Year 6 - Autumn 2 - Week 3
Date: 18th Nov 2022 @ 3:07pm
What a wonderful week it has been! We hope everyone enjoyed watching our Celebration of Kindness music video last weekend.
It has been a ‘celebration of kindness’ every day. In Year 6, we had previously discussed our school value of Nurture and how its intents are for us to be kind to each other, but also ourselves. We talked about how this was our final year of primary school and soon we would be going to secondary school, where our moods may change more frequently and we may feel like we are having more ‘down’ days as ‘moody teenagers’. As a result, we have ensured that every day this week we focused on our own wellbeing and paid extra special attention to our emotions, thinking of ways we could maintain our positivity and activities we could do to boost our mood when we are not feeling as positive as usual. Such activities have included mindfulness practice, creating gratitude journals and continuing with our weekly yoga sessions. We considered how others can affect our mood and on Wednesday, we had a morning of board games - thinking about we communicate each other and how we should aim to ensure everyone around us is also in a positive mood.
To be kind to those we have a responsibility of looking after, we invited our Reception buddies to create a piece of artwork with us on Wednesday afternoon, which our younger friends could then use to gift to others and spread kindness around the school. This was a lovely activity to observe, as the children needed to guide their buddies through the task, modelling how to create colourful hearts with messages of positivity attached. All the Year 6 children were excellent role models and we are sure the Reception children are very appreciative.
Friday brought the conclusion of Celebration of Kindness Week. In the morning, we were given the opportunity to be kind to our community by helping Team TSP create items that could be sold at Formby’s Christmas Market via our very own stall. This was a great opportunity for us to support the school while also mixing with friends from every year group.
Outside of our kindness-themed lessons, many of our curriculum subjects have continued. Continuing with our war unit in Art - in recognition of Remembrance Day - we read 'In Flanders Field' by John McCrae and analysed the words. We then explored the artwork of Claude Monet's 'The Poppy Field' before creating our own pieces in a similar style. The finished products were incredible; make sure you check out a sample on our Twitter feed.
PE on Tuesday saw the start of our gymnastics unit. The children revised their understanding of various rolls (forwards, backwards, straddle) and discussed how they could build on their prior learning and challenge themselves further with each one. Fortunately, teacher demonstrations were able to be kept to a minimum as we had many gymnasts in class willing to support their peers…phew! In PE on Thursday, the children were treated to some excellent strategy games as part of their OAA (Outdoor Adventurous Activities) learning, working alongside their Year 5 buddies to race against other teams and solve the clues. A special 'well done' to all the children for also receiving their Virign UK 'Mini Marathon' medials on Friday - what an achievement!
We know that next week, a lot of the children are excited to watch The World Cup. On Thursday, we had a class discussion about why there are protests about this event taking place in Qatar. We read news articles on the matter and debated several questions about whether it is right that Qatar that was able to host The World Cup and whether or not we should watch it. Following on from a lot of our learning this year – such as our class novel of ‘George’, our WW2 topic and Hate Crime Awareness Week – we were able to make many clear connections to our human rights and the importance of respecting diversity in our community. While we did not reach any unanimous decisions, we were all able to explore different viewpoints and could understands reasons for both sides of the arguments. We will be showing The World Cup on Monday and many of us will be supporting England as they play in their LGBTQ armbands. If any children do not wish to watch the game of Monday, they know that this is fine and their peers will respect their decision now that we all understand the current politics and debates.
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 and needs additional support, please remind them that there are support videos attached to the tasks. If it is ever the case that there are no available videos on SATs Companion then at least one Youtube video will be uploaded on Google Classroom.
We hope everyone has a lovely weekend – see you on Monday!