Year 6 - Spring 1 - Week 2
Date: 12th Jan 2022 @ 3:08pm
Our first full week back and it’s like we’ve never been away!
In Writing, we have started reading our text focus for this half-term, “The Selfish Giant” by Oscar Wilde. The first half of the week saw us making predictions and inferences about the text as we were slowly given more and more detail: from the front cover to the blurb and finally the first few pages of the story. We then focused on the page that described the Giant’s garden and discussed how we immediately knew it was a special place from the author’s use of language. For the latter part of the week, we created our own poems about the garden - using formal language and expanded noun phrases – before committing them to our author books as the first entry for 2022!
Our Reading sessions have followed a similar style of story as well this week with Mr King’s group focusing on another Oscar Wilde tale, The Happy Prince, while Mrs Martin’s group explored “A World Full of Animal Stories” by Angela McAllister. We have also started our new class novel, ‘The Lion Above the Door’ by Onjali Rauf; the children have enjoyed hearing the first few pages and have already realised that racism and buried identities may be key themes in the book.
Maths this week has been recapping many of our Autumn term’s objectives and arithmetic skills. Next week, Mr King’s group will be learning about ratio and proportion; Mrs Martin’s group will be continuing to develop their knowledge of fractions.
In PE, we have continued with our gymnastics unit. This week, the children were not only given the task of performing particular balances and movements, but they were also given levels of challenge to attempt for each. On Tuesday, we focused on inverted balances such a ‘bridge’ and shoulder stands, while on Thursday we practised headstands on cartwheels. By the end of each lesson, some children were so determined to meet each challenge that they did so with time to spare and were able to create their own challenges to then share with the rest of the class – superb! To conclude our unit, we then created our own routines in small groups, incorporating many of the balances and movements we have learned during previous lessons...and they were fantastic! It was also equally pleasing to see some children, who usually shy away from demonstrations, wanting to perform for their peers by the end of this unit. It was a very proud moment!
Finally, this week also saw the commencement of our new Science topic, 'Electifying'. With a quick recap on the knowldge learnt in Year 4, the children learnt about some of the incredible discoveries made within electricity dating back as far as Ancient Egypt through to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison! The children were able to draw circuits using an array of symbols, which will support them in their upcoming lessons. At the request of one of our pupils, we finished the lesson by listening to the song 'Electricity' from the musical Billy Elliott, which then led into an interesting discussion about stereotypes - we are always making connections in Year 6!
Spellings for next week can be found on Google Classroom; homework for Maths and English have also been set for the children and they are aware of what they need to do.
Have a great weekend, everyone!