Three of our Year 2/3 pupils were invited to the Sage on Thursday.The lucky three,Reece, Demi and Will had a wonderful time learning how to dance in wellies, play drums and sing African songs.They mixed with children from other Gateshead schools and all agreed that it was great fun.J Anderson

For the second of the linking schools project workshops Swalwell played host to Birtley East Primary School pupils. A cultural day was organised which included African mask making,drumming and gumboot dancing. Children from both schools enjoyed dining together and had ample opportunity to engage with friends they had met on the first workshop at the Shipcote Art Gallery. After lunch everyone was delighted to take part in a mini assembly of dancing, singing and games to celebrate the success of the day. More photos can be seen in linking schools album . J Anderson

The Community Police do a lot of pro-active work around education and safety. We feel it is really important to create links with professionals and our young people , so Year 5/6 welcomed Shaun ,a Community Support Officer, into school today. He talked about his career, gave crime prevention advice and spoke about crime and its consequences. After a question and answer session he left a bag full of goodies for the children .Thanks again Shaun! Photos in the gallery click here Mrs Anderson

>Our visit to a real working farm enabled us to see cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry as well as pets and exotic species. We had a fabulous time at Whitehouse Farm. The hands-on activities kept us entertained for hours. Children were able to handle, feed and learn about a variety of animals and to ride around the farm on a tractor. In the sheds we touched and learned about reptiles and insects and were amazed at the meerkats, iguanas and tortoises. Photographs can be seen in the gallery (farm). J Anderson

This trip was organised to encourage children to use our local library. In the library, pupils listened to a story and then were given a tour of the facilities. They were shown how to locate fiction and non-fiction books and the older children discovered 'read-alone' books and realised that the fiction books were ordered alphabetically in author surname. Photographs can be seen in the gallery. (KS1 trips) (Benjamin)

Firemen from Swalwell Fire Service often come into school to give safety talks to our children. Pupils look forward to seeing the officers who show them videos, let them dress up in uniform and gave advice on fire safety. Photographs can be found in our gallery under the link for visitors.

Our trip to Beamish Hall in Durham to see the wild birds of prey family was organised by Miss Scott. The children had a fabulous time in the woodland setting and saw birds in comfortable habitats. Hawks, owls and falcons were on show and children saw and interacted with cute baby owls. A flight presentation gave us an insight to the ability of the birds. Although the rope course and playground were out of bounds that day due to bad weather, it did not stop us having a super time! This was an educational, inspired, experience that will never be forgotten. (Benjamin)
See photographs in the gallery. (KS1 Trips)

Science lessons were enhanced with a visit to the Centre of Life where we studied the Earth, Sun and Moon. See photographs in the gallery.

Our pupils took a walk on the wild side when they visited a dinosaur exhibition at Sunderland Museum.The trip was organised by class teacher,Miss Smith as part of the topic pupils had been studying in literacy lessons. This was a fun exciting trip , activities included workshops, trails, digs and shows to celebrate all things dinosaur.
See photographs under gallery..J Anderson

Arbeia Roman Fort and Museum is at South Shields. It brings the Romans to life by exploring excavated remains .Year 2/3 saw reconstructions of an officer's house, barrack block and gatehouse. These reconstructions are based on evidence unearthed on the site which helps us to discover how Romans lived. We saw armour, tools, weapons, cooking utensils,coins and jewellery in the Museum. After lunch we unravelled secrets of the past when we became archaeologists and dug for finds .The museum staff were very knowledgable and helped us to study the artefacts we found buried in Timequest We were able to try our hand at mosaics and also participated in role play whilst dressed in Roman attire. A wonderful trip! Why not view photographs of this super day by visiting our website gallery?.J Anderson

We had a brilliant day at the CLC on the 10th of June. The theme of our visit was Greeks and Romans. We made posters,wrote stories and played in the grounds of Heworth Grange School. Thank you to Miss Allen for organising this trip.
The pupils of Year 3/4 had a great time.

Ponds are fascinating habitats. They contain plants and animals. Year 3/4 discovered what was lurking beneath the water on their trip to the Derwent Walk. Sensible footwear, nets, containers, identification sheets, magnifying glasses, pencils, paper, camera and packed lunches were all required for the trip. After a health and safety talk, pupils were allowed to collect and identify organisms. They drew their observations and discovered that different animals live in different parts of the pond.
Photographs can be seen in the gallery..Posted by Mrs Anderson

What a fun day! Swalwell pupils wore their pyjamas to school in order to raise money for comic relief. £150 was raised and sent to the charity for good causes in this country and abroad. A talent show was also held in school where children were encouraged to sing, dance, tell jokes and act. The highlight of the show was when the staff performed YMCA.
Photographs of the event are in the gallery (Helping Others) M Clark

Year 3/4 were concerned that birds were disappearing throughout Britain. They were delighted when Gateshead environmental services involved them in the making of bird boxes and an owl box. The boxes were placed in Swalwell park with the hope that they would attract many endangered species to the area. Our work with Gateshead and improvements to Swalwell park is continuing.
See photos in the gallery. (Swalwell Park - our contribution)Benjamin

Children enjoyed a maths morning when parents and carers came into school to have fun playing number games which were organised in a very interesting way. Adults interviewed on the day said that the morning had been a success and they had enjoyed the lessons.
Photos can be viewed in our gallery.L scott

Children enjoyed a maths morning organised by Miss Smith, our numeracy co ordinator.Parents and carers attended the event held on April 27th. Lots of fun was had by all.The sessions were eventful , interesting and well organised .
Photos can be viewed in our gallery.Benjamin

Playground Buddies is a playground leadership programme designed to develop leadership skills and to encourage children to partcipate in activities. The programme is aimed at children in Year 5 and 6. Our Year 5 pupils attended Whickham comprehensive for buddy training. They passed on their skills to other year groups in school. This has had a huge impact on the behaviour, co-operation and physical activity within school. The games children were taught on their training day are now being developed at playtimes and lunchtimes in the KS2 yard.

View photographs in the Gallery (Under 'Sports Events'). Mrs Anderson

St. James' Park; the home of Newcastle United football club was the venue for a Year 5 outing on the day Alan Shearer signed as temporary manager. Miss Busby and Mrs Anderson accompanied the children on a tour of the grounds. Dressing rooms, dugouts, private boxes and the stands were viewed. An exciting and memorable day was had by all!

Photographs can be viewed on the website Gallery.Benjamin

Saltwell park was the venue for an exciting literacy/book week event. The Dryden centre at Gateshead had organised a literacy project which encouraged the sharing and reading of books. Staff were dressed as characters from their favourite books and our year 5 class were fortunate to be invited to join in the festivities. The day was made all the more pleasurable with organised displays and exciting drama productions. Photographs of the event can be viewed on the website in the school gallery.
By Benjamin

Year 5 were very lucky to have a visitor in school. Luca, a student who had first hand knowledge of African culture and who had visited the country himself came into school on many occasions to show children African artefacts and to talk about his travels. Masks, weapons and jewellery were handled by the children. A display was then created in class as a reminder of the visit from Luca.
See photos in the gallery (Under culture)J Anderson

Year 5 had an interesting and stimulating visit to Beamish open air museum. The museum is divided into areas joined by footpaths. In the town pupils saw Georgian houses and shops and were able to purchase sweets from the old-fashioned sweet shop. A visit to the pit cottages and colliery was the highlight of the day, with children donning safety helmets for their trip underground.
After lunch it was time to be taught in Victorian style. Children were transported by tram to the old school where they took part in Literacy and Numeracy lessons using quills and parchment. Everyone agreed that life today is much easier than it was 200 years ago!Photos of the trip can be viewed in the gallery; Beamish.
By Megan and Benjamin.

Evening Chronicle Newsroom
In September we visited the Evening Chronicle Newsroom, to professionally produce our own front pages of the 'Swalwell Star.' After preparation work in class we used the same software as journalists to create our news stories and added plug boxes, headlines, images and captions.

Whickham Library
We have enjoyed 2 visits to our local library this year, where we learned more about the library system and borrowed books on our school ticket. As well as participating in some literary activities we were lucky enough to be given a tour, including the back rooms!

Alnwick Gardens
The whole school visited Alnwick Gardens and had a wonderful day and year 6 were no exception. We had a great time visiting the different areas of the garden with the particular favourites being the Grand Cascade, Serpent Gardens (resulting in a few wet children!) and the rope bridges in the Treehouse (Mrs Fife was NOT scared!)

Whickham school hosted the mini olympics on July the 1st. This involved year 6 children from cluster primary schools participating in small games events. Although we didn't win medals we had a fabulous afternoon and have lots of good memories. Sun, rain, thunder and lightning did not dampen our spirits or stop us from being good sportsmen. Thankyou to Mr Hampson and Mrs. Anderson for accompanying us and to Mr McCaughty and his team of sports leaders at Whickham. From all of year 6.
Photographs can be seen in our gallery.

A fantastic day was had by year 6 when they were given the chance to visit Kingston park - the home of the Newcastle Falcons. Expert training was given in this difficult sport. Whilst children participated in tag rugby matches, Mr Hampson and Mrs Anderson were given lessons on the rules of the game. In the afternoon, pupils were given the opportunity to use computers to make DVDs of the occasion containing music and pictures.
Photographs can be viewed in the gallery under sporting events.
By Benjamin, Year 6

Swalwell Primary School pupils got quite a shock when they walked into the school yard and discovered a police car waiting in the yard for them!
Pupils speculated wildly on the cause of this, but suspicions were confirmed when they entered their classrooms and were confronted by their grim teachers and a policeman, explaining the situation - ALIENS HAD INVADED DURING THE NIGHT!
It was revealed by the site manager, Mr. Fitzpatrick, that he had seen great balls of fire erupting from the school field late at night after locking the school up. All children were led up to the field and were greeted by an amazing site - a large, burnt crop circle in the middle of the grass, with a space shuttle like object placed in the middle. Police had marked the area off, and all pupils were extremely cautious, especially the forensics who had to actually touch the evidence - e.g.; pieces of skin, metal from the shuttle.
In school, many strange things had happened. In Nursery, a blue foot was found in the sandpit! A glowing egg was found in Year 3, and in Reception/Year 1 a hand was discovered! (Maybe the aliens took part in an amputation).
It soon became apparent that this was a hoax, but not before children had produced high-quality, high-tech work on the mysterious events of the day.

By Megan and Benjamin, Year 6 pupils.

Wouldn't you like to attend a school that sells Fairtrade bars? By doing this we are helping poorer countries to make a good living. The fairtrade bars are sold in school for 37p each by children in the Year 6 class. All pupils are encouraged to buy these bars at break time on Friday mornings. The sales were turned into real life mathematics problems in the classroom. One of these sessions was recorded and shown on Teachers TV for the Raising Aspirations program.
See photos in the gallery. (Under Fairtrade Friday)

The CLC at Heworth was the setting for a day of ICT datalogging. Opportunities were provided in the morning for all Year 6 children to record temperature, sound and light. Their findings were input and printed out. Later that day children used Matilda software and Photoshop CS3 to enhance skills. The wanted posters that were produced were of a high standard. A good day was had by all!
Photographs can be viewed in our gallery.

For 5 days in May Year 6 pupils were subjected to a week of testing. Our english, maths and science skills have been greatly improved with all the practice we have done this year. Mr Hampson has been very supportive throughout and has given us the confidence to do our best and to achieve the maximum of our potential. We now have the skills to take with us to secondary schools and in our future careers. We are all looking forward to the end of term party and our leavers assembly.

Year 6 and Year 5 pupils shocked all Impetus judges by giving them a hip hop rap of their project this year at the Impetus award! Raising Aspirations was the theme of the rap and the pupils did the school proud with their performance. Here is an excerpt from the rap;

More of our talents will be revealed in July at the Dryden Centre. Watch this space!

Year 6 arrived at Kingswood at 11am for a full pack day of activites. After some tasty lunch the children got changed into safety gear. Strapped from head to toe the children set off to abseil down a 20ft wall. All the children were very brave and completed the task without any hesitation.
After a quick juice break both groups had to put their heads together in order to build a 6ft stand from lego which could balance 5 welllington boots.
In the evening children enjoyed sipping on some hot choco whilst singing some camp fire songs.
Finally the children got dressed for bed and were ready to keep Mrs Lancastle-Smith and Miss Busby up to 4am!
Images can be seen in the gallery.Click here to view.
By Benjamin, Year 6

Year 2/3 spent a lesson making clay dinosaurs, they had done lots of research and had already designed their new friends in their art books before bringing them to life.

The children then took their work home in the form of a project, they were asked to use different materials to create their dinosaur. Here are some of the results!

Georgia O'Keefe Artwork
Using digital images taken during our visit to Alnwick Gardens, we recreated flowers in the style of Georgia O' Keefe. To allow us to enlarge one area of a flower we made a frame and then used a grid to help us to use relative proportion.

Greenhouses
We designed and made a greenhouse structure to enable our sunflower seeds to grow successfully. Working as part of a small team, we produced several design ideas, including step by step lists of what needed to be done and resources to be used. Then we measured accurately, used vices and saws and eventually glued the structure together, after adding the transparent plastic they were successfully completed.

We have been working on solving problems that can arise between friends. We made a friendship web and talked about what happens when a link is broken and who this can affect.

Our class looked at how we can help to sort issues between people as mediators without taking sides.

In Year 3/2 science we have been focusing on practical investigations.

We are starting to make our own questions to be investigated, for example, what material is best for keeping beans warmer for longer? and what is the best material for keeping my hot water bottle warmer through the night?

When we have made our questions we predict what we think will happen; make an equipment list and write a method.

After this we conduct our experiment ourselves or with our group. This is great fun. We have to get all our equipment and set it up before we can start our investigation.

While we are doing our investigation we have to take measurements and record them.

At the end we look at our results and draw a conclusion to see if we have answered the question we set.

We have also investigated shadows and if the shadow changes if it is closer to a light source and thermal insulation - will an ice cube melt quicker if it is wearing a coat.

Check out our science photos in the Gallery!

We have used practical maths to help us this year to help us with our numeracy.

We use giant chalk number lines to help us with addition and subtraction of any small number and to help us recognise of multiples of 2, 3, 5 and 10.

We made fraction pizzas to see the link between equivalent fractions.

Year 3/2 also made a visual timetable of their day from waking up to going to bed with digital and analogue times on them.

We went on a right angle hunt round our classroom and our new and improved playground.

Check out our Gallery to see more photos!

Our Year 6 class were fortunate enough to spend a day at Newcastle University working with students who helped us gain an insight into student life. We discovered a wide variety of courses that may interest us in the future and were given the opportunity to try some of them, including archaeology and mechanical engineering.

Another day was spent in school, where we took part in a variety of workshops where industries such as dentists, pharmaceutical companies, British Telecom and Motor mechanics allowed us to try out some aspects of their work.

Year 6 have competed in several tournaments, sporting events and festivals, including football, tag rugby, basketball, tri-golf and dance. In class they have been taught by several professional coaches who have helped everybody to develop skills as well as stamina, agility and quickness.

In ICT we have been very busy learning how to make our own databases.

We look the different parts of databases, at files, fields and records. We made our own databases with our group.

In our literacy work we studied Myths, fables and Legends. In ICT we use Fresco to create our own images on characters we looked at. We drew The Lambton Worm, Medusa and Sir John Lambton.

We have been learning to add text and pictures into a document. We made Christmas posters and designed some posters for the PTA Easter raffle.

Year 3/2 wrote non-chronological reports on Healthy Eating and Keeping Safe after we had a health week in school in January. The school nurse came to speak to us. We gathered lots of information and typed our reports.

Lately Year 3/2 have been looking at music programs and have record some simple tunes they made using 2 simple music toolkit. We will be making our own tunes with more than one instrument soon - so watch this space!!!

We have been studying Vincent Van Gogh and his picture of the Sunflowers.

We made our own studies of the picture and took a viewfinder to find out favourite area of the picture.

We enlarged it and re-created it in 3-d using tissue paper.

We plan to make prints based on this picture as well.

You can see more photos in our Gallery.

We have been reading the stories of Roald Dahl. Our favourites were Fantastic Mr Fox and Georges Marvellous Medicine.

We acted out scenes from both. Our favourite scenes were escaping from the mechanical diggers - From Mr Fox and Giving Grandma here medicine - From Georges Marvellous Medicine.

In literacy we also studied Fables, Myths and Legends. We use read lots of different stories and analysed them. We did some drama work and planned our own hero story. We used small world to make our picture plans.

We wrote descriptions of what it would be like to be in an Indian jungle linked to Culture week. Our country was India and we looked at many different things that we find there.

Our class have been learning to use the success criteria to edit and amend our work. We work with a partner, as two heads are better than one when it comes to spotting mistakes. We correct using a coloured pencil.

We looked at features of instructional texts and made Angels delight by adding numbers to the instructions to make them easier to follow.

Find out more about what we do in our Photo Gallery.

Jonny Starr
Year 6 visited Heworth Grange CLC where they created and recorded the sound effects, music and theme tune to the animation 'Jonny Starr.'

CAD - CAM
We used Computer Aided Design software to generate 3-D images to create a'virtual' design of a butterfly, a boat and a robot. We then designed a key ring which was manufactured using a rapid prototyping machine.

Lego Robotics
Year 6 had great fun learning to program robotic devices using Lego Nxt Mindstorm software. We were taught how to build instructions into programs which enable the robots to carry out routines and manoeuvres. Year 6 made so much progress that they even created their own programs and made the robots do exactly as they wished!

Year 6 Lego Robotics - It Works!

Powerpoint
To help us revise the human body in Science we designed and created our own powerpoint presentation. We animated and translated each slide, inserted background images, pictures and sound as well as hyperlinks.

The Human Body (PPT: 2.2MB)

We have been working on our speed, agility and quickness in PE. We have used the ladders for quick feet and hurdles to improve our running with high knees.

Everyone has worked hard to improve in PE this year.

Year 3/2 and Year 4 have been lucky enough to work with drama students from Gateshead College once a week, every week since January.

We play different games and become different characters. It is really developing our speaking and listening skills.

You can see more of our photos in the Gallery.