Author: Mr Roundtree

Last week, we reminded ourselves about algorithms and practised giving them verbally through drawing pictures. This week, we made it a little more complicated by writing an algorithm to get a friend through an obstacle course.

As we realised what worked and what didn’t, we had to debug our algorithms to make them successful.

We kicked off our Explorers Big Topic today by discussing where we’d like to go exploring. The children shared their thoughts with each other and then their partner fed back. There we re lots of interesting places mentioned: the bottom of the ocean, into space, New Zealand and many more.

Then, we used the Atlases to remind ourselves of some key geographical vocabulary: hemisphere, continent, tropics, ocean names, etc. They also prompted us to think about other places (on Earth) that we’d like to visit which we then visited – via Google Earth.

Finally, we explored some fantastic images – all of which were real places on Earth – and chose which one we’d travel to if we could and why. The Plitvici Lakes in Croatia were most popular in our class.

A fabulous start to homework from Year 6. We enjoyed a wonderful presentation from both Edward and Aleena and saw a whole host of different ways we could us the 8Rs at home, at school and in extra curricular activities.

As always, we spent some time looking at each others’ before sharing a comment in everybody’s book.

Here are some we particularly liked:

We started a computing project this week – without computers! Y6 reminded me what an algorithm was and discussed what made successful and unsuccessful algorithms.

We practised trying to give oral algorithms by drawing a simple picture and then instructing a friend to draw the same (without seeing it first).

Here were some that actually ended up being very similar and we decided it was because the picture was simple in the first place; the instructions given were step by step; and the instructions included descriptions of where to draw things and how big to draw things.

In pairs, we then created some written instructions to try and get me (Miss Rushbrooke) from the front of the classroom to outside the fire door.  I walked into walls, banged by shins, ended up in the cupboard, but – after refining their algorithms as a result of other people’s mistakes – a couple of groups managed to get me outside.

We’re reading a book called The Incredible Book Eating Boy at the moment and, during our topic lessons, we’re trying to create our own piece of art in the style of Oliver Jeffers.

We’ve had a look at his art and compared it something that has similarities and differences.

Then, we practised drawing in the style of Oliver Jeffers which we notice included rather large heads and very thin arms and legs.

We also noticed that it looked like he used watercolour to create light and shadow in his illustrations so we practised that, too, ready for creating a final piece of art next week.

Year 6 have had some great Maths lessons this week, recapping some previous learning while honing our explanation and justification skills.

We’ve been reading, writing, comparing and ordering numbers up to 10,000,000 and managed to achieve some fantastic learning while playing some really fun games.

See whether your child can explain what we were doing here and teach you the game, too.