Design and Technology

Winter Workshop

Thank you to everyone who came and helped the children with their tic-tac-toe pouches. It was a lovely afternoon 🪡👝👛

Puppet workshop

Thank you to all the families who helped us make our puppets.

Puppet Making!

Thank you to our parents for joining us this afternoon to make our puppets. We loved it! Thank you also to our Year 5 helpers.

Exploring Puppets

This morning we have been investigating different types of puppets. We looked at what they are made from and how they move.

What a great afternoon sewing with our parents!

Year 3 Winter Crafts

WHAT AN AMAZING TURN OUT! Thank you to all our Year 3 parents and carers for coming and helping finish off our DT mechanism cards.

Thank you!

Year 6 Computer Aided Design

This term, Year 6 have been exploring computer-aided design (CAD) as part of their Design and Technology curriculum. Building on last year’s wooden train set project, pupils are now designing and creating their own model cars. They have been learning how to use digital design tools to plan, test, and refine their ideas before bringing them to life.

Work at home inspired by our textile project in DT

It has been a busy day booking cakes for Maisie’s Birthday Party 🎂 We have learnt the names of the ingredients and measured them out before mixing them together.

How do we join fabric together?

Developing our cutting skills by making puppets to retell our story.

Mechanisms

We finished off our second prototype today for our DT unit. We labelled our work with key vocabulary and then created some designs to stick onto our arms.

Deconstructing a coin purse

Remembrance poetry

To think about those who have lost their lives, we created some rhyming poetry. We based our poems on poppy fields, just like our art work.

Remembrance Day 11.11.2025

Year 3 have started Remembrance Day by focusing on some art work that uses paint, fabric and stitching. When they are dry we’ll add some stitching on them to add colour and texture.

Diwali Celebration

We had a wonderful workshop this morning to celebrate Diwali and reinforce the work we have already done in Hinduism. We listened to a story, danced and created lanterns.

Year 1 had a great time making smoothies in our DT lessons!

Picnic Wraps

In D.T. we made picnic wraps to as part of the school’s 150 years celebration. We analysed different ingredients and then used our cutting, peeling and grating skills to make our wrap using our favourite.

Y4 Food Technology

A very busy day in Year 4 as we taste tested wrap ingredients, designed and created our own picnic wrap ready for our school’s 150th birthday party tomorrow.

Biomes

Today, we learnt that biomes are places with similar climates, landscapes, animals and plants. These children created biomes representing deserts, rainforests and savannas.

Biomes

In groups we created different biomes of our worlds. We thought about, climate zones, temperatures, vegetation and animals that would live in our different biomes.

DT – engineer visit!

We have loved making our trains last week in Year 5. We’ve built our chassis, adding electrics and tested our locomotives. We were even visited by a local engineer from Stadler Rail Company to help us with our electrics and testing.

We have been busy baking school cake to celebrate our schools 150 year old birthday.

Cyanotype

Year 3 have been exploring artists who use natural materials. Anna Atkins created one of the first books with photographs in it without using a camera! We practised the same technique she did nearly 180 years ago. We used light sensitive paper and natural things we found to create our cyanotype photos.

We have been busy sticking our designs onto our bunting for our 150 year celebrations.

D.T. We have finished our drawstring bags !

A selection of our finished drawstring bags, all unique as all designed and made by US.

Eid celebrations!

Today we learnt about Eid and took part in some 3D pop ups.

Ruth Wakefield – science week

For science week, we researched Ruth Wakefield. We learnt all about the temperatures needed and the variables that she changed. We then had a lesson in cookie making with our wonderful cook Monica and decorated the cookies with her face.

Today we have been reading Mr Wolf’s Pancakes. We have drawn Mr Wolf and made pancakes just like his recipe! 🥞

Art project

What an amazing start to our art project. The children created their very own paper and then decorated it. Next in our sustainability art project is to up cycle clothing. We can’t wait for the outcomes.

Superstars in Year 3 🌟

We love children doing work at home!

Our designs for our 150 Year bunting are really coming along. We are going to stitch “TOGETHER WE GROW” along with some pictures that remind us of school.

Palaeolithic Stone Age

We made art that we would find in Palaeolithic caves. We worked together and made our caves walls as realistic as we could.

Design and Technology today… textiles

We are having our first try at sewing using different stitches today. This is in preparation for designing and sewing our own bags.

5JH Lion dance to celebrate the Lunar new year! 🐲

We had an amazing afternoon in our lion dancing workshop. Happy Lunar New Year!

Running stitch

We all practised our binca running stitch so that we are ready to create our 150 year celebratory bunting.

150 Years of Smithdown

We created some designs that we may use for our 150 year bunting. We will practise stitching so that we can attached our designs.

Our Finished Moon Buggies

We have loved making our moon buggies today. Do you like them?

Making our Moon Buggies

We have loved making our Moon Buggies this moring.

Sawing Skills!

Year 2 have been busy sawing their doweling to make their wheels and axles for a new moon buggy!

DT – Vehicles

In DT today we looked at a range of our own toys. We analysed how they moved and started to learn all about wheels and axles.

Product Analysis

Today we looked at some moving vehicles in preparation for designing our own. We thought carefully about the object’s design features. We were very confident at identifying the object’s wheels and axle.

Parent assembly and activities Year 3

We had a lovely morning with our Hands assembly and our DT craft activities. Thank you to all our adults who turned up to support us.

Sequencing

This week in Mathematics, the children in class RJP have been focusing on sequencing. We explored the vocabulary, how ‘sequencing’ means to repeat a pattern. The children used paint to create an ‘ABBA’ pattern firstly, following the pattern, ‘red, green, red, green’. We then had lots of fun demonstrating the ‘ababab’ pattern using Christmas pictures, and designing a colourful paper-chain. To extend the learning, we explored different patterns, expanding on the number of picture cards, colours, and using shapes which have been learned previously. This helps the children problem solve sequencing in a fun way.
Why not keep up this learning at home, by asking the children to make repeated patterns using different objects.

Mechanisms!!

We created moving mechanisms using pivots and levers in our DT lesson with different types of cards, we created holes to bring the mechanism together with a spilt pin and made it move.

5 currant buns in the bakers shop.

Remembrance Day 2024

11:00 11.11.2024

Huge respect in our class to recognise the soldiers that have fallen in the past. We did a minute silence in the morning and then created amazing poppy art work based on our art topic ‘painting with scissors’ in the afternoon.

Diwali lanterns

Today we are designing our Diwali lanterns for next week. We have learnt the story of Rama and Sita and thought about why Diwali is celebrated in Hindu religion. We are trying to focus on using Rangoli patterns.

Painting with scissors

We used Henri Matisse as our inspiration for our art topic. We used his method of painting with scissors to make our collages.

Year 5 Primary Engineer Award

Earlier in the year, year 5 took part in a project with Primary Engineer and built moving locomotives with an electrical circuit. Today we celebrated each child taking part, awarded awards for best group work and also two boys took home the ‘Best communicator’ award. Well done, year 5!

Cooking time again!

We had our second group to make our traditional Italian bolognese. They had a great time preparing the ingredient and seasoning it to perfection! Thanks to our amazing head chef once again – Monica.

Year 3 Volcano eruptions!

Volcanoes Eruptions!

We had an amazing afternoon erupting our volcanoes! We even had a very dangerous and violent composite volcano with thick magma which increased the pressure when erupting.

Year 4 enjoyed test testing ingredients for our Ramen recipe.

Eid Mubarak!

Happy Eid to all our families celebrating! We had a lovely day and week celebrating with all our children and adults.

Spaghetti Bolognese time!

Our first group created their very own authentic traditional bolognese sauce! We have linked our DT unit with our Geography topic of Italy. Super behaviour and sensible cooks.

Volcanoes!

We have created our volcanoes and painted them. They look amazing! We are going to erupt them this week and see what happens when an active volcano blows. Watch this space…

Primal Painting

Year 3 used the pigment from different foods and natural resources to paint and mark make.

Buzz Wire Games

Bell Beaker Pottery

Super work creating our Bronze Age Bell Beaker pots. We created a similar shape and added patterns to them.

We loved making smoothies in Year 1! We had so much fun!

DT – Making our chairs

We had lots of fun using different joining techniques to build our own chairs. Take a look at some of our fantastic structures

Great morning with our Everton project! We made our dough from scratch, cut up our own toppings and created wonderful pizzas!

Today we have baked cakes to help celebrate Maisie’s Birthday ?

Maisie Mouse in our story is having a birthday! ? ? ?

5EHD DT

We have been working hard on our rail engineering project. Over the past couple of weeks, we have created our own locomotives, complete with a frame, wheels, axels and an electrical circuit.

Check out our finished chairs!

We made chairs as part of our DT topic on stable structures.

Teamwork – we started to build our chairs

We worked so well in teams to start to build our chairs in DT

Building our prototypes!

Buzz Buzz

We’ve had a great afternoon making circuits with a light and a buzzer to help us when making our buzz wire game. We also got to have a go at a buzz wire game!

We had an amazing day on world book day! We focused on #Goldilocks and created our own poems and naughty hashtags.

Supertato’s House

This afternoon we created Supertato’s house using icing sugar and gingerbread. We mixed the icing sugar and water to use as glue to stick the house together.

We rounded off our ‘My Bnk’ sessions with talking about money habits and the importance of saving! We even made our very own money bank.

We explored how nets can be used to transform into 3D shapes. We practised cutting, folding and gluing tabs to be able to make shell structures.

We enjoyed making puppets with our families yesterday!

Great afternoon with our LJMU students and our sustainability project.

Tesco trip

To continue learning about chefs, we’re going to become chefs and make our own soup! To prepare for this, we went to Tesco to buy the ingredients we need.

A happy Diwali from 3TS! We made beautiful lanterns to represent the festival of light.

We loved making models of our homes!

We loved making models of our homes! #smithdowneyfs #smithdowndt