Last Friday, we were lucky enough to have a visitor, Mr Vine, to talk to Year 6 about becoming a director for Disney. He spoke to the children about his ambitions as a child, the way in which he uses story boarding and how important it is to surround yourself with talented people and learn from them. We then, with a side of popcorn, enjoyed watching his latest Disney film 'Ron's Gone Wrong'.
This week, Year 6 have been demonstrating their knowledge and understanding of spelling, punctuation, grammar, reading comprehension and mathematics by completing their Year 6 SATs. We have been incredibly proud of the children as they all worked systematically through the papers and tried their very best; they have shown incredible determination, perseverance and resilience.
This week, in Maths, we hunted for mathematical treasure - solving reasoning problems in a fun way.
The children of Year 6 have worked incredibly hard throughout their gymnastics unit and this week they were able to combine all of their skills in their final springboard jump.
Across the unit, the children have learnt a range of jumps (including pike and straddle) and they also learnt how to use the springboard safely and correctly. Despite some of the children feeling quite daunted, they have persevered and worked hard to improve.
In science this week we have been continuing our work on electricity by learning to draw circuit diagrams. We can now use internationally recognised symbols to represent the components in a circuit, so that any electrical engineer could view our work and build our designs. We found out that circuits are always drawn as rectangles, using straight lines. Finally, we put our learning into practice by building our own circuits and drawing them as circuit diagrams. We have also been busy this week showing what we know with some assessment papers, learning to use a springboard in gymnastics and plotting coordinates in the first quadrant.
This week Year 6 visited Holly Lodge Centre in Richmond Park to take part in the Junior Citizenship programme.
The citizen days are an opportunity for pupils to learn how to deal with different types of dangers, as well as get to know their local police officers and firefighters. They learn top safety tips first hand from emergency service workers, including council officers and electricity company representatives.
The programme involves 10 interactive sessions with the different organisations, which let the children ask questions and play out scenarios they could realistically come into contact with.
The children were given the opportunity to telephone emergency services to report a fire. They discussed safe routes in the event of a fire and the importance of fire alarms.
Year 6 have enjoyed the start of our new geography topic: Europe! The children started their learning by looking at a range of maps which broaden our understanding of politics, topography, population density and history. It was interesting to see the range of countries that make up the second-smallest continent (Europe) and just how much has changed over time in terms of border changes and new countries.
This week, the children in Year 6 completed area and perimeter investigations as a part of their measurement topic. They thoroughly enjoyed working in pairs and the teachers were very impressed with the mathematical vocabulary the children used. Have a look at the attached question, that the pictured children are solving. You can see that some children chose to solve this problem by using squared paper; other children calculated the area of each square and then found possible factors of the area of the rectangle.
This week, the children of 6AD and half of 6S completed their Bikeability training. This course has given the children the skills and confidence needed to cycle safely on the road.
We have loved this week! The children have had the opportunity to research and evaluate tomato sauce by taste testing a range of commercially available sauces. They then used this information to develop their own recipe. We practised knife skills, including using a bridge and claw grip, and finely diced onion and garlic. We then headed to the kitchen and got sautéing. We enjoyed adding our own ingredients to the basic sauce including chilli flakes and fresh herbs from our school garden. We then taste tested our own sauce and evaluated it against the same criteria as earlier.
As a part of our geography unit focused on the United Kingdom, this week the children learnt about how cities have changed over time. We used Sheffield as a case study and found out that the population increased rapidly due to the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. We also found out that advances within train transportation led to the city sprawl, as food and building materials were more easily transported in.
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This week, the children have been very excited to start learning about salsa music. Salsa originated in Cuba and we discovered that salsa means 'sauce' in Spanish, which is rather appropriate as many countries have since added their own 'flavourings' to this style of music.
