Y6 News of the Wek 25.9.21

Another packed week in Y6, from creating Alberto Giacometti inspired sculptures to enjoying time with our Reception buddies which we all loved. You have all continued to work so hard and I am thrilled with your completed tasks. Well done Y6.

In Maths this week we completed our focus on Place Value as we tackled negative numbers. We then assessed our knowledge with our Power Maths end of unit check. We then began a new unit, the four operations, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. We shared top tips on solving addition and subtraction calculations and recapped both formal and mental methods. We will continue to develop our knowledge next week. We have also completed a times table test and discussed the different options we could select from and then trialled our choices. Some of us decided to try a trickier test. We ended our week by chatting through an arithmetic paper. We will have a go at our first one next week. Super job Y6.

In English this week we have worked hard to create a shared piece of writing. We have collated our ideas and tweaked them to improve. We have then used our targets to up level our writing. Editing has also been a focus in class this week. We will do our final shared write edit next week and then have a go at a hot write. Keep it up Y6.

In Book Club his week we have all read with an adult, changed our books if needed and enjoyed our shared reading books. We have also enjoyed more of our class story, Letters from the Lighthouse. The main characters have now been evacuated to Devon and are awaiting host families!

In Science this week we continued with our unit on Light. We have all confirmed that light travels in straight lines and we began our lesson with a quick experiment to prove this fact. We used water in a container, anti-bacterial spray, mirrors and a laser beam. This enabled us to see the beam being reflected at the same angle. We then learned about the incident ray and reflected ray and how the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incident. We then moved on to building our own periscopes out of our cereal boxes. We will complete these next week.

Our History lesson this week focused our attention on the word invasion. We worked in pairs, and with a map of Europe in 1939, and 3 different coloured pieces of modelling dough. We listened carefully as I read the Dough War Walkthrough. We split our playdough into three pieces, one for Germany, one for the Soviet Union and one for Italy. Our invasion stopped on the 10thJuly 1940. As the invasion took place, children recorded any questions they wanted to ask. We will look at these at the beginning of our next lesson. Thank you to Will for bringing in his great grandfathers war medals and sharing them with us.

Our Art unit continued this week as we created sculptures inspired by Alberto Giacometti. We began by sketching stick people thinking about emotion. From these sketches we then created figures from tin foil. Our figures were placed in different positions to show movement and emotion. We will continue with our sculpture unit next week. We all loved creating our figures and had them hanging from table legs, sitting on books and posing in all different positions. Fab job Y6.

In French this week we continued to learn the sounds of the French alphabet. We used the sounds to spell out our own names in a conversation with a partner. We took our learning outside to work together and recorded our efforts. We then came back to class to watch and reflect on the recording. Tres bien Y6.

In RE this week, we continued to think about our big question by using quotes from the Bible. In groups we discussed the verse and decided on a group definition. We shared and chatted about the different explanations and displayed them on our RE wall.

In Computing this week, we took part in our first E-Safety lesson – finding your media balance. We thought about our perfect days and jotted them down. We then tweaked them once we realised we were to have our perfect day for seven consecutive days. We discussed the term media and how to ensure our time is balanced between devices and other activities.

In Music this week, we were reunited with our ukuleles. We were so excited to play them again. To start our lesson, we began by recapping what a ukulele is, how it is played, held, as well as the name of each part. We remembered so much. Our song this half term is Happy by Pharrell Williams. We sang and danced along to the first half of the song, feeling the beat of the music. Then, we checked our heart rate and realised how out of breath we were. We decided to sing whilst standing still, although we found this very tricky!

We have also taken part in the daily mile. Our PE lesson with Sportscape continues to focus on basketball and of course our second lesson was taught by Mrs Jenkins. Please see a separate post by Mrs Jenkins detailing her lesson.

Our Y6 roles and badges were given to us this week by Mrs Chesters. We had a special ceremony watched by other classes to receive the news and we are now wearing our badges with pride. We will meet with our adults to find out all about our responsibilities.

We ended our week spending time with our reception buddies. We were all so excited to meet them and loved our time outside. We all split off into our house teams and enjoyed different activities on the field. We will rotate each week, weather permitting. From reading books to running the daily mile, from time on Fort Lewis to balancing on the adventure trail, I think it was definitely the highlight of our week. We even managed to play a game of duck, duck, goose! We thoroughly enjoyed seeing you reception.

We have also enjoyed some TT Rock Stars time and we have used some of this time to explore the house of Anne Frank.

New homework has been set. This includes: Spag.com online, TT Rock Stars and regular reading aloud with an adult. Please could you encourage your child to play on TT Rock Stars as often as possible. Times table knowledge on the tip of their tongues is of great help as we move through the Year 6 maths curriculum. Much of my curriculum depends upon sharp knowledge of these facts.

I hope you have a lovely weekend and see you all on Monday.

Your teacher,
Mrs B.