Week ending Friday 7th October

Welcome to our Year 6 blog. Please find a roundup of our week here.

English
We started the week by summarising the story of the Snow Leopard by Jackie Morris, this included identifying and summarising the story by pulling main ideas from the text. We then wrote our own stories using a variety of sentence openers and favourite ideas from the book to write the story of the raid on the village from the perspective of one of the villagers. After this we learnt and remembered the text by drawing a story map which we used to retell it. Then we looked at devices Jackie Morris uses in her writing such as hyphenated adjectives and nouns like: flame-cat of the forest, sharp-eyed running cat, resin-scented forests and sun-scorched. this led us onto metaphors, similes and the power of three.

Science
This week we used the processes of sieving, filtration and evaporation to separate sand, salt and nuggets and drew particle diagrams to represent the changes. 

History
In history, we investigated the inventions and inventors that revolutionised factories, towns, cities and work life in Britain during the industrial revolution.  As this is black history month, we recognised that all the inventors were white men and wondered if black people had been inventing too. Of course, they had - we found out a little about those inventions too. We decided that we don’t hear about those inventions so much as history was most probably written by white men too.

​Maths
This week in maths we have started our new unit on the four operations, starting with addition and subtraction, factors, and multiples. For this the children need to be secure with their number bonds and their times table. There will be a big emphasis on this as the year goes on, to check the children can recall these things quickly, starting with our maths homework this week! Well done to all the children who have really persevered with their reasoning.

Art
This week in Art we continued with our focus on Monet and impressionism, by looking at a wider range of paintings and attempting to replicate them.

French 
In French this week we continued with 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! We played different games with the phrases including rock, paper, scissors, battle ships and the intruder!  I have met with Mrs Jordan this week to discuss the French residential, so if there are any outstanding forms, please can we have them in.

PE
We had our first swimming session, and it was great to have all the children in the pool together in two groups. They children have almost an hour in the pool with their instructors and the first session was full of smiles. We also began to build up some miles towards our ‘mini marathon’ inspired by the London marathon. We have signed up to complete this challenge over the next few weeks and will be totalling the miles as we go! A group of children from Year 6 took part in the OCRA football tournament today! Both teams did amazingly well and came second and third place receiving medals as recognition of their achievements. We are so proud of them! Well done!

Look out for more information on our Harvest festival next Friday 14th, that coincides with Dingle Dangle Scarecrow Day and also our sharing assembly that will take place at 2:30 on Friday 21st October.
Thank you all for your continued support. Have a wonderful weekend and we will see you next week. 
Mrs Ware and Miss Ruby