Y6 Theme Day and News 18.6.21

A brilliant week of learning has taken place in Year 6 again this week. We have thoroughly enjoyed our WW2 Theme Day and we certainly dressed to impress. I'm sure you will agree from the photos that Year 6 immersed themselves in the 1940's and made their final theme day a good one. We have also taken part in many other areas of learning from understanding processed foods and food labels in science to using a protractor accurately in maths.

What a super Theme Day we had as we welcomed our VE celebrations into Y6. Your outfits amazed me. Thank you Y6. We began our day by making spitfire planes to fly in the final Battle of Britain. Our planes took to the skies after some tweaking and the battle began. We then came back into the classroom to put our periscopes to the test. We changed our classroom around to create trenches and used beanbags as our ammunition. Fire – a large hoop gained us one point and a small hoop 2 points. Which battalion would win? We also planned our bunting designs ready to complete in class time. After lunch and filled we excitement, we entered our classroom that had been transformed into a street party. Flags flew and music played. We performed our WW2 songs and then sat down to be served afternoon tea. I served tea and coffee (otherwise known as orange and blackcurrant juice) and the fun began. We spent the next hour enjoying all the goodies set out on our tables. Your contributions were a complete success and looked delicious on each cake stand. We ended our day watching the first part of our film Goodnight Mr Tom and we will finish it off soon. Thank you for all your support in making our Theme Day a memorable one.

We began our week in maths by using chalk and metre sticks to create triangles. We drew many different triangles outside on the playground and then identified their perpendicular heights before going on to calculate their area. We then moved on to calculating the volume of cubes and cuboids. To help recap our learning we created different cubes and cuboids with multilink cubes and investigated how we could find different shapes but with the same volume. Later in our lesson we found a formula which supported our learning. We now know that V=LxWxH. Our final area of learning this week was using a protractor accurately. We used our desks to measures lines before then using a protractor to create an angle of a given degree. We had great fun covering our desks in all sorts of angles. We completed our week of learning by tackling a SATs paper which focused on reasoning skills. We have one more paper to go! You are smashing it Y6, and I am so proud of you.

Our English lessons this week began with an expert edit of our Covid19 poems. They are now ready to be published in our study work books. We have moved on to a new unit in English – a descriptive write. We have played warm up games, focused on vocabulary and learnt our first two paragraphs of our story text. We will continue to progress with this new piece of writing. We have also begun a new unit of spellings, the ible sound.

During our book club sessions this week we have focused on the Holocaust in the form of non-fiction text. We have spotted new vocabulary and matched new words to definitions, and we have also looked at the layout of the information. We will continue with this new learning next week.

The Holocaust has also been the focus of our history lesson this week. We were introduced to Steven Frank, a Jewish survivor of WW2. We discussed the content of the video and then we went on to work with a partner to answer different questions about his early life. We found out different facts about his life, like how old Steven Frank was when the Nazis came to Holland and the things he was banned from doing as a boy. We found out that he could not even go to the library or the zoo! We went back with him to his old school, and we were shown the register he was in until he was removed as a Jew. We will continue with our learning next week.

This week in science, we talked about processed foods. We looked at different food labels and considered what all the parts of the label may mean. Using a range of labels, we ordered them from healthiest to unhealthiest and discussed our reasons for doing so. We ended our lesson by labelling a food label of our own. Our PSHE lesson consolidated our learning.

In PSHE we looked at healthy eating which supported our science lesson. We discussed the various sections of the Eatwell Plate and learned which foods are in each category and how much of these foods we should try to include in our diet. We then used the iPads to find our favourite balanced recipe on the BBC Good Food website.

In our Sportscape lesson this week we recapped our archery skills. We used our stance technique to aim for bullseye. Our PE lessons are back to normal this week, Monday and Wednesday.

In our final DT lesson, we evaluated our products. We re-visited our Binka practice fabric and considered the changes we made to our original design. We completed a set of questions about our product and by using Airserver we were able to comment on each other's product. We will now work on presenting our poppies as the front covers of our study work books.

Our final RE lesson answering the question, "Does Genesis disprove the Science" took place this week. We were lucky to welcome a visitor into our classroom (for no more than 15 minutes) to discuss our big question. Mrs Hughes, our school bursar, very kindly offered her time and answered different questions posed by the children. We will now move on to our assessment in the form of a piece of art.

We also found time in our busy week to begin discussions about transitioning to high school. Children had two post-it notes to write down a worry and something they are excited about. We popped the post-it notes into a box and then began to discuss different ones. We moved around the classroom stopping at either the nervous, excited or don't know signs. Great discussion and ideas were offered.

What a busy week we have had, and I am super proud of all that you have achieved. You have worked so hard. Well done Y6.

I hope you are having a wonderful weekend and see you all tomorrow,
Your teacher,
Mrs. B.