Y6 News of the Week

Welcome back to you all. It has been lovely to have everyone back in Year 6 and I have thoroughly enjoyed teaching you all face to face. We settled very quickly into our rhythm and we have covered many different areas of learning.

We began our week by catching up with friends and then chatting about the new books we have in Year 6. We have all changed our reading books and enjoyed more of our class story, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.

Our new topic, WW2, has been in full swing this week. We are all very excited to begin our learning. Big Art is always a fun way to deliver the first steps of new learning. We have thought about the Battle of Britain and we began our learning by watching video footage of the first day of the Blitz, known as Black Saturday. We have chosen different planes to create a squadron as our class display. We will complete these next week.

In Maths this week we continued to work with decimals by multiplying and dividing them. We worked carefully, and with resilience, to pick a method we thought we could use. I am so proud, as by the end of the week we were all feeling much more confident with our fluency and we even went on to reasoning problems. A sense of achievement was felt by all as we shared our knowledge with each other. Amazing Y6. We will check our knowledge next week and then move on to a new unit on percentages.

In English this week we have been introduced to Anne Frank and her diary. We have used a fact file and a newspaper article to understand more about Anne Frank and her family. We have also logged on to view the Secret Annexe and take a virtual trip around the attic. Ewan kindly brought in his copy of Anne Frank's diary and shared it with our class. We have begun to learn my new model write using pictures. It is based on a day from Anne Frank's diary. We will use this as a stimulus to write our own diaries over the next few weeks. We have also spent some of our English lesson writing up our lockdown recipes and preparing them for publishing. They look brilliant.

In Science we began our new unit on light. We discussed what we already knew and talked about some common misconceptions. We then performed an experiment to try to answer the question: does light travel in straight lines or can it curve? We used several pieces of cardboard with holes and torches to prove that the torchlight can only be seen at the other end when all the holes line up and the beam can travel straight through. We will continue to investigate this question next week as we take part in another experiment.

In Music we listened to the first of our WW2 songs, Let's all go Down the Strand by Stanley Holloway. Once we had listened to the style of music, we sang along to the chorus. We also had a quick introduction to some basic steps from the Charleston, which were expertly taught by Bella. We just about managed forward step, tap, back step, tap and found the swivel heels hard!

Our PE lessons have taken place in two halves. We have enjoyed these sessions and learnt new skills.

This week we have learnt about the National Census and created one of our own by answering the question, who is Y6's favourite author? We used tally charts and bar graphs to present our findings.

We have also had a visit from the PCSO where we talked about road safety and how to stay safe if you are out on your bikes.

New homework has been set. Could I also please ask for regular reading to take place as often as possible and I will support this further in class.

I am so proud of you all and how well you have settled back into Y6 classroom learning. I have enjoyed listening to you chat together, giggle together and play together. This is just what we all needed after so much time apart.

Have a wonderful weekend.
Your teacher,
Mrs. B.