Hour of Code

Joining thousands of other schools around the world, the Year Six children took part in the Hour of Code. All the children enjoyed taking themselves through a series of activities linked to Star Wars and, by completing these, the children learned some basics of coding as well as played a fun and educational game.

More information can be found on the website https://code.org/learnhttps://code.org/learn

Back to the Future Day

Back to the Future is a favourite film of many of the Year Six staff. Those of you who have seen the film Back to the Future II, know that Marty, the main character, travelled forward in time to October 21st 2015.
To celebrate this day, the Year Six children took part in a number of 'Back to the Future' activities including working together to calculate how many months, weeks, days, minutes and seconds there will be until October 21st 2045 and designing their own time machine.
The children also wrote a letter to themselves in the future asking pertinent questions and reminding their older selves of the dreams of their 2015 self.
We hope the children keep these letters and open them twenty years in the future.

Legoland

As part of the Year Six D.T. curriculum, the children will be designing their own fairground rides using Lego pieces and the software package WeDo.

In order to properly research rides, the Year Six staff took all the children to Legoland Windsor so that we can identify what features make a good ride by having a go. The children also took part in a workshop teaching them how to use the WeDo software led by a Legoland member of staff.

The children loved learning about the rides by riding them and we had repeated visits to the roller coaster, Lego driving school and even a submarine.  Screaming and laughter were judged to be a good indicator of a fun ride.

We identified that, when it is time to make our own rides, speed is an important factor as well as sudden changes of direction.

Now, all of the children are looking forward to making their own designs soon.

Our aspirations for Year Six.

We recently got to meet our new classes and talked about our hopes for the new academic year. We used this presentation to share some of the expectations we have for the children.

Welcome to Year Six 2015-16

Welcome to the new Year Six blog. It is going to be an exciting year. Remember to read everyday; if you need to, practise your multiplication and division facts and learn your spellings. Our first trip to Legoland is in the first full week and is going to be fantastic. Have a great summer and have a go at some of these activities. Have fun and be safe!

Anne Frank #notsilent

Recently, as part of our work on World War II and in honour of Anne Frank on the 70th Anniversary of her tragic death, Year Six took part in the #notsilent campaign promoted by the Anne Frank Trust UK. The children read one minute extracts from Anne Frank's Diary to each other and discussed their thoughts and feelings about Anne Frank and what she experienced. Here is an example of one of the extracts which was read by the pupils.

“We’re much too young to deal with these problems, but they keep thrusting themselves on us until, finally, we’re forced to think up a solution, though most of the time our solutions crumble when faced with the facts. It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. 

It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too will end, that peace and tranquillity will return once more. In the meantime, I must hold on to my ideals. Perhaps the day will come when I’ll be able to realize them!”

 – 15^th July, 1944, ‘Diary of A Young Girl’

Below is a video of one Year Six class sharing these extracts:

Mock General Election

Today, all Year Six children took part in a mock general election to help them understand the process taking place nationally.
Initially small groups of children were selected to form parties and they were given time to come up with pledges for their manifestos in a range of key areas such as education, technology and health.
Whilst this was happening, the other children were developing questions which were asked at our very own hustings.
The children asked pertinent searching questions which our 'political parties' had to develop answers for on the spot. A challenge for even the most experienced politician!

Between the time of the hustings and actual election, each party delivered a party political broadcast throughout Year Six using the speaker systems and were allowed to revise their pledges based on the feedback from the electorate.

As the polling station was set up by a group of volunteers, the other children were given time to review their opinions on each party; ask further, clarifying questions and reread each parties manifesto.

Finally, each member of Year Six was given the opportunity to vote, the chief counter collated the results and the returning officer announced that the Progress party had won the election.

The children were engaged by this process, asked excellent questions and all turned out to vote.

Writing 'Exciting Sentences'

From the start of Year Six, you have been encouraged to use a variety of simple, compound and complex sentences in your writing as well as a range of different punctuation from commas to brackets. In order to support you with this, we have introduced you to some 'exciting sentence' types. To help you with this, there is a booklet of the different sentence types which explains the sentence types and offers some examples. Please have a look at this booklet and use it to practise your writing at home.

Click here to access the booklet.