Author: Mr Roundtree

This week’s 8Rs we’re focusing on are resourcefulness and resilience.

To be resourceful at school, we can make sure we’re bringing anything we need from home (PE kits, reading books, homework); we can make sure everything we need is always in our trays; and we can use the displays and equipment around the classroom to help our learning. Discuss with your child whether there are ways they can be resourceful at home.

All of Year 6 know what it means to be resilient. We discussed when we might need to be resilient and how we might feel at the time. See whether your child can share any of our discussion with you.

We had a bit of fun while thinking about resilience too. Each group was challenged to build the tallest tower they could but, every now and again, someone (definitely not Miss Rushbrooke) came and knocked some of it down. This helped us to experience those feelings we might have at a time we need to be resilient.

We’ve been developing our skills in drawing faces and, today, we focused on our eyes.

By following some really simple steps, we managed to create some great eye drawings, Why don’y you try it at home too?

When looking at England’s coastline, we talked about how it needed protecting against erosion from the sea. We planned an investigation to test what concrete mixture was the strongest and, today, we tested them.

We placed our samples into bags and labelled them with the ratio of cement:stones:sand used to make it.

We donned our coats and braved the bad weather. We agreed to drop each sample at 10cm intervals and see which broke last and, therefore, was the strongest.

Lots were so strong that they didn’t break even when we were dropping them from 2m! So, we found the highest point we could get to in our school and dropped them from there…

Some still didn’t break. We decided this was a good thing as it means our coastlines are protected by a very strong material.

We tested our Where in the World knowledge during our homework review.

We’d learnt all sorts of facts:

• capitals of countries
• countries of Europe
• countries of Africa
• continents
• oceans

We were particularly impressed with how quickly Albert could name the capitals of the countries he’d chosen and with how many countries of Africa Isaac could name.

In PE sessions, we’ve been working hard to improve our ball skills. We’ve been working individually and in pairs to throw, catch and pass a ball. The children are enjoying their PE sessions in Year One and have made great progress already!

In Year One, we’ve been busy combining our English and topic learning. The children were given an envelope of words and had to work together to put them in the correct order to form sentences. After this, the children used maps and atlases to write their own sentences.