Y6 News of the Week 17.9.21

I cannot believe how much we get through in a week Y6. You have worked so hard and your dedication to my tasks is impressive. Well done to you all.

This week in Maths we have begun by using our fluency skills to solve different calculations. We have discussed our strategies and shared our methods. In our Power Maths lessons we continued to investigate place value. We have compared and rounded numbers into the millions using number lines. Top tips are now on our working wall to help round numbers within 10,000,000. We know we need to find the decider number and we need to remember which power of 10 we are rounding to. Next week we will complete our place value unit with negative numbers and then consolidate our learning and assess our new knowledge. We will then move onto a new unit which will focus on the four operations. We have also discussed some parts of an arithmetic paper and we have challenged ourselves to our first times tables test. We have battled each other on TT Rock Stars and discussed our Maths homework which has been set. All Maths.co.uk logins have been stuck into reading diaries.

In English this week we continued to learn our model write on the diary of Anne Frank. We can now retell most of our paragraphs and we have drawn our own story maps for the final two. We have used the model to identify the different tools used in this piece of writing and we have also boxed up our ideas about each paragraph and listed the tools used within them. We have chosen the person we want to base our shared writes on and we have created jottings to log their movements during Black Saturday – the first night of the Blitz! We will develop our pieces next week.

We have begun a new reading unit on the diary of Anne Frank in Book Club this week. We have used different daily entries to understand her life and the Secret Annex she lived in for 25 months. We have thought about her feelings and how living in this small space must have affected her. Next week, we will spend the week reading our banded books to an adult in class.

We have revisited our Spag.com homework today and discussed the trickier areas. We thought about relative pronouns and how to spot a relative clause. We have continued with suffixes in our spelling lessons this week and we have even created a display of "must have spellings" to help.

In History this week, we began by creating a Morrison's shelter feel in the classroom by crawling under our classroom tables whilst the siren played. We then listened to the Prime Minister of the time; Neville Chamberlain announce war upon Germany. We spent some time understanding why WW2 began and discussed this further using comprehension questions. Our next lesson will introduce us to the term invasion.

In Science this week we continued our unit on light. We recapped our last lesson and reflected on our final experiment. We listed the apparatus and drew our ideas on how light travels in straight lines. We then looked at a piece of Leonardo da Vinci's writing and tried to work out its meaning. We found out that he wrote backwards, and we quickly decided to use a mirror to decipher his writing. We then went on to work with light reflecting in a mirror and we had a go at our own reverse writing. Finally, we wrote a secret message for a friend to solve.

In RE this week, we were introduced to our big new question "Why is Jesus, 'Light of the World' good news for Christians? We thought about different light pictures and predicted the content of our lesson. We were then introduced to a painting by the English painter Holman Hunt. We looked carefully at his painting and considered all the elements of light. We ended our lesson by reflecting on what this artist wanted us to feel when looking at his painting.

In Computing this week, we continued to think about conditionals. We were introduced to the terms "If" and "Else" and used these to help the farmer to pick his produce. This lesson was a real challenge as it involved loops and repeats to be successful. Well done Y6. A great job.

We have begun our Art unit this week on sculptures. We began our lesson by looking at different sculptures and deciding on our favourites. We chose one in particular to look at in more detail and answered questions to help us to explore it further. We will continue with this unit next week as we work with different art media to create sculptures of our own.

This week we shared another Friday Year 6 worship via zoom. We thought about friendships and what they meant to us. We shared prayers, a poem and we sang a favourite song by Bruno Mars.

Wellbeing this week was in the form of human bingo. We spent time outside in the sunshine finding out different answers to questions about our classmates. Great fun and some down time too. I now know many facts about my new Y6 class.

Sportscape continue this week with more basketball skills. We have also taken part in the daily mile and our second PE lesson was taught by Mrs Jenkins.

PSHE is underway in Y6. Within our first Heartsmart lesson we began with a powerful story from a landfill orchestra in Paraguay. We learnt how the villagers had seen the very best in a situation and created instruments from what could have been worthless rubbish. We followed this with a discussion about when we may have felt worthless and took lots of thought to offer up strategies to help one another.

We began our second lesson by thinking about what body language is. In doing so, we acted out different ways to move around the classroom and thought about this as a way of communication. We learnt that when we are powerless, we tend to close up our bodies, but when we are powerful, we open up our bodies. We then had the opportunity to create our own power pose and reflected on whether this made a difference to how we felt.

Our French lesson brought us to the end of our week. We have begun to learn the French alphabet with the help of Abi. We know that sounds are put into groups and we concentrated our skills on letters with an eh sound.

New homework has been set. I have set a new Maths.co.uk task along with reading and TT Rock stars.

I just wanted to say how amazing our Blitz tunnel books look now Mrs Whittingham has displayed them in our classroom. They are a definite wow factor and I know how proud my children are of them.

Wow, what a busy week we have had and how hard you are all working Year 6. I am proud of each and every one of you. Have a wonderful weekend.
Your teacher,
Mrs B.