How sound affects
28 Feb 2025Form 6 has explored many interesting concepts this week.
In maths, Form 6 has been exploring the properties of 3D shapes. They began by identifying a variety of 3D shapes based on how many faces, edges and vertices they had. They also learned about some new shapes that they had not seen before, such as dodecahedrons and icosahedrons. The class were fascinated to find out that a lot of the shape names were linked to Greek words. After that, the children hunted around in their own classroom to see what everyday objects were formed from recognisable 3D shapes.
Over the term, the children in Form 6 have been developing new skills and preparing routines for a class gymnastics competition. Some children have also taken on the extra challenge of choreographing their own routines. It has been amazing watching the children develop over the term and they now have one more lesson to prepare their routines, ready to perform their routines in weeks 9 and 10.
In English, the class has enjoyed learning about the British author and artist, William Blake, following references to him in the class book, Skellig. Unappreciated and deemed strange in his time, Blake had many visions and dreams, which he turned into poetry and art (and he also enjoyed wandering around naked). A Poison Tree is a poem which warns of the dangers of leaving your anger unspoken and Form 6 investigated these ideas, as well as discussing Blake's dislike of formal, boring education. How can a bird that is born for joy sit in a cage and sing? It's lucky for our pupils that education has moved on since Blake's day!
In science, Form 6 has been learning how sound can harm our health and what we can do to limit the harm that sound can do us. They have been learning about the structure and function of the human ear as well as the amplitudes (volumes) and frequencies (pitches) of sounds that we can hear. The next step was to look at how sound might cause health problems. Noise, an unwanted sound, can cause minor problems such as irritation, through to more severe effects, such as headaches and vomiting, or even causing permanent total or partial deafness. We discussed the role of headphones in the epidemic of hearing loss in young people. We noticed that a soft sound is much louder when a beaker is held over our ears rather than held in front. The focused energy reaching our ears is able to damage tiny hairs in the cochlear of our inner ears. Luckily, we have thousands of these hairs at each frequency, as the damage is permanent and why we tend to lose the ability to hear higher frequencies as we age.
Within the PSHE topic of staying safe whilst out and about, we discussed the danger of wearing headphones whilst crossing roads, as it reduces an awareness of your surroundings. Combine this with looking at your phone as you walk and you have a potentially lethal combination. This is something for the children to be aware of before they start walking to their senior schools.
