The highlight of our week has to be the Year 5/6 mass at Sacred Heart on Tuesday. With the theme being ‘prayer’, Year 6 put smiles on many faces with their Sister Act inspired rendition of Salve Regina. In fact it was so well received, Father Jeremy requested a repeat rendition to close the service. Thank you to all those who gave their assistance to walk the children safely to and from the church, and to all who attended the service.

Many thanks also to parents who supported their children by meeting with their teacher at our parents’ evenings. It was lovely to meet you all and we are looking forward to continuing to support and challenge our pupils over the coming term.

Maths lessons have focused on fractions this week, moving from simplifying to ordering using a common denominator. Children are growing in confidence in their explanations of this sometimes tricky concept.

In English we have been examining different character viewpoints using the painting ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump’ from 1768 (Google it). It was great fun discussing pupil ideas from looking at a section of the painting and then revealing the whole scene. From this, we created interesting dialogue and have begun planning a monologue for the whole scene from a chosen character’s perspective.

Another busy week then and we have more to look forward to in the coming week, which culminates in a STEM (science, technology, English and maths) investigation day on Friday.

All the best,

The Year 6 Team

Dear all,

This week saw the children exploring war poetry and poetic devices in order to create their own remembrance poem.  We were amazed at how the children took on the task in such a short time to explore messages and emotions that they wanted to convey about war and remembering the fallen soldiers that gave their lives for the freedom of others. Both classes have created a memorial book of their work that will be offered at the Remembrance Assembly on Monday morning.

In Maths we started work on developing fraction and decimal knowledge for year 6. We will be completing a series of assessments next week to enable us to pin-point the next steps in the children’s learning.

In RE, we continue our work with Prayers, Saints and Feasts and look at the role of Saints within the Catholic faith. A reminder about the Year 5/6 Mass – Tuesday 21st November in the Sacred Heart Church at 10.20am. If there are any parents that can walk to the Church with the children, then please let the office or class teachers know of your availability.

The week ended well with a visit from authors – The Two Steves. The children enjoyed a fun-packed performance in the morning and then a writing workshop in the afternoon. We will be applying their story writing advice on Monday when the children have a go at writing a ghost-type story in preparation for our next unit of English.

Enjoy your week.

The Year 6 Team

It was lovely to welcome the children back to school feeling refreshed – we were all ready for half-term following the enjoyable but tiring Stubbington trip.

We have spent the week completing, editing and improving our non-chronological reports on some extremely original and quite gruesome bugs. Would you like to be confronted by a tarantuscorp? The children have applied their understanding of the features of this form of writing to include a range of generalisers, relative clauses and topical language. We may have the next Sir David Attenborough in our ranks!

Our maths learning has continued to focus on efficient methods of multiplying large numbers together. Maybe you could ask your child to do the calculations next time you reach for a calculator at home? We finished the week applying our learning to solve some quite comlex area problems with a few red herrings thrown in for good measure.

We are now studying Prayers, Saints and Feasts in RE, with a particular focus on Mary. Our first lesson investigated the many different titles that she has been given and a discussion of what these told us about her and her importance. We have since been learning the prayer ‘Salve Regina’ which was immortalised in the film ‘Sister Act’. Our hope is to give a showstopping performance at the Year 5 and 6 Mass.

Throughout the week the pupils have completed an assessment of the 100 Year 5 and 6 statutory spellings, the results of which have been shared and should have come home. We would be grateful if parents and carers could spend a little time each week testing children on the words they have highlighted. Please also encourage them to use Sumdog to improve their maths recall and to read daily.

Have a wonderful weekend!

The Year 6 Team