Author: Mr Roundtree

Year 6 are working in groups to prepare for our class assembly which is on Wednesday 1 November.

You’ll have to come along to see what it’s all about.

After the half term holiday, Year 6 are going to Fountains Abbey. We’ve been learning about the human and physical features of this site and comparing them to Machu Picchu in Peru.

This year, the children are taking control of their trip. We spent the afternoon looking at maps of the site and the timings of the day so that the different groups could plan what they were going to do while we’re there.

We decided that giving each other jobs would be a good idea so each child has a role:

• map-reader
• photographer
• time-keeper
• visitor surveyor
• artist

It can be quite difficult to work in such a big group but the children did a good job discussing jobs and making sure each person was happy in the end.

We had a great homework review today as the homework completed on exploring the local area was top notch. Archie created a great video of walking to school but with the camera around his dog’s neck; Edward presented a bird’s eye view of some local landmarks to us; Neive created a video of her exploration; and Ollie created a ‘guess where’ game for us to play.

Here are some more for you to see at home.

Photos of going to the shops

Lift-the-flap map with information about each area

Map with places labelled with pictures

A diary entry of a walk around the area

Some great quality spelling work this week, too, which was great to see, having discussed this as a class last week.

This was our first lesson on how to use semi-colons in a list.

We had to place the semi-colons and commas correctly.

We worked in groups so that we could discuss our decisions and help each if needed.Using ‘contributions tokens’ helps us to make sure that everyone is contributing equally to group discussions. (Ask us how this works.)
By the end of the lesson, most of us could change a sentence which just required commas for a list into one which needed semi-colons.

Y6 are taking part in yet another competition!

Fountains Abbey is hosting a ‘Design a Folly’ competition, the of winner of which will have their folly built in the grounds of the abbey itself.

Yesterday, we were visited by Chris Hinett, an architect who is working on the project. He helped us to mark out the size of the actual folly on the floor of our classroom so we could understand how big it would be when it was built.

We had to move all the tables and chairs it was so big!

Then, he taught us about scale and how our designs for the folly would have be drawn at a 1:20 scale. We learnt this in relation to how tall we were. Our actual height is a 1:1 scale and, if we drew ourselves as half the size, this would be 1:2.

We drew around ourselves (1:1 scale).

Then had a go at drawing us at 1:20.

Finally, we used our Maths skills (divide by 20) and Chris’s fancy ruler to check how close our drawings were. Our attempts were pretty close and Zack’s and Owen’s were pretty much spot on.

We finished the session by looking at some examples of follies and sharing our initial ideas before getting some ideas jotted down in our Arty Ideas books. We’ll be finalising our entries next week for them to be sent off over half term.

We’ve been working on perspective in art to be able to create drawing which are in proportion. We started off by exploring shading as a technique to make things look 3D. Then, we moved on to using one-point perspective to draw a corridor or a street. This week, we tried out two-point perspective and drew a street from the corner rather than the middle of the road.

Nico got a certificate for his work on two-point perspective this week. (In the display above, his picture is the middle one on the right hand side.)

Grace has enjoyed it so much, she created this entire city at home and brought it in to show us!

Each week, the children bring home either a spelling activity or a list of spellings to learn. Unfortunately, a number of children haven’t been completing this task to a high enough standard and some haven’t completed it at all.

We all looked at some good examples today and we’ll be working hard to ensure we’re all producing such good spelling practice from now on.

Last week’s homework was to create a competition entry for the Young Imagineers project. It required the children to think about how to make the world a better place and invent something that would contribute to this.

Here are some of the children’s favourites:

Lawn Mower Shoes (my favourite)Salt-Water PurifierAir-Powered Vehicles
Insta-Charger
Peace Sprinkler

 

I’ll be uploading all of the entries over the weekend so keep your fingers crossed.