Year 5/6 netball
This week, our Year 5/6 netball team took part in the Leeds Well Schools Partnership netball competition at Allerton High.
Despite the rain, the team played some great netball and managed to finish second in their group.
For some of the children, this was their first time representing school at netball and for some it will be their last after many years of coming to our netball club so well done to all the children who competed.
Topic: Drop Down Morning
Today, we had a topic Drop Down Morning. We revisited knowledge about climate change, the West Indies carnival and William Morris’ artwork.
In Geography, Year 6 matched some of our key vocabulary to its definition and an example. They also thought about the 3 main causes and the effects of climate change.
Help at home: What are the 3 main causes of climate change?
In History, we recapped our knowledge of the historical concepts and linked these to the Atlantic Slave Trade and the West Indies carnival.
In Art, we revisited all the visual and tactile elements and thought about how they link to William Morris’ artwork called ‘The Strawberry Thief’.
Help at home: What are the visual and tactile elements? Can your child describe a piece of art made by Orla Kiely using them.
Writing: A Promotional Piece
After completing some fantastic narratives that created tension and suspense, we have now started to look at creating a promotional piece of writing. The children will be trying to persuade people to buy their ‘Chatbot Game’ that they have been making in our computing topic.
The purpose of a promotional text is ‘to persuade/sell/promote a product’.
We started by looking at different promotional texts; the children highlighted and annotated them to find the R2s.
Help at home: Find the R2s in the text.
– present tense
– name of product
– slogan
– subheadings
– persuasive language
– figurative language (e.g. alliteration, hyperbole)
– rhetorical questions
– customer review (e.g. direct quotes)
– special offer
– repetition (e.g. rule of three)
Living and Learning: Health and Prevention
Year 6 have been learning about germs and how to prevent spreading them.
We started off the lesson by taking part in a quiz. Did you know that the kitchen is normally the most germiest room in the house? And, there are 100,000 microbes in a sneeze?
The children then discussed cross contamination and how quickly germs can spread. We talked about the need to wash our hands to help prevent this spread. We could use soap or hand sanitiser.
Help at home: Discuss other ways we can stop germs from spreading.
Topic: Computing
This half term, computing is our topic. We have had 3 unplugged lessons where we have discussed what a search engine and logical reasoning is. This week, however, we have taken to the Chromebooks!
Year 6 had some time to explore Scratch and remind themselves where everything was and how to use it. Then, the task was to create their sprite (cartoon character or object) to walk up a set of stairs. The children showed good teamwork as they worked in pairs.
World Book Day!
Today is World Book Day and we started off the day with an assembly lead by Mr Wilks where we got to hear from teachers about their favourite books.
Help at home: Talk about the best environment to read in. Where is a good place to read? Is it better to read on your own or with someone? What time is a good time to read?
We had a busy morning. It was jam-packed with loads of reading and enjoying books. We completed some activities about our favourite characters.
Year 6 did some paired reading with Year 3. The children were absolutely fantastic. They thoroughly enjoyed sharing their books from home and reading to each other.
As you can see, lots of the children enjoy Lottie Brooks’ books, Percy Jackson and Dork Diaries.
Help at home: Read everyday with your child for at least 20 minutes.
Cross country
We’ve had two cross country events this week.
First of all, it was the final Saturday morning race at Middleton Park. Well done to all of the children who have taken part in the four races held across the year and for parents who supported at these events.
On Tuesday, five of our Key Stage 2 children represented Leeds at the West Yorkshire cross country final at Temple Newsam in the glorious sunshine.
We are very proud of all our runners who raced in tough, competitive conditions, with the best runners from across West Yorkshire. They all put in 100% effort and were a great support for each other. The children should feel proud of competing at this level.
A special mention to our Year 5 runner who finished 10th place out of 151 runners and has now qualified for the national cross country final later this month. One of our Year 4 runners narrowly missed out on this qualification by two places.
Thank you to parents who helped with transport and supported at the event.
Reading: Oracy
In today’s Reading lesson, the children performed the poem ‘Railway Carriage’ by Robert Louis Stevenson written in 1885.
We recapped our oracy targets from this year and identified which ones would be relevant to this lesson.
Help at home: Can your child learn this poem off by heart?
Living and Learning: I know what a drug is.
In Living and Learning, Year 6 have been learning what a drug is, why people use medicine and how vaccines can protect the population.
We defined a drug as ‘a substance that changes the way the body or mind works.’ Then, we moved on to focus how medicines can help:
- prevent someone from becoming ill or stop a disease from spreading
- help someone manage an ongoing health condition, such as asthma or diabetes
- help someone feel better and relieve pain, such as from a headache
- help the body recover from illness
To finish off, we played ‘the vaccination game’. This helped us to look at how different percentages of vaccinated people can affect the spread of diseases. We learnt that the more vaccinated people in a population, the less likely it is for someone to get the disease.
Writing: Francis
This week, Year 6 have started their new writing topic. Over the next three weeks, the children will write a short narrative which creates tension and suspense. We used an animated video as our stimulus which was sourced from the Literacy Shed.
This film is perfect at building tension: the narrator uses pauses and varies the speed at which he speaks in order to build the suspense. As well as speech used to create tension, the music also plays a key part in creating suspense.
Help at home: Watch the video with and without music. How does this alter the tension created?