Author: Mr Catherall

Whilst the real referendum takes place across the country today, we held our own mini-referendum in Year 6 yesterday. Combining learning from the previous day with learning from last week’s homework, the children took part in a debate against each other.

There were three debates in total, all focusing on five key areas of the debate: immigration; the economy; pay and taxes; the cost of being in the EU; and terrorism and security.

All of the debates were of a high quality; we definitely have some budding politicians in our class. It was great to see how children could articulate their responses whilst remaining respectful to the opposite side.

Here are some action shots:

Afterwards, we voted. The results were:

Remain – 22

Leave – 7

So, according to Year 6, Britain should remain a member of the European Union.

As always, our responses to our creative homework (I can show what I know about the EU referendum) were brilliant this week. Who knew they had such an interest in politics? We had quizzes, PowerPoint presentations, persuasive letters, information leaflets and even a home-made ballot box with voting slips. It was great to see how proud the children were to show off their homework and it was obvious that efforts had been made to impress each other – keep it up – I love homework! 

Here are some of our favourites:

PS Some children might notice the variety of the punctuation in this post; it is one of our new writing targets. I’ve managed to use a colon, a semi colon, a dash, a comma, a question mark and even a few full stops! (And an exclamation mark.) 

This week marks the beginning of our latest topic: World History. In this topic, children will be learning about one of three civilisations: Benin, Ancient Islamic and Maya.

Today, we had a ‘taster’ session of each civilisation and found out lots of things we never knew:

• Did you know that the Mayans may have invented basketball?
• Or, did you know that the Ancient Islamic Civilisation were inventing machines that may have helped humans to fly thousands of years before the Wright brothers?

Children will now complete an independent research task to create a fact-filled project board about a civilisation of their choice whilst focusing on skills related to the foundation subject age-related expectations for Year 5 and Year 6.

It might look something like this:

You could help at home by:

• asking your child to think about the pros and cons for researching each civilisation
• spending time researching their chosen civilisation with them (using a range of reliable sources – not just Google!)
• encouraging them to carry out independent research
• discussing the importance of using reliable (and appropriate) sources when researching

Today, in our guided reading session, we practised our inference skills. However, we didn’t read a book, or a even a piece of writing. Instead, we watched a music video.

We answered a variety of questions that forced us to think about the character in the video, made predictions and used evidence from the video to justify our answers. (We’ll be doing a lot of justifying our answers this half-term, in all subjects.) The children really enjoyed practising their reading skills in this way, and recognised that they were learning a lot, too!

We discussed how this could easily be done at home, when watching TV or videos on the internet. We identified that we could create our own questions or ask an adult to help us. It would be great if you could help at home by encouraging your child to question the things they are watching, or ask them questions about it to check their understanding.

It’s a fun activity and really will help with reading!