Week ending 30th September 2022

Good afternoon everyone, 
​
We hope this blog finds everyone well, the end of the week has certainly turned more autumnal. Please make sure the children come with a coat and also a spare pair of clothes might be useful for those footballers who get a little wet and muddy playing football at lunchtime! It is great to see them all being so active whatever the weather. 

Here is a snippet of what we have been up to this week.

Science
We carried out an investigation this week to see how much sugar would dissolve in a small amount of water.  The children used scientific skills of: raising questions that can be investigated, predicting, observing and recording.  They also learnt and used some new scientific vocabulary: solute(the sugar), solvent(the water) and solution.  I also asked them to consider what sandy beaches would be like if sand was soluble.

History
In history we continued our exploration of what life was like during the industrial revolution.  This week, we focussed on the working conditions in factories and coal mines.  The children considered the dangers in both work places and decided where they'd rather have worked if they had been alive during this period.

Life skills
This week I took the children to Okehampton where they took part in a number of workshops all focussed on learning the skills needed in 'real life'.  These included beach and sea safety from RNLI, some CPR training from St John Ambulance, information from a Dartmoor Ranger, online safety from the Police and others.

Maths
This week in maths we have wrapped up our unit on place value. This included comparing and ordering numbers, understanding negative numbers, and also rounding. These lessons have included solving word problems and reasoning as well as using fluency in our understanding. Next week, we will move onto the four operations or addition, subtraction, multiplication and division and this unit will take us up to half term and beyond.

Art
This week in Art we designed our school Christmas cards as part of our school fundraising initiatives. The children used their fingers and hands to create a picture of Father Christmas and his reindeers! I think it’s safe to say they look great, and the children had fun making them. Let’s hope you are just as pleased and would like to buy a pack as a memento of their time in Year 6!

French
In French this week we began to look at Nationalities asking the questions “what nationality are you?”, “what nationality is he?”, “what nationality is she?” and answering by saying “I am/he is/she is”. Our knowledge of flags also came in useful here!

PE
In our P.E. sessions with Coach Edwards the children played some small team games where they practised some of the skills needed for netball such as passing and moving to find a space for the ball and then we all got chance to play a game to recap the actual game itself. The children were split onto teams of 5 and played high fives netball. They then rotated in and and out and when they weren't involved in the match they were practising ball skills in small groups. 

We hope everyone has a great weekend and look forwards to seeing the children next week. Please return French residential consent forms by next Friday so we have an idea of numbers. Once this information is in we can confirm staff members and dates! If you have any queries at all about this, please come and see us. We want to be able to help everyone as much as possible to enable all the children to come. We both fully appreciate how daunting it might be to send your child off on a residential abroad and how much effort it might take to get things organised with regards to passports etc. If we can be of any help or reassurance or answer any questions you may have, please, please let us know. We can help with anything, honestly!  It would be lovely to have as many of the class together as possible making some amazing memories! 

Thank you so much!
Gina  and Jo