Visitors from Japan

Professor Hiroyuki Tanaka made a personal visit to Oakington to see our school and to see how his research project was developing. The project which has brought together year 6 pupils from Oakington and Hamadera Primary school, Osaka, Japan was designed by the professor to use digital technologies to communicate, exchange information and to find out if life in year 6 is the same in both countries.

The Professor came with three of his masters graduate students who will be starting their teaching careers next year in Japanese secondary schools. The four were fascinated by the enthusiasm shown to them by the pupils in 6DA, 6RJ and 6SE towards the project.  Children asked questions about Japan and the inspiration to start a project with Oakington and Hamadera. Professor Hiroyuki, promised to ensure that further communication between the two schools is a little quicker when he gets back to Japan.

The rest of the visit continued with a tour around the school, visiting classes and seeing our school. Professor Hiroyuki stopped in 3IB’s class and was asked if he could teach the children how to count to 10 in Japanese. He willingly obliged. All the children were happy that they were able to count in Japanese, it seemed so easy.

日本語でカウントすることを学ぶ。動画を視聴するには、ここをクリックしてください。

 

World Maths Day

WORLD MATHS DAY started off with a bang with a whole school assembly where Mrs Mandalia generated lots of activities to enrich the children’s calculation skills. Starting with Year 1, 2 & 3, children had to place flash cards of random numbers from 0 to 100 in a number line. Could they organise themselves into the correct sequence?  Years 4 & 5 had numbers from 0 to 9. At first they had to position themselves into the correct order and then Mrs Mandalia, Mr Smith and Mr Cox asked random timetable questions to which the children  holding the digit had to position themselves to make the two-digit number for the answer. The audience gave lots of thumbs  up on the correct answers.

Year 6 were used a quick method of calculation to find the square root of a number ending in 5.  However, the assembly did not end there!  Maths would not be complete if it offered no challenges.  Mr Smith and Mr Cox had to put their ‘thinking caps’ on for the magic maths question. Both teachers were very impressive with their knowledge of addition and subtraction sums to find the ‘magic number’.  The audience all participated in trying to find the magic number. Throughout the day, parents were able to visit their children’s classes and carry out fantastic Maths activities including Year 1 parents in the ICT suite. The day ended with lots of enthusiasm for Maths particularly, problem solving.