Hello everyone, what a beautiful week of weather! The sun has been shining, the temperatures have warmed up and Spring has finally arrived, just in time to have a full class again! It's been lovely to have everyone back together. Here is a round up of what Year Six have been doing this week, in a few areas of our curriculum!

Cross Country
Year 6 went to the final cross-country event at Sleekers Farm in Sourton.  This was a challenging course for all of them but they showed great determination and resilience with all of them completing the course and some of them in a respectable time.  Once again they showed excellent team spirit as they cheered every last member of their team home.  There are more sporting events coming up so we look forward to cheering them on again soon.

Life skills (PSHE)
As you can see we have changed the name of the subject formerly called Personal Social and Health Education to 'Life Skills'.  We feel that this is more meaningful to the children as what we teach in these lessons really is about giving them skills and knowledge they will need in life now and in the future.  This week we had a lesson about money and how money can affect how we feel.  This lesson covered an understanding of debt and how, when badly managed, debt can be harmful to mental health to the person in debt and the people around them.

Spelling, Punctuation, Grammar and Handwriting
Our English lessons regularly include revision of elements of grammar and punctuation in order to plug the gaps which have arisen over the last couple of years of disrupted education.  We also have spelling lessons every week with a different focus - in the last couple of weeks the focus has been on homophones and pairs of words that regularly get mixed up as well as the statutory words that we have to learn in year 5 and 6.  The children enjoyed using a website called spelling fram to practise spelling these words.  This can also be accessed from home: SpellingFrame.  The children are also doing their best to improve their handwriting and we have practised this alongside our spellings and in all our writing across the curriculum.

Maths
The children have continued with algebra as their focus in maths and have now moved onto solving one and two step equations! They have really taken well to this unit understanding the terms variable, expression and  equation. They have begun to use their new found knowledge to solve more difficult problems. 

French
The children were all introduced to French dictionaries and how to use them! It was a fun lesson. We found out why we shouldn't rely on Google translate to help us with our French but should always use a French dictionary. We discussed masculine and feminine nouns and looked at 'cognates' (ask your children what this mean as they should know!) and used the dictionaries to find different animals in French. 

Art/DT
We finished our Spring daffodils and then moved onto our DT project which will involve designing and making a fish out of fabric and thread! Watch this space for photos!

Congratulations to Rory, our Sycamore Star! Very well deserved, a real asset to our class. Well done!

Have a lovely weekend, soak up some vitamin D, get some fresh air and enjoy! 

Mrs Ware and Miss Ruby

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Hello everyone,

We hope this round-up finds you well and if you or your family are currently at home self-isolating, then making a speedy recovery.

English
In our English lessons we are now using our research to write biographies.  In lessons, we are also revising areas of grammar and punctuation to help the children improve their writing as well as preparing for the grammar and punctuation test.  We are continuing to read regularly at school and also practise the skills needed to answer questions in reading tests.  The homework that is set each week consolidates what we have been learning at school so it's really important that children do this preferably with your support.  

Maths
In our Maths lessons we have begun a new focus on 'algebra'. Within this, the children this week have learnt about function machines and finding the rule, expressions and simplifying expressions. This will help form a good foundation for when they transition to Year 7 and the Key Stage 3 curriculum. The have also undertaken more arithmetic to put these skills to excellent use. They are definitely improving on accuracy, speed but most importantly, confidence and resilience. 

Science
Our lesson this week focussed on efficiency and we learnt how to calculate the efficiency of a machine using an equation.  I asked the children to have a look at home to see if they could see any appliances which have efficiency ratings on them.  We will be using more equations next week to find out the power of an appliance.

Geography
This week we learnt about population pyramids - a tool that governments use to measure changes in their countries' populations and to plan policies and services to meet needs.  Using the pyramids we could see how different factors can affect population such as war, migration and improved medical care for example.

Computing
We are continuing to learn how to use spreadsheets and this week learnt how to use formulas to carry out automatic calculations.  This linked nicely with our maths lessons in which we learnt about formulas in algebra in the form of 1 and 2 step rules in function machines.

PE
The children had an excellent time swimming this week. The sessions were spent with the instructors assessing the children's progress in the pool and seeing how far they could swim independently. Lots of them were confident and able to swim 50 metres, but most importantly for all children it was confidence in the water  that was most heart warming to see. It's been a fantastic few weeks of swimming with great results so far. During our session with Coach Edwards, the children undertook a 12 minute Cooper run, where they had to run between two cones, 25 metres  apart, for 12 minutes.  Sixty four  runs, that equates to one mile! I know some managed much more, and came back into the classroom looking rather red! Well done!

And to finish off, for Red Nose Day... a great joke from Ralfie; "What did the chicks say when they saw an orange in the nest? Look what Ma-ma- laid!"
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Have a fantastic weekend everyone and stay well. I hear the weather is going to be beautiful and spring has finally arrived! 

Thank you,
Mrs Ware and Miss Ruby

Hello everyone,
Here is a round up of our busy week! Have a great weekend.

Maths
We have completed our block of learning focusing on percentages. This week we have looked at ordering fractions, decimals and percentages, we have spent two lessons learning how to find percentages of amounts, we have found missing values as percentages and have practiced our arithmetic skills in our weekly tests.  Next week we move onto our next unit of work which is all about algebra!

English
We have continued to write and research information for our biographies. We have a range of people to write about from: J.K.Rowling,  Sarah Storey, Rosa Parks and  Marcus Smith. Our lessons have focused on using our notes for research, different verb forms, modal verbs, use of apostrophes, semi colons and colons and writing information concisely. 


DT update- we have finished our projects and the photos are in the gallery! Hooray! The children should have brought these home, complete with circuits so that they are able to play them.

Art
We have been introduced to the artist O'Keefe and their style of work, focusing on drawing oriental poppies using a grid to really hone and focus our skills in our pastel drawings. Take a look in the photo gallery to see photos of us in action. We will be using this as inspiration to create our own pastel drawings of daffodils-a beautiful spring flower. Look out for photos of the finished products next week!

​World Religions and Values
We are learning about the Easter story and what happened during Holy Week.  We have been remembering the details of the story and sharing our thoughts about this amazingly sad and yet hopeful story; whether you are Christian or not, it is the most incredible story.  We have also been looking at artwork depicting the story as well as some modern interpretations in film and music.  Our lessons focus on salvation and what Christians believe Jesus did to save us.

Life Skills
We have been continuing to learn how to be safe online and how to maintain digital wellbeing.  We talked about the advantages of using the internet but the children showed a good awareness of the risks involved in online activities.  They could talk about how to avoid those risks and who to talk to if they are worried or feel uncomfortable about something online.  We talked about privacy settings and this link to the thinkuknow website will give you information about how to ensure you and your family are using them:
A parent's guide to privacy settings (thinkuknow.co.uk)
Next week we begin the first of a few lessons on money matters

PE
We all took part in the second of three cross country events organised within our learning community by OCRA. Once again, the children showed great kindness and support to not only each other, but other schools who participated too. The final event takes place in two weeks time, which will see our children run in three cross country events in total; a great achievement by all! For those who now have the 'running bug', look out for Mr Foreman's running club in the Summer term!

We continued with our swimming sessions and it was wonderful to see the children's confidence growing. If you had said to some of the children they would have been swimming in 'the deep end' without an adult, they would have laughed nervously at you, but with swimming aids and great teaching, watching their enjoyment is brilliant. I am sure they'd stay in and swim all day if they could!

French
Madame Jordan came into school on Friday and we revisited two different sounds 'oi' and 'on' (French phonics), we recapped previous learning using 'I don't like' and 'I don't have' and we played a game where we had to identify the French sentence and translate it into English using our knowledge organisers. She was very impressed with our knowledge!

The children have had a really positive week this week! They have definitely shown maturity, resilience and positivity and we are both really proud of how they have conducted themselves.

Mrs Ware and Miss Ruby 

It has been a fun week where we have celebrated and learned in equal measure.  We have begun new teaching sequences in English, Geography, Science and Computing, completed our DT work and continued learning about percentages in Maths.

In Science, we are learning about energy stores and the children were fascinated to learn that energy can not be created or destroyed – it can only be transferred.  This is a challenging topic but the children have shown a positive attitude to this new learning.

In Geography, we are learning about Global Population and about how changes in society and in medicine have affected population growth.

We are writing biographies in English inspired by the book, Women in Science.  The children have all chosen a famous person to write about who has achieved something great or even something which has changed the world.  We have also chosen a person who has faced some kind of adversity and overcome it to do something great.  Any time that children can find at home to research their person would be really helpful.

In Computing, we are learning how to use spreadsheets.  Some of the children recognised that their parents use spreadsheets in their work.  It would be great if you do, to show and explain to your child how and why you use them.  This helps them to see a purposeful use of the things they are learning.
World Book Day was a great success and the children worked with great focus and enthusiasm to design some impressive T-shirt designs and then painted them with care.  I hope they are enjoying reading their free book from the Giant Book Giveaway.  Thanks for helping to organise this Year 6 volunteers!
 
I hope you were able to join the parents’ assembly and enjoyed our performance of Strict by Michael Rosen! 
Have a great weekend.
Mrs Ware and Miss Ruby