Mid-session, we went outside to collect some more data from ourselves, by running for a set time then measuring changes in heart rate. Literacy - dystopian society and fiction is our new focus. Miss Williamson introduced the topic with some exciting activities. First of all, we brainstormed as a class some features of dystopian societies, using our knowledge from popular books and films. After watching an intense trailer for one dystopian film, students worked independently on a writing task - a letter to a friend or family member, to describe a society they'd just woken up in. Some brave students read out their fantastic, creative letters to the class. Creativity - continuing the first aid course we began last Saturday, we moved on to learning CPR today! Students began the session by recapping their knowledge of last week's topic, the recovery position, by practising it again on their partners. After we proved we knew the recovery position, we brought out medical dummies to learn CPR on. This was a really important lesson, and students worked really hard to make sure they knew how to perform it, by doing some very focused practising. See below for some highlights:
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THIS WEEK'S THEME - FIRST AID!On our first week of the new year, we began a theme that we'll be following in our lessons throughout the entire half-term. Creativity - in creativity today, we began our term-long theme, which involves students taking part in a first aid course! It will be run by Heroes and teachers throughout the coming weeks. In our first session, we learned the incredibly important recovery position. See below for the day's activities! We are halfway through our 2016-17 Step Up year! To celebrate, today we had our Winter Showcase, and started off our day with some special sessions. Numeracy - today's numeracy lesson was in the food tech room: following our session last week, we took the recipes and the numbers we'd calculated, and started baking. We split into small groups and measured out our ingredients to bake some food to eat while we celebrate later. Each group made either cookies or cupcakes, and did a great job! Creativity - we spent our morning in creativity creating decorations! With festive music playing in the background, we did some arts and crafts to make our showcase look colourful and exciting. Some of us made huge paper chains following a pattern of colours, and others drew or coloured in some wintery images. We then invited our parents, carers and friends in for the last half of the day, to enjoy our showcase! Some students stood up in front of the audience to read out their speeches, and it was wonderful to see how their confidence has grown. After some special Step Up badges and prizes were given out, our families and friends were invited to take a look at all of the work we've been doing since September - and of course try the food we'd baked earlier. The showcase was a really successful event, and we hope everyone involved with Step Up enjoyed it! A huge thank you to the staff and Heroes who have done loves of work behind the scenes to run Step Up for the first half of this year. See you all in 2017! See photos from our Winter Showcase below! THIS WEEK'S THEME - WINTER SHOWCASE PREPARATION!This was our penultimate week of the term before the winter holidays - so it was all about getting ready for the fantastic winter showcase we will be having next week! Numeracy - today's numeracy session helped us to prepare for the food we will be making for our winter showcase next Saturday. To get our mathematical brains warmed up, we started the session by defining key terms in maths, such as addition and division. We were then given a recipe for burgers, which we will be cooking next week, and tasked with working out how much of each ingredient we will need for a larger number of burgers. It was a difficult challenge, but everyone gave it their best efforts and did some brilliant work! Literacy - today, our literacy session was run by Esther, one of our Heroes, and she delivered some fantastic activities that everybody enjoyed. We started off by sitting in a circle, closing our eyes and imagining our favourite moments from winter and holiday celebrations, then shred these all with the group using descriptive language. To prepare for the winter showcase next week, students then chose their favourite memories and stories from their year at Step Up so far, and put them into a speech. These speeches were absolutely fantastic, and it'll be exciting to hear some of them presented to parents and teachers next week. Creativity - of course, we couldn't have a winter showcase without all of the family, friends and teachers we'll be inviting to see our work. So, our creative task today was to make some invitations! Whilst some students chose to draw theirs on paper, most created their cards using Microsoft Publisher, learning some great new computer skills whilst making some festive invitations. Students will be taking home their invitations to family and friends, and we cannot wait to welcome everyone to Step Up next week for our celebration. Here are our Step Up students preparing for the showcase: Our first trip of the year was to The Crystal, to learn about the environment and clean energy. It was a fantastic day! After meeting up at Oasis Academy Shirley Park for breakfast, 24 of our students accompanied our teachers and student Heroes on a trip to Central London. The place we were visiting was The Crystal, a conservation education centre near the O2 arena, but to get there we had to use the Emirates Airline. Splitting up into our smaller groups, we travelled in cable cars on the Emirates Airline, across the River Thames. We soared over the river and gained a fantastic birdseye view of London, where we could see the entire city from above. The Crystal is a new, modern and interactive place to learn about the environment all over the world. There are lots of different activities across two floors, involving touch screens, futuristic installations and interactive film experiences. One favourite of the students was the Santander Bikes, which we could all cycle on to see how much energy we could generate to power technology. All of the activities were linked in some way to the einvornment, whether it was to do with learning facts about pollution, or ways in which we could use energy in a more sustainable way. Overall, it was a really exciting day for everyone who attended! We hope all of the students were able to gain a new perspective on sustainable energy and the environment, through the fun activities we engaged in. View the slideshow below to see what our day was like, in pictures! THIS WEEK'S THEME - ENVIRONMENTAL EXTRAVAGANZA!In preparation for next week's much-anticipated trip to The Crystal, we spent today learning all about the environment and sustainable energy. Numeracy - our numeracy session this week involved a lot of action! Our session was centered around planes this week, so firstly we did challenge questions about working out the perimeter and the area of airplane hangars. Next, we watched a paper plane tutorial and created our own planes, designing them to be eco-friendly. We finished off the session with a massive competition for whose plane could fly the furthest - some travelled some very impressive distances! Literacy - today we began our literacy session by looking at footage of a landfill site, and finding interesting and high-level words to describe the five senses in that place. After expanding our knowledge on pollution, garbage waste and environmental problems, students wrote to either the Croydon MP Gavin Barwell or the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, to talk about their concerns. We've been recording our students reading their letters - so maybe we can make an impact. Creativity - creativity today was all about types of renewable energy, which will help us on next week's trip to The Crystal where we'll be exploring this topic in an interactive center. After an interesting discussion about what different types of renewable energy there are, students created PowerPoint presentations in order to present some facts about each type, from solar energy to geothermal power. Here are some photos of what we got up to: THIS WEEK'S THEME - DINOSAURS!All of our sessions were Jurassic-themed this week! Numeracy - today everyone made some excellent efforts in completing lots of dinosaur-themed worksheets. First up was a code breaker, where we uncovered a sentence by adding and subtracting complicated decimal numbers. We then moved onto lots more fun activities - from measuring the heights of dinosaurs, to colouring them in by numbers, and playing sudoku-saurus! Literacy - inspired by a scene from Doctor Who, we asked ourselves what would it be like if dinosaurs invaded London and Croydon? After a quick discussion about which powerful adjectives we could use, we filled our worksheet pages with sentences to describe an invading dinosaur. Using a story mountain as a structure, students put together some fantastic descriptive writing pieces about the dinosaurs taking over the town. Creativity - in creativity this week, we created our own dinosaurs, by deciding what type of dinosaurs they would be like, such as a carnivore or a herbivore, and what they would look like. After watching some clips from Jurassic Park movies, we typed up some creative stories about how we would react if we were in that world. See below for photos of this week's activities: THIS WEEK'S THEME - UNDER THE SEA!We had lots of fun this week with our under the sea theme. Numeracy - We challenged the maths skills we've been building up in lessons at school. Everyone put a lot of effort in when completing a worksheet full of tricky questions involving negative numbers. Afterwards we linked our numeracy learning to our under the sea theme, by taking lots of images of things such as submarines and creatures, and placing them on a number line, to guess how deep in the sea they can go! Literacy - We practised our creative writing skills today, spending much of the lesson writing after a short discussion to brainstorm some ideas. A documentary clip of an ocean with two contrasting sides gave us lots of creative fuel, and we set to work drawing colourful storyboards, to illustrate our descriptive writing. Creativity - In this session, we got competitive with our knowledge of the sea. Heroes quizzed students on what they knew about the sea, and sea life. For every question a student got right, they were able to move up on a ladders and eels game board - we had lots of winners. Here are our students in action this week, exploring our under the sea theme through creative learning: THIS WEEK'S THEME - SPACE!We (quite literally!) launched into our first week back after the October holidays, with an out of this world Space theme. Numeracy - we worked on some number skills that we haven't yet practised in the normal school week. We used different functions such as multiplying and subtracting, in complicated tasks to try and find the number we were looking for. Our worksheets were space-themed, and each planet was a different step of a sum, in order to get to the number we were aiming for. Literacy - Miss McPherson made the world's first ever alien contact - but this alien's words got a little lost in translation. Students took on the challenge of decoding the alien's words, before going on to write their own letters to a species on another planet. We focused on writing in a detailed way, so we could describe the most exciting things about Earth - as well as how we live. Creativity - this week, we made our own planets! Miss Smith-Henry gave us a quiz on the planets and our solar system - some of us could recite every planet in order from memory. Afterwards, we went into detail to design our own dream planets - choosing scientific facts to describe them, as well as choosing whether they'd support life, and what it would be like to live there. Here are this week's space explorers: |
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