AoLE
Summer 2024 Y4

What is it?

We had lots of fun looking at items and pictures from the 1980's.

What do we want to find out?

At the beginning of the topic, we had lots of questions and ideas of things that we would like to learn about. This included:

The cost of items in the 80s.
Differences in style and fashion.
What toys and activities did children use?
Was there any disasters?
What were the key events of the 80s?

1980's Timeline

In groups, we created a timeline of key events during the 1980s. Some key events included:

The creation of the Rubix's Cube,
The Miners' Strike 1984,
The Challenger Space Disaster in 1986,
www. - World Wide Web!
Creation of video games.

We loved using our numeracy skills to place the dates on the timeline in order.

After this lesson, Dosbarth Du decided they wanted to research the Miners Strike and Dosbarth Arian decided that they wanted to learn about the Challenger Space Disaster.

1984 Miners' Strike

Dosbarth Du were interested in learning about the 1984 Miner's Strike as it affected the local community.

We were very lucky that Dosbarth Gwyn ( Year 5) learned all about this for their topic Cynefin Cwmlai and were willing to teach the children about everything that they had learned. There was a lot of discussion and questions being asked and Dosbarth Gwyn provided lots of answers. Diolch Dosbarth Gwyn!

Expressive Arts - Miners' Portraits

We were inspired by the artist Valerie Ganz and her artwork of miners. We looked closely at her print, 'A Miner Going Home' and tried to replicate this image using pastels and chalk.

Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster

Dosbarth Arian delved into learning about space travel and the Challenger disaster.

We started by having a class discussion about the event as it was quite emotional.

The children created a list of questions that they would like to research. These included:

What was the Challenger?
When did the disaster happen?
Who was involved?
Why and how did it happen?
Where did the disaster occur?

The children used Chromebooks to find answers to their questions. They chose different ways to represent this information. Then, using the information that they had found, they created an Adobe video about the disaster.

Here's two videos that we created...

Science - Light

During our science lessons, we began investigating light. We firstly discovered that light is a form of energy made up of a spectrum of colours.

We used torches around the class to find objects that are opaque, transparent and translucent. We were shocked by some of the items!

In groups, we were challenged to prove that light travels in a straight line by using pegs, cardboard, pencils and a torch. It's safe to say we found this challenging! With a range of clues, we finally discovered how to prove that light travels in straight lines!