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Year 5 had a fantastic visit to the Centre for Life to end their STEM Week. They learnt lots about astronomy during the planetarium show, found out about satellites, tested out their own rockets and had a chance to explore the different sections around the centre.

TikTok is an ever growing craze for young children. It has an advisory age of 13 and over because of the content which is shared and the easy ability to connect with other users. Much of the content is of an adult nature and without supervision your child could see many videos which are not age appropriate and connect with strangers.

During discussions with our older children recently about social media we were concerned to hear a misconception on how accounts must be open so that parents could keep close control over their children’s accounts. This is not true. Your account does not need to be open for a parent to check, we do not advise any of our pupils to have accounts but if you have given permission to your child to use it then we strongly advise that they have a closed account. As a parent, you should have a password that you share with your child at all times so that you can access their account 24/7. This is the safest way to monitor their account for threats. This advice we give to both the use of instagram (13+) and whatsapp (16+).

There have been a number of safety alerts both in the media and from advisory sectors of computing education that should be listened to. This is a social media targeted at older teenagers and adults.

Parental Controls: You can now set parental controls on TikTok so you have more say on what content children are seeing in their stream. Follow this link for more details. (As always, these settings do not always block everything, parent supervision is still required!)

https://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2020/02/22/parents-now-can-control-their-childrens-activity-on-tiktok.html

Below is a link to information from the National Online Safety, which as a school, we encourage you to follow.

Taken from NationalOnlineSafety.com

TikTok is a video-sharing social media app available on iOS and Android which lets users create, share, and view user created videos much in a similar manner to Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. It’s main draw, however, is that users can record and upload bite-sized looping videos of themselves lip-syncing and dancing to popular music or soundbites, often for comedic effect, which can then be further enhanced with filters, emojis and stickers. TikTok has been designed with the young user in mind and has a very addictive appeal. At the beginning of 2019 it skyrocketed in popularity to become the iOS store’s most downloaded app with over 33 million downloads. Estimates suggest that it now has anything between 500 million and over 1 billion monthly active users worldwide.

Thank you to Stuart Culley, from Costain, who worked with Year 4 today building on from the assembly last week about his work on Testos Roundabout. He gave them an insight into the job of a civil engineering.

All the children were given the opportunity to build a larger scale bridge as part of a team on a map based on the Testos Roundabout.

The children quickly learned that it was harder than it looked and took time, patience and skill.

Great work from our future civil engineers!

During STEM week our Reception pupils made rockets.

We took a water bottle and stuck a narrow straw to the top of the bottle. Then we measured a wider straw and put it on top. We made a rocket and glued it on and then decorated our bottles with stars.

We counted down and tested to see if our rockets worked.

Y6EM had a fabulous day of coding with specialised computing teachers from the ICT in Schools team at The Word on Thursday of STEM Week.

They worked with EV3 lego robots, programmed Spheros and discovered how to use Pencil Code to produce some very well known tunes.

Many thanks to Mrs Chippendale for a fantastic day.

This week, Year 4 have been designing, making and evaluating models their very own cars. They have been building on their knowledge of fossil fuels and renewable energies and researching how they could power their very own car.

Year 6 have been investigating bridges this week. They began the week by looking at bridge structures and exploring their features. They then created a range of different-shaped beams which they tested to find out which could hold the most weight. The children used their knowledge of trusses to improve their bridge designs and increase their sturdiness. Year 6 have had an amazing week of investigating,  designing and modelling and we are very impressed with their final products.

We brought our STEM week to a close with a fantastic whole school showcase of all the work that has been going on in and around school this week.

Our children have thoroughly enjoyed this creative week and it was evident from their explanations during the assembly how much knowledge they have gained from this week.