Year 6 - Autumn 2 - Week 2
Date: 10th Nov 2023 @ 1:50pm
What a week!
Firstly, we welcome Miss Osborne to Year 6. She will be supporting the children in class alongside Mr King and Mrs Martin.
As authors, the children are now on their final piece of writing, having finished the story, ‘Star of Fear, Star of Hope’. The children have now gone back to the start and are writing a recount of the initial events in the book, but this time from the perspective of the secondary character, Lydia. Next week, the children will then be able to link together all the shorter pieces they have written from Lydia’s point of view so far and use them to write up an extended piece in their author books. We can’t wait to read them!
In Maths, Mr King’s group has worked incredibly hard on a number of tricky topics. They have not only revised their understanding of long multiplication from last year, but this week had to apply it to difficult reasoning problems, which certainly tested their mindsets and resilience levels! They have also learned new concepts and methods, including long division (using the chunking method). Mrs Martin’s group will be learning this later in the term; this week, they have focused on rounding.
Our History topic continued this week – now focusing on WW2 - with the children firstly learning about the reasons for the outbreak of the war in Tuesday’s lesson. We were able to re-visit some of last half-term’s STAR vocabulary (such as trigger, factor and ultimatum), as well as learn some new terms in the lesson, including ‘reparations’ and ‘colonies’. On Tuesday, we were very fortunate that John from Formby Civic Society was willing to visit us to talk about how the wars impacted Formby. He showed us photographs taken at the time in Formby; local newspaper articles describing the war, and also explained what some of the shops and buildings we see today used to be. We may never look at Formby in the same way again! The children were so engaged that John ended up staying until home time…and he still had to cut his presentation short! The children asked brilliant questions throughout the session and it was wonderful to see them thinking like historians, asking questions about his sources and how he found lots of his information. Well done, Year 6!
On Wednesday, our young historians learned about all the key events of WW2, exploring a range of resources such as newspaper articles, maps, textbooks, local documents and equipment such as ration books and medical boxes. Next week’s lessons will see the children consolidating their learning by summarising what life would have been like in Britain during WW2.
A particular highlight was our visit from Callum from The Hammond, a renowned institution for performing arts education. On Thursday afternoon, we enjoyed a very active, theatre workshop, which explored storytelling, drama and some key elements of acting and adopting the role of different characters.
To conclude our week, the children were very excited to attend a special, whole-school assembly in the hall to watch the launch of our sixth ‘Celebration of Kindness’ music video! There were plenty of laughs in the hall as we watched ourselves, our peers, staff (and even parents!) dancing around school last week and having fun. This is always a great way to launch our Celebration of Kindness Week and we hope all the children have fun watching the video again over the weekend with their families. Remember, the video can be found on our Youtube and Vimeo channels!
The children are aware of how to access their homework for next week – either on SATs Companion or in their books. Spellings have also been set. If your child is accessing their homework through SATs Companion this week and needs additional support for long division, there are support videos and websites on Google Classroom this week.
We hope everyone has a fantastic weekend and is excited for the week ahead - celebrating kindness!