Happy Easter everyone, So here we are at the end of the Spring term! The next time I write a blog it will officially be the summer term and the Year 6's last term at Primary School. Next term sees lots of exciting things planned for them (details will follow in due course) as well as lots of important things too. We hope the weather begins to improve so we can truly make the most of our time together. This week has been as busy as ever. We have used our time to finish our biographies, write our Geography essays based on 'Population', finish our D.T projects, undertake a short unit on converting units (measures) in maths, learn about April Fools Day in French, practise for our sharing assembly and conclude our swimming lessons. There have been two highlights for me this week and both of them are about celebrating the children's achievements and their resilience. The first is the improvement in swimming and water confidence for EVERY single member of our class. I absolutely loved watching the children swimming this week as they undertook their assessments to see how far they could swim. The encouragement they gave each other, the determination, the courage and the smiles on their faces and the pure pride they had in themselves. Whether it be 10 m or 100 m, positivity and effort is what counts. I was a very proud teacher today, and the staff at the swimming pool were full of admiration for the progress they have all made. The second highlight was the children completing their D.T. sewing projects. They have all worked very hard, in a relatively short space of time, to complete a stuffed felt fish from design to toy. All the children worked independently, with little support from me and showed huge pride in their efforts as they were desperate to take them home! There were moments of joy, concentration, relief and support as they all participated with determination to complete it in time for Easter. I wish you a very Happy Easter; Mrs Ware and myself will be in touch with news about the Summer term, what to expect, timetables, events, trips, activities and much more. We will do our very best to support your child in fulfilling their potential and having the most memorable time in their final few months at primary school. Thank you and take care. Mrs Ware and Miss Ruby ![]() Good afternoon everyone, Well here we are, the penultimate week before the Easter holidays and it seems to have been the quickest school year ever! I am sure I say that every year...however the time is flying and we will be in the Summer term before we know it. Lets hope we get some 'summer' weather soon, as we seem to have arrived at Easter in the grips of winter again. The children were however, very excited at the few flurries of snow we had on our way back from swimming yesterday! This week has been a whole school wide assessment week, where we look at the levels of progress the children have made throughout their time in their class, to ensure they are on track to meet their potential at the end, and what we can do as teachers to best support them. Our class have worked incredibly hard this week, with an excellent attitude and approach. We were both incredibly proud of them. They are of course eager to know how they have done, so we will spend the next couple of days getting the information together to share with them if they wish. The children have undergone assessments in maths, reading, spelling and punctuation and grammar. The children are almost at the end of their swimming block and I have been thrilled at the levels of progress they have made. The level of water confidence from every single child has increased tremendously and that is so important in this vital life skill. They are happy and enjoy every second of their lessons which is wonderful to see. Coach Edwards took the class for a P.E. lesson on the field, where the children enjoyed a game of football. In French this week, the children practised lots of listening skills and had to be detectives to identify correct sounds. They had to match questions in French to the answers in English and also listened to a short paragraph about 'Marie-Claire' and then had to identify phrases/sentences about her from what they heard. Our children's French ability is very good and it's really great to see them having a go, using the new knowledge they have learnt and applying it with reasons for their thinking. I have been very impressed. We have also undertaken another of our D.T. projects. The children each designed and made a soft toy fish. They had to decide who it be would be for, and undertake a strict criteria to check it fit the person., e.g if the toy was for a baby then you wouldn't want buttons or anything they could choke on! They then created a template, to make two parts, decorated each part and then sewed them together using a running stitch and stuffed them to make it soft like a toy. It is fair to say this was no easy task, as many aspects of the task were fiddly, however, once again, the class really rose to the occasion and all pulled together to create some brilliant toys! We will aim to finish and evaluate these next week, before they come home (which I know the children are desperate to do). Have a fabulous weekend, please see Class Dojo for reminders about Leavers Hoodies, a class reward to the park with bikes and scooters and a celebration of our Star of the week. Thank you, Miss Ruby and Mrs Ware 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 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!" 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 Good afternoon everyone!
We hope this blog update finds you all well, safe and sound, after what has been a truly stormy day. I am unsure whether you have power, internet connections, tiles on your roof, or fence panels left around your gardens so we are wishing you all well. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you need support with anything. Storm Eunice will certainly leave an imprint on our memories for a long time to come. As for our learning this week, (which sadly had to change very abruptly late yesterday afternoon), the end of the week has panned out differently than we had anticipated. However, the rest of the week has been as action packed as ever! Here are a few snippets... Science We completed our unit on heat by planning and carrying out an investigation to see which material was the best insulator and kept an ice cube frozen for the longest. The children had to consider which variables to control in order to ensure we carried out a 'fair test'. They then completed the end of unit test, which showed they had made good progress with their learning about thermal insulators and conductors. History We completed our lessons on Civil Rights with a lesson about #BlackLivesMatter to understand how the struggle for equal rights continue. The children then all wrote an essay to demonstrate their learning. I was extremely impressed by the way they took on this challenging task and they did really well. I was very proud of them! PSHE We have begun thinking about our 'digital wellbeing' and looked at the positives and negatives of the Internet. As half term begins, we learnt that it is important to limit screen time and, when the weather allows, children should get out and enjoy themselves too. I hope that they will use some of their screen time to revise for Miss Radbourne's Grand Geography Quiz, which will be happening after half term- please see the school Dojo page for more information. Maths We completed our unit on Decimals, culminating with an end of unit test for assessment. All the children have made great progress with this area of learning and were really pleased with themselves! English We finished with our Cloudbusting invent stage of our unit, by writing our own narratives, through poetry. The children then self assessed to check they had written in the appropriate style, using the success criteria. Class Assembly We also spent a little bit of time practising our class assembly which will now take place on 4th March, due to Storm Eunice. The children have all used drama to retell a favourite poem of theirs! Finally... we wish you all a very happy half term. Can you believe we are now officially over half way through the academic year? I certainly can't! Lets hope next half term is kinder to us all in terms of weather and illness. Take care and thank you. Mrs Ware and Miss Ruby Good afternoon....Good afternoon everyone, here is a brief roundup of our week together. Poetry We have been enjoying poetry in our English lessons and in guided reading this week. The children particularly like Michael Rosen's 'Strict' poem. Look out for a performance of this next week in our parent's assembly. We are now ready to write our own version of some of the events from our shared text Cloud Busting and will be telling the story from a different character's perspective using a range of poetic devices. The children have already shown a natural talent for writing poems so I'm really looking forward to what they produce next week. Computing The children have nearly completed their websites and have learnt how to create internal links to subpages within their website; external links to other websites as well as embedding web pages from other websites on their own. Children's Mental Health Week We watched an online assembly which asked us to think about how we can grow emotionally and who can support us with our emotional growth. The children identified parents and other family members as well as teachers and other school staff and their friends and peers. I asked the children to identify something positive about themselves/something they are good at or have improved. Some found this difficult - it is easy to identify something we're not good at or can't do, but we always find it hard to be more positive about ourselves. Some children were also able to identify a target for their emotional growth. We marked Children's Mental Health Week with 'Dress to Express' today! Maths We have continued with our unit of work focusing on decimals. This week we have divided decimals by 10, 100 and 1000, multiplied decimals by integers, divided decimals by integers and used division to solve problems involving decimals. Next week we will conclude our unit and look towards our new one percentages. PE The children are getting so much more confident in the swimming pool. They have used a range of apparatus to support them (such as woggles and floats) and have practised different strokes to swim across the pool. Some children have also swam lengths of the pool using different strokes and have practised jumping into the deep end, developing their confidence. Religion and World Views We have continued with our focus on Hinduism in World Views and Religion. We have understood the meanings of Karma, Dharma and Samsara and how they fit together. They children played a traditional Hindu game called Moksha Chitram to understand these things and discuss how this game is like real life and what it can teach people about Hindu beliefs. DT The children designed and began to make their ‘Steady Hand Games’. This involved drawing sketches of their designs and reasons for their choices. They then chose a net of a shape to create the base of their game. We look forwards to making the actual ‘game’ next week, which involves an electrical circuit with a buzzer. French We are beginning to learn how to say our ages and starting to learn dates and birthdays. We hope you a have a good weekend! A few highlights of our week!
English We have been reading the book Cloud Busting which is a story about childhood, being different and covers the themes of friendship, diversity and bullying. The story is told through various types of poetry and we have really enjoyed reading it together. In our English lessons, we will be looking deeper into the way the story is told and will be writing our own stories through poetry based on the viewpoints of different characters in the book. We were really impressed with the children's elicitation tasks where they showed a great deal of talent for writing poetry. Maths We have begun our new unit of work focusing on decimals. This week has seen revision of some of the Year 5 objectives in maths to recap learning that happened during the last lockdown. The focus has been on understanding decimals to two decimal places (2dp), understanding thousandths, decimals to three decimal places (3dp) and multiplying decimals by 10, 100 and 1000. This week we have used lots of manipulatives (resources such as place value charts, place value counters, gattegnocharts and base 10) and have taken photos for our books and working wall. Science Our lesson this week was about heat transfer and conduction. We were able to observe conduction by heating a knife above a candle and seeing how the end of the knife became warm as the particles in contact with each other transferred the heat along the knife. It is really good to be able to carry out this type of investigation with them as they begin to show much more maturity. History In history this week, we read and performed an abridged version of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream speech". We learnt that the march on Washington in 1963, in which over 250,000 people from all over America gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to demand civil rights and economic equality for all Americans, culminated with this historical speech. PSHE (Life Lessons) We discussed stereotypes, learnt what they were and how/why they exist. We thought of ways to challenge stereotypes. Some excellent ideas from the children were: "Call them out!" and "Prove them to be wrong." World Religions and Views We have been finding out about the Hindu beliefs of Samsara, Karma, Dharma and Moksha and asking "Why do Hindus try to be good?" We read and interpreted the story of the man in the well and we found our interpretation of the story to be very different to that of a Hindu. It has been really interesting to study a religion with its origins from a culture very different to our own. PE This week we have been incredibly active! Relay races, gymnastics, swimming and a cross country event! The cross country event in Simmons Park, Okehampton, was the first of three races that will take place over the year. The children were placed into teams and ran approximately one and half miles through mud track and footpaths. They all did incredibly well and showed huge resilience, positivity and teamwork! ![]() This week in a nutshell... English We are almost there on the invent stage of our explanation texts and the children have written about lots of different things they find interesting. We have explanations about the life cycle of frogs, tigers, dogs, the creation of the solar system and the extinction of the dinosaurs! We can't wait to see the finished products. Maths We have come the end of our unit on Fractions. The children have shown great perseverance and this has shown in the new knowledge they have acquired. Fractions are a very large part of the Year six maths curriculum so this knowledge will be of great use as a foundation to their learning for the KS3 curriculum next year. Next week we begin decimals and we have already undertaken our elicitation task for this. Science We learnt about thermal equilibrium and heat transfer. We learnt through practical investigations using hot water and ice cubes how heat always transfers from a hot substance to a cold substance until the heat is evenly spread out. We also carried out an investigation to understand what we mean when we say something is hot or cold which involved the children plunging their hands into ice cold water. I think they enjoyed it!! History We took part in some role play in our History lesson on Monday to learn about the story of Rosa Parks and how her small peaceful protest (a refusal to give up her seat for a white person) started a movement which was to change America forever. Computing The children have begun making their own websites, learning about copyright as well as how to use different types of media in their web pages. They are previewing their pages to see how they look on different devices and evaluating their own and others' work Art/DT We have finished our Silberzweig portraits (photos will follow once displayed!) and have started to look at our new D.T project which is called, 'Steady Hand Game'. The children will make a game using components of an electrical circuit, with buzzer and/or bulb too! French We completed our end of unit task where the children had to write independently on the topic of 'our opinions'. They have done brilliantly, under the guide of Madame Jordan and we were both so thrilled to see all the children engaged and confident. The range of vocabulary learnt, alongside rules of grammar and word classes was such an improvement. Well done Year Six. PE We had a great swimming lesson on Thursday and it was lovely to see all the children enjoying and challenging themselves. They always get so much out of these lessons, with the expertise of our instructors and such a great swimming pool. Unfortunately, Coach Edwards was absent this week for our P.E lesson in school so we played netball and practised our ball skills. We hope you have great weekend. Thank you, Miss Ruby and Mrs Ware. |
AuthorWelcome to the blog of Sycamore Class at North Tawton Primary School Archives
July 2024
Categories |