What a wonderful week! On Monday, Year 6 visited St Leonard's Court air raid shelter as a conclusion to our World War II topic. It was interesting to see the impact the war had on our local area. The following day, we were lucky enough to be visited by the author Grant Strong, who talked through the process of writing and explained how important daydreaming is. Our fun filled week was finished off with a STEM Day.
Year 6 have been developing their gymnastics skills throughout a unit focused on rolls and balances. They have worked individually to master a range of one, two and three point balances and then in teams they worked on their partner/group balances. We learnt that counter tension is when gymnasts perform a balance which involves two or more of them pulling away from each other (or a piece of apparatus), where the weight is not even, whereas counter balance is when a move is balanced (like a sea-saw) or like when a gymnast performs an arabesque, the front and back of their body counter-balance one another.
On Friday, Year 6 made 'Reebops' which related to our science topic, evolution. We were focusing on how genes passed down between organisms of the same species; this is called inheritance.
This week, Year 6 have been learning about the impact of WWII on our local area. We looked at aerial photographs of the Richmond area to identify any evidence. We were able to identify anti-aircraft guns, anti-landing trenches in Hampton Court Palace gardens and bomb damage. Various photographs showed vast areas of allotments and prefabricated housing. We noticed something very unusual about Pen Ponds. The water was drained from them so that enemy aircraft could not use them as navigation points using the reflection of their lights.
Have a look at some of the photos. Can you spot anything unusual?
Written by Year 6 pupils
In our computing lessons, we are learning about internet communication. We have learnt that a search engine makes an index using a program called a ‘web crawler’. This automatically browses the web and stores information about the pages it visits. Every time a web crawler visits a webpage, it makes a copy of it and adds its URL to an index. Once this is done, the web crawler follows all the links on the page, repeating the process of copying, indexing and then following the links. It keeps doing this, building up a huge index of many webpages as it goes.
This week in our maths lessons, the children were challenged to represent and solve problems using bar models. We learnt that a bar model can help identify what calculations need to be carried out. The teachers were thoroughly impressed with the positive attitude shown by the children and they way in which they worked together.
This week we have been inspired by Grażyna Bacewicz who, during WW2, composed a piece of music beginning with secret messages in morse code. We have had great fun writing dots and dashes in morse code. Here you can see us using musical instruments to share our hidden messages. Next, we will be adding musical notation to create a musical motif to show the rhythm we have created.
Year 6 have been learning about the role dialogue plays in conveying character. We have learnt that it is not only the words that the person says, but also how they say it and the actions that accompany the words.
This week, we took a day trip to Kew Gardens.
Continuing with our abstract expressionism painting unit, based around the works of Mark Rothko, this week the children started planning for their final piece.
This week, the children brought in fossils from home to help bring our science lessons to 'life'. We are learning about living things, evolution and inheritance and for this lesson focused on how fossils give scientists clues about organisms that lived in the past.
We learnt about microorganisms in our science lessons this week. We found out that not all microorganisms are bacteria and protists - some of them are fungi too! Mould is an example of this as it is made up of millions of tiny fungi. They start off as microscopic spores which are carried through the air, but when they land somewhere with enough moisture, nutrition and oxygen to grow, they develop tiny fibres called hyphae, which can be seen as fuzzy patches in different colours.
