Beautiful weather arrived just in time to make the Year 6 Bikeability Week an enjoyable experience with not a damp saddle in sight. After a day of scrutiny from the instructors, the children then faced the local roads, developing their road awareness in real-life situations. They demonstrated commitment and critical thinking to remain safe at all times. Well done to all!

Inbetween riding their bikes, pupils have been investigating how heart rate responds to differing levels of exertion; they carried out a range of physical activities and compared these to their own measured resting heart rate. Bar charts were created to illustrate the data and children calculated their ‘mean’ for each activity. This allowed for discussions surrounding anomalies within a set of data – some dodgy HR monitoring took place with one person reporting a heart rate of 14 beats per minute! He must be fitter than Mo Farah!!!

Hopefully we will see you at Summerfest tonight and at the Sports Day on Monday morning at 9am.

The Year 6 Team

As our Everest survival topic continues, we were delighted to welcome Malcolm Harris – a professional photographer and mountaineer – who presented  a really engaging talk about his adventures around Everest Base Camp and summiting Kilimanjaro. On top of this, Malcolm also showed the children his range of mountaineering equipment, including a pair of the infamous crampons! And no, he didn’t experience any ‘cramp-on’ Everest! Thanks must also go to Sienna, who brought her father’s climbing equipment in that he used in 1988 during his trekking around the base of K2. To wrap, this up, a final thank you to Mr Cunningham who also spoke to the children about his trekking from Kathmandu to the area around the Khumbu Glacier. We really hope this has inspired the children to realise that the world is a small place, and that you can do anything you put your mind to. Just remember – ‘manage the risk’.

It was lovely to end the week with our Brazilian Carnival celebrations. The children had put a lot of effort into creating: Carnival masks, carnival shaker, Christ the Redeemer artwork and Brazilian banners. See below for a snapshot of the afternoon…

Another busy week in Year 6 began in an uplifting way on Tuesday with the celebration of Year 5 and 6 Pentecost Mass at Scared Heart Church. The weather was on our side as we walked to and from a wonderful service hosted by Father Jeremy with Miss Keo providing musical accompaniment. As we have been very focused for the past few weeks, Year 6 are grateful to the Year 5 children for leading the worship on this occasion.

The children were given the opportunity to write more informally this week when creating ‘A Dummies’ Guide to Mountaineering!’ The resulting puns and word play are ‘snow joke’ and the children truly ‘peaked’ on this particular piece of writing! They deserve to be read – which is a good opportunity to remind parents that they are invited to view their children’s work in class from 3:30pm this Monday. To further immerse the Year 6’s in their survival topic, Mr Cunningham kindly shared his photographs and maps from a trek he made in the region a ‘few’ years back; the children were very taken with a particular passport sized photo found inside his Sagarmartha National Park Trekking Permit…

While they were engrossed in their writing, Year 6 were visited by photographer Malcolm who was taking shots for future school publications. By sheer coincidence, he too has actually trekked most of the way to Everest Base Camp and was so impressed with their focus and interest has offered to share his photos, equipment and experiences with us this Thursday morning. How kind. We’re sure we’ll have many questions to ask!

Keeping with our topic, maths had an Everest focus too. Pupils were given an altitude profile graph of a round-trip to Base Camp with a series of related questions. Did you know that temperature drops by 6 degrees centigrade for every 1000m climbed from sea-level? Imagine how cold it can be at the 8,848m summit!

Have a lovely weekend,

The Year 6 Team

Coinciding with the spring summit season on Mount Everest, this week saw the Year 6 pupils begin their latest English topic – survival. We immersed ourselves in the world of mountaineering by watching scenes from the film ‘Everest’ and reading excerpts from the book  ‘Into Thin Air’ – the real life recount on which it was based. One of the most dangerous parts of any expedition up the south-west face is having to cross the Khumbu Icefalls, a slowly moving ‘river’ of ice, riddled with crevasses and hanging ice cliffs waiting for their next victims – an ideal setting for the children to write an extended story full of tension. We are very pleased with the results of their efforts over the week; they have all managed to convey character and capture the setting through their use of dialogue, action and description.

To tie in with the physical demands of survival situations, we have begun a new science topic this week, focused on human responses to exercise. Having analysed Mr Land’s heart rate over the course of a 10km run, the children are looking forward to comparing their own responses to running with and without the burden of a parachute on their backs. Should be fun!

The D-Day celebrations were another focus this week, and we were fortunate to have Kris share his Dad’s first-hand experience of the events that took place on Southsea Common. We enjoyed reading the programme and brochures which taught us more about the preparations made and huge numbers of brave soldiers that left the south coast for various Normandy beaches.

A little reminder that we would welcome parents and relatives to join us at Sacred Heart Church at 10:30am  Tuesday 11th June to celebrate the Year 5 and 6 Mass.

Have a good weekend,

The Year 6 Team