Welcome Back Year 6 to your Spring Term

Welcome back to you all. It has been lovely to have everyone back in Year 6 and I hope you have all had a wonderful Christmas break. Year 6 you have settled back into class beautifully and have worked hard.

Our new topic, Stone, Bronze and Iron Age has begun this week. We were all very excited to begin our new learning. We have had a quick introduction to our new class text Wolf Brother and considered who the characters might be and what kind of story we could be listening to.

We began our week in maths by tackling different problems using ratio and proportion. We have used different scenarios to compare amounts thinking about ratio language. We then went on to compare amounts using the ratio notation and finished our week thinking about scaled drawings. We have also begun to tackle two SATs sample questions each morning in our starter time, and we have completed our second arithmetic paper. What a lot of maths Year 6 and amazing work. .

Our new unit in English has also begun this week. We have delved into the life of an explorer and used our hooks to predict the text. We have also written spine poems and a setting description. We have recapped some different word classes and thought about how the word it's can only ever mean it is.

In Book Club this week our final assessments have taken place. All assessments are now complete. A note has been placed in your child's diary keeping you up to date with their progress. Could I ask for regular reading of Big Cat books to take place as often as possible and I will support this further in class.

Our first Forest Schools session took place this week and what a fantastic time we all had. We are covering our history unit – Stone, Bronze and Iron Age in our Forest Schools sessions and we were introduced to the term prehistory which enabled our class to think about this period of history. We looked carefully at different miniature prehistory characters and tried to place them on a timeline. We now know that there are three stages to the Stone Age and that this time in history lasted the longest. We thought about when our planet was a super continent and then spent time looking at pictures of a camp before going off to create one of our own in small teams. Forest Schools is a fantastic way to bring this period of history alive and Mr Hadfield has so many great artefacts. My class display has now been changed where more artefacts can be explored.

We have focused on how to protect our oceans in Geography this week. We considered the WWF's list of endangered sea creatures and what threats could be the reasons for this. We then went on to research important facts and recorded them in our own way. We will continue to focus on this next week.

In Computing this week, we took part in an unplugged session. We discussed the terms copyright and fair use and used different scenarios to embed our learning.

We have begun a new unit in art this week – activist artists who share their work. We are focusing on the artist Luba Lukova, a Bulgarian-born American artist, who uses her images to highlight social injustice. We have used four different images of her posters to discuss the message behind each one. We will continue with this unit next week.

We began a new unit in RE this week and have been introduced to our big question – Why is the Exodus such a significant event in Jewish and Christian history? We began our lesson talking about significant events and what this term means. We linked this back to our first RE unit where we considered our own journeys. We asked the question – what makes an event significant and explored this further. We were introduced to different events from history and discussed the impact these have had. We will continue this lesson nest week.

Our PSHE lesson this week was focused on gratitude. We all thought about things we are grateful for and added them to our very own Gratitude Jar. We have placed our jar in class ready for more ideas to be added. "Give thanks to the Lord, because he is good; his love is eternal Psalm 136:1.

We have begun a new unit in Music this week using the glockenspiels. We improvised using notes C, D, E and F and added note rests too. Counting our notes definitely helped.

We ended our week spending time with our favourite buddies. This week we itroduced them to early coding using the A.L.E.X. App. We all enjoyed sharing our time and instructing the robot to complete actions.

I am so proud of you all and how well you have settled back into Year 6 learning. I have enjoyed listening to you chat together, giggle together and play together and can't believe that we have only been back in class for four days!

I have set a new piece of maths.co.uk homework for this week. I am also encouraging my class to keep up with their home reading to increase their speed. We have assessed all our readers now and book changing. if not already taken place, will be completed next week.

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