“Penpol pupils are curious, creative and courageous learners. Our school community believes in authenticity as the foundations of deep-rooted learning. Through our rich and relevant curriculum, we nurture community-minded, forward-facing international citizens of the future.”
The reception classes had a great time when Police Officer Mike visited us today.
He brought loads of equipment which we tried on and found out all about the different roles that the police do, including search and rescue, first aid and lots of different things to help us and keep us safe.
Police look after people -Cora
We got to see what is inside the police car and had a go with the lights and sirens.
If someone takes a bike the police take them to jail – Charlotte
I want to be a policeman when I grow up – Isaac
Class 1 and 2 would like to thank Mike for spending the time to share his exciting and interesting career with us.
This half term our Year 3’s have been learning how to use Tinkercad to create 3D models and objects on their computers. This clever program lets you create anything you like in three dimensions, which can then be sent to a 3D printer to turn digital designs into real world objects.
To start with our students were introduced to the basics of Tinkercad (including how to resize, rotate, recolour and arrange 3D shapes). They then applied this learning to a series of fun (and slightly bizarre!) challenges – including building a Giraffe in 8 blocks, a favourite food item in 6 blocks, a spaceship with 4 blocks and a self portrait with 2 blocks (and the awesome Scribble tool!). To make it even harder then only had a few minutes for each challenge!
These fun and low-stake challenges helped the children explore the program and encouraged them to create multiple designs very quickly, rather than spending hours on each project. That meant when we came onto designing our Winter Ornaments the children were able to rapidly prototype different ideas before choosing their favourite.
But rather than me telling you about that here’s a video from some of our Year 3’s talking about the project…
DESIGN, REFINE AND PRINT
Once the children had designed a few different winter ornaments it was then time to refine those designs to ensure they looked as great as possible (and that they would print out nicely on our printer).
Part of this process involved checking the dimensions to ensure they all fit inside a 60mm box and also the tricky task of choosing which colour combination they’d like to use!
Lastly, we added a hole to the top to ensure our decorations could be hung up if desired.
After that all that was left was to print them out. An easy task you might think? Well, given we had 113 to print and each one takes nearly an hour it was touch and go whether or not we’d get them all done by the end of term!
Thankfully we managed it and below you can see a gallery of every single decoration designed by our Year 3’s and Year 6’s this year.
