Our First Full Week In Y6

A super week in Y6.

We have settled into our first full week in Y6 and covered many subjects from Science and History, to French, RE, Music, Computing and much more.

We began our second week with Maths. This week we have continued to investigate place value. We have counted in millions using different representations and considered where numbers appeared on our number lines. We will continue next week with place value by comparing and rounding large numbers.

This week in Book Club we have all had a chance to take part in reading assessments. We now all have our new banded books and we are excited to focus on them. We have begun our class story Boy 87 and we now know this story is set in Ethiopia. We have been introduced to the two main characters, Shif and Bini.

In English we completed our Journey short stories and we have written short letters to Duncan to quit as his coloured crayons. We have also received a letter from our classroom chairs stating strike action. We have pleaded with them to return to service in a persuasive reply.

Our SpaG focus has been suffixes this week. We have looked at different word endings and considered if they change the root of each word.

We began our new unit in History this week, Generations – You Me and Those Who Came Before Us. We discussed the meaning behind this heading and what it could relate to. Great discussions and ideas flowed through this lesson. We then went on to think about the experiences that have shaped us to be the people we are today. A timeline supported our learning. I have set a small activity for children to complete at home to help them to think about their own families. We will continue with our learning next week.

We have also begun our new Science unit this week, Evolution, Adaptation and Inheritance. The key statement we are considering is – I can recognise that living things produce offspring of the same kind, but normally offspring vary and are not identical to their parents. This statement began to be unpicked using biscuits! We used two biscuits and their characteristics to then create an offspring biscuit and listed where its traits had come from. Of course, we wanted to eat them, but we were very careful to only eat the untouched ones that were still in the packet! This lead nicely onto an activity used to determine if a characteristic is inherited or acquired. We will continue with our learning next week where we will investigate inheritance using dog DNA. Super job done Y6.

We completed our Giant Doll's House project this week and created our installation in our classroom. The impact our display provides is thought provoking and impressive. I'm sure you will agree from the images that you can see.

In Music this week we began to understand more about the song Happy by Pharrell Williams. We then used this song to accompany our musical instruments as we played the note A on our glockenspiels.

We considered the big question, "How do different Christians describe God" in RE today. In our lesson we discussed the word powerful and thought about the types of people that showed power. From Albert Einstein to the NHS, our reasons for our choices were discussed. We created an image from different drawings and used key words to describe it.

In French today we recapped numbers from one to ten and began to learn the numbers eleven to thirty-one. We ended our day with a game of French bingo and a shout of full house. Great fun.

We completed a Y5 place value assessment today which will allow us to focus on our weaker areas. We will revisit these questions soon.

New homework has been set. Details are stuck into the back of reading response books. Homework includes: Spag online task (1), I have arranged for Spag logins to be stuck inside each reading diary if you are unsure of them, TT Rock Stars practice (as often as possible), regular reading aloud with comprehension style questions being asked (sample questions are printed in the front of each reading diary). I have also included two short activities (history and science) to be completed at the times specified ready for our next lessons.

What a week you have had. Have a wonderful weekend Y6, you have been busy bees and I am very proud of you.

Your Teacher
Mrs B.