Merry Christmas!

We’ve had a lovely week finishing off our Fairtrade iMovie campaigns. The children have worked exceptionally hard to script, film and edit these within their groups. They have also created some fantastic animations to tell the story of a Fairtrade farmer within their iMovie. We enjoyed sharing these and watching them back as a class.

We also thoroughly enjoyed the virtual panto (and ice cream!) that FFG kindly organised. That, along with the beautiful reception nativity, brought us lots of festive cheer!

All that’s left to say is that, from all of us in year 6, we wish you a merry Christmas and a lovely holiday. Stay safe and we look forward to seeing everyone in the new year!

Almost there…

We have made it to Friday at the end of a strange week for Year 6, we started the week by making poo (!) and ended dressed up in our Christmas clothes.

In our Science work this week we have been looking at the digestive system and how it works to extract the nutrients and energy we need from our food. As part of this session, we had great fun creating a model digestive system using, among other things, an old pair of tights. We took it in turns to be different parts of the system including a lot of squeezing in the intestines. The final product (made of a mixture of biscuits and lemonade) was unnervingly realistic!

This week we have been continuing to work on our Fairtrade i-Movies. This has included working in groups to write our scripts and storyboard our animation. Children have been working hard ‘screen testing’ sections of their script and creating all sorts of buildings and equipment out of paper. We hope to complete our final films next week before the end of term.

We finished off this week in two ways. First by donating food to a local food bank so that everyone in Dunmow and the surrounding area has enough food to eat over the Christmas holidays. Second by filming our Christmas messages for the online digital calendar. This was quite a challenge as it is hard to be sensible and pay attention when wearing a set of fairy lights or your Christmas jumper.

One more week till the Christmas holidays!

Advent!

I can’t believe we have already reached advent! Things have been starting to get a bit more festive in Comet class this week. We have been busy preparing a Christmas surprise for the school digital advent calendar, we can’t wait to share it with you! This week also saw the arrival of some class advent calendars. Each morning, we are doing a different wellbeing activity in the lead up to Christmas to help us look after our own mental health. On Tuesday, we had to come up with our favourite jokes to share with the rest of the class… needless to say, these needed a little bit of work! As a treat, we also have our own chocolate advent calendar that we do at the end of each day.

In our English lessons, we have started working in groups to put together our final iMovie campaign for Fairtrade. The children are going to script and edit their own iMovies and create animations about Fairtrade which we will send out at the end of the term. They have split their team into animators and script writers. The animators are working with Miss Ash to create their animators and the script writers are with Miss Pearce in Comet class. We are looking forward to showing you the finished product!

Powers of Persuasion

This week the children have been working exceptionally hard on writing their persuasive leaflets to send to the Co-op. The children have been thinking carefully about how to knit all of the skills they have been working on together. They have included statistics, rhetorical questions and plenty of emotive language. Next week we are going to finish these off and type them up in best. Don’t forget to pop to the Co-op and see if you can find our Fairtrade leaflets in a couple of weeks time!

In our experience lessons, we have started to practise creating animations. This is a skill we are going to develop further next week when we start to think about how we are going to put our Fairtrade iMovie campaign together. We have also conducted our own investigation to test what happens to our pulse rate when we do different types of exercise. We found that skipping and boxing raised our heart rate the most.

Next week sees us into December and things will start to be getting a little Christmassy, stayed tuned for more info!

Reunited!

After a quiet start to the week, it was lovely to be rejoined by the rest of year 6 on Wednesday. We have been so impressed with how they handled the shift to home learning with such little notice. The children have come back to school ready to pick up where we left off and it was great to see everyone again.

We have continued to explore some complicated punctuation and grammar skills in our English lessons this week, focusing on semicolons and the passive voice. These are not easy concepts, but the children have had fun with it have started to apply these skills to their writing.

In our experience lessons, we have had fun with taste testing different products to see if we could tell the difference between fairtrade products and non-fairtrade products. Unfortunately, this HAD to involve lots of chocolate tasting – it’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it!! We realised that despite costing more, the fairtrade products tasted very similar to the regular items. This makes our job much harder when persuading customers to choose fair trade. We have discussed how we could incentivise people to choose fairtrade products even though the cost is higher. This is something we will explore in more detail when we begin creating our campaigns next week.

Isolation Nation!

First of all – well done for getting through your first week of home learning! It has been fantastic to see all the children’s work coming through and how hard they have been working.

Secondly, apologies for not posting last week – under the circumstances of the bubble closing down we completely forgot!

Home learning will continue for Monday and Tuesday, Miss Ash will be online to provide any help you might need.

We look forward to welcoming you back in school on Wednesday!

Across Year 6, we have changed our test day for spellings and Going for Gold to a Thursday. This week as the children have been working on learning their Year 5/6 spelling words, we will choose 10 spellings from the first column of the spelling sheet and these words will still need to be put into sentences for their spelling test.

Monarch Madness!

It has been an exceptionally busy week in year 6. The children have been focused on finishing their cross stitch pieces off and the results are amazing! We have been blown away with how far the children’s sewing skills have come and it has been so lovely to see them enjoying watching their creations come to life!

They have also been making screen prints of different kings and queens made to look like postage stamps as well as some portrait sketching. We will be compiling all of their hard work into a gallery which is going to be displayed in our Discovery Centre for all to see.

In addition to this, we have been writing our Treason newspaper articles. This week in particular, we have been thinking about the layout and presentation of our work as we decided to type up our final drafts to make them look more authentic.

A few bits of admin just to finish…

• The children have been sent home with their Christmas card designs. To order these, you will need to follow the instructions on the leaflet attached and then return the artwork back to school next half term.
• FFG have sent home a smarties tube challenge – all the details of which are on a leaflet.
• We have noticed a few children with juice/squash in their water bottles. Please ensure that your child’s bottle only contains only water.

All that’s left to say is have a lovely half term! We will see you all when we return!

Treason: Read all about it!

This week the children have been exploring some grammar and punctuation skills in preparation for our Treason newspaper article. We have been focusing on our use of direct and indirect speech and our use of tense. The children have produced some great writing and we have been so impressed with how well they have listened to the feedback they have been given. Towards the end of the week, we started planning and drafting our final newspaper article. The children are doing well to remember the skills we have been practising and applying this to their own writing. Next week, we are going to be typing these news articles up, thinking carefully about the organisation and layout of our work.

In maths this week, both groups have been practising their calculation methods. Lots of this has been recapping previous learning but the children have also had to grapple with new formal calculation methods like long division!

Our experience lessons have been dominated by sewing our cross stitch monarchs this week. The children are becoming much more confident with this and have made a lot of progress with their kings and queens! We will have a couple more sessions on this next week to ensure they are ready for our gallery which is going up in the Discovery Centre!

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Sew much fun!

This week the children have been designing their cross stitch monarchs. They had to think carefully about the different characteristics of each monarch and how they could represent this using cross stitch. Once the children had finished designing their kings and queens, we began to get stitching! The children first had to identify all of the different coloured threads they would need. After they had done this, they had to find the midpoint on their binca so they knew where to start on their designs. Despite getting frustrated at times when things didn’t quite go to plan, the children have done brilliantly and are really enjoying practising this new skill (even more so now we have our hands on new, much-loved needle threaders)! We will have several more sewing sessions next week to finish off our work.

In English this week, we have moved on to start looking at newspaper reports. We have familiarised ourselves with the features of a newspaper report and started to think about some of the grammatical aspects involved too. This week we focused specifically on cohesion, using fronted adverbials and conjunctions to make our writing flow better. Next week we are going to revisit the rules of speech and tense, applying this to newspaper reports.

Treason!

This week has been a very creative week in Comet class. We have been planning and writing our own new chapters for our class text ‘Treason’ by Berlie Doherty. This has involved us having to come with a plan to rescue a character imprisoned on a charge of Treason against King Henry VIII!

We have also been practising our drawing skills, learning to draw a face accurately to prepare us for creating portraits of English monarchs. In addition to this, the children have been learning the craft of cross stitch, ready to start designing our monarch tapestries next week.

In our history lessons, we have been learning about Queen Victoria. We have been finding out about what life would have been like for children in Victorian times. The children considered themselves very lucky, having heard about the lack of appropriate sewage facilities available to most Victorians!

This week we have set spellings and going for gold tasks so please check out the ‘homework’ page in preparation for our tests next week.