2023-2024 Activities
Curriculum maps, from earlier in the year, are at the start of this year’s page.
Design Technology: Playgrounds
In Design Technology, the children have been tasked with designing and creating a new playground. They brainstormed what features make a playground enjoyable. They explored the Key Stage 1 playground to draw inspiration for their own designs.
They then watched a video showing how to construct one particular structure, before going on to create their own, and discussed why triangles make a strong structure. Most of the children decided to create swings, or climbing frames.
While the task originally seemed simple to the children, they quickly realised that things were not as easy as they seemed. In particular, the need for patience to let the glue dry(!), but more frustratingly, how to make their structures stand up. Bit by bit, they began to come up with different ideas.
The children finished the unit, by decorating their structures.
World Book Day
Learning To Play the Ocarina
We have been learning to play the ocarina. We have practised each note in turn, as well as the whole song, which we have thoroughly enjoyed! Our next challenge is to learn how to play Twinkle Twinkle in rounds.
Making Electrical Circuits
We have been exploring how to make electrical circuits in Science and how adding and removing components has an effect on the brightness of the bulbs. The children enjoyed creating different circuits practically and solving how to fix a circuit to make the bulb work. They worked collaboratively as a team and came up with some excellent conclusions from their findings.
International Dot Day
On International Dot Day, we read the book The Dot by Peter Reynolds. The message in the book is such a strong one. It is about a little girl who doesn’t believe she can do art. Encouraged by her teacher, she puts a single dot on her art paper. Her teacher frames it, and the following week Vashti puts more dots on the paper, encourage by her teacher. Before long Vashti is encouraging others.
The key messages are around:
We use the idea of dots to create our own mathematical artwork, involving rotational symmetry. The finished images are fab: the children needed a huge amount of concentration and perseverance to keep the symmetry going, as it’s not an easy task.
We are now planning to do a detailed piece of instruction writing, to finish off our work on International Dot Day art.
I Am…
As part of our work on character traits in English, we thought about our own traits and then created a piece of artwork. We had to:
We hope you like our work…
Collaborative Maths
We had our first maths session today. We revised odd/even/prime/square numbers, while playing a card sort game called Maths Buzz.
In the task we had to:
work with a partner,
read 15 clue cards, involving lots of maths vocabulary,
sequence 9 number cards to match the clues,
double-check our answers against the cards.
It’s quite a challenge, and most of us needed several goes to get the correct answer…
Character Traits...
In our first English lesson we played Scoot... a reading game, where we had to:
We then 'Scoot' on around the classroom to do the rest of the cards.
Once all the cards are completed, we go through the answers as a class, checking for any which caused a problem.
It's a great way to cover grammar revision, without doing a 'ton' of worksheets. The children love it, especially with the element of time involved... seven and a half minutes to complete 15 questions.
First Day Jitters
Over the last couple of years, one of my favourite things to do on the first day with my new class is to read First Day Jitters by Julie Danneberg. Why you may ask? Well, it tells the story of a character called Sarah Hartwell, who has the jitters about being in her new class. But it has a twist, which always raises a smile with the children... the twist is that Sarah Jane is actually the teacher!
It provides a lovely way for our first class discussion, and for a chance to share how we are ALL feeling, on the first morning.
The children had lots of fun, creating poses to show various emotions. Enjoy the photos...
National Reading Day
The first day back at school 'kicked off' with National Reading Day!
We acknowledged the day by choosing our new take-home readers, spending time 'getting into' our books and creating our new bookmarks. In our English lesson, we read the book First Day Jitters by Julie Danneberg... which had a surprise ending!!
2022-2023 Activities
Curriculum Coverage & Parental Newsletter
Leavers' Assembly
Thank you to all our parents, family and friends who came to the Year6 Leavers' assembly.
The children sang the lyrics of the Maya song that they had written this week (after doing lots of independent research), to fit the tune of La Cucaracha: they thoroughly enjoyed playing the djembe drums as an accompaniment.
They were clearly in fine voice, as they sang It Ain't Easy, or as I prefer to call it - 'The Mischief' song!
We thoroughly enjoyed sharing time afterwards with all of you, and getting lots of opportunities to take photos, and to show off our beautifully dressed teddies, that were wearing their newly created waistcoats, which had been made during our DT topic.
All the staff, especially the Year 6 staff, hope you enjoyed listening to the children and watching them being presented with their gifts of either their portrait work, or their 'Found' poem.
We wish all the children the best for the summer and their transfer to high school. And, look forward, as always, to catching-up with them in September when they call in for a chat. Enjoy the photos...
Leavers' Celebrations: Laser Quest & Nando's
Our celebrations this year 'kicked off' with a visit to Laser Quest at the Trafford Centre and lunch a Nando's, courtesy of a very generous parent, who doesn't have a pupil in the class (thank you so much, as that was a total surprise).
The children had a fabulous time, and there was a definite sense of déjà vu, as staff yet again got 'cornered' and 'attacked' by multiple groups of pupils... the hardest thing was not to collapse in a fit of giggles or scream 'no' at the children. Still, the staff got their revenge, and both Mr Hope & Mrs Lawson topped the league tables at the end of the first session. I only managed to get to 7th! Watching the children compare scores and being so competitive makes me smile.
The children's behaviour at lunch-time was great, despite a half-hour wait outside the restaurant, as it opened later than advertised. The manager was amazing in his attitude to us, and 'gifted' us our bottomless drinks. Just like last years' class, we were 'run off our feet', serving endless 'bottomless' drinks!
Listening carefully to the instructions.
Enjoying a relaxing, but noisy lunch...
Summer 2
Photorealism
Our final piece of work on our Photo Opportunity topic was to recreate our school photograph. We had to:
• demonstrate observation and proportion to create art in a photorealistic style.
• apply the grid drawing method to translate a photo into a drawn image using careful observation.
• understand how the grid method helped to retain the same proportions as an original image.
• show different tones in colour and patterns to create a photorealistic painting or drawing.
We spent way longer than planned doing this work, but it truly was worthwhile, as the children were so engaged and so proud of what they produced.
Summer 1
Poetry
One the first things we did after SATs, was to go through our reading books and get rid of any that were to old, or too tatty! Before disposing of them, we used them to write poetry called Found Poetry.
A “found poem” is one that is created using only words, phrases, or quotations that have been selected and rearranged from another text, such as a book or magazine. It’s a bit like creating a collage in art!
How to create one:
Finally, we typed our poems up, to make them easier to read. We hope you enjoy reading some of them...​​​​​​​
Spring 2
Crucial Crew
The children travelled to Rochdale to take part in this year's Crucial Crew event, where they learned about personal safety, including:
They had talks from the police, transport police road safety workers and health workers.
School Book Fair
The children had a lovely time choosing books for our class library, and couldn't wait to get back to class to start reading them. We were very fortunate in being able to trade-in some old tech, that had been destined for the recycling bin, for cash !
Spring 1
Colloborative Maths… Maths Buzz
We took a mini-break from our maths curriculum to look at problem-solving. In this Maths Buzz challenge, the children had 15 clue cards and 9 number cards to arrange in a certain order, using the clues. What seems like a very straightforward activity created a lot of discussion, and required some very careful reading of the clues, while at the same time ‘juggling’ possible combinations of answers.
Finally, the smiles that come with success…
Our Dreams for the Future…
Autumn 2
Baa Baa Bethlehem…
The children all worked incredibly hard in the two weeks preceding our Christmas Nativity performance. Some of them had masses of lines to learn, others showed what great team players they can be by helping others to learn their lines. The singing was fab too! It was lovely to be able to get them all dressed up in costumes too, and to be able to do our first Christmas performance in three years. Enjoy the photos…
Cast in order of appearance… roughly
Party Time…
There’s only one way to end the Autumn term and that’s with a Christmas Party. We only managed two games, pass the parcel and musical chairs, but both were very loud and energetic. As always there was tons of food (thank you to all our parents for that) and it really was lovely to see the children making sure that everything was shared out equally on their tables.
Autumn 1
PSHE: JOY
As a link to our work in English, where we have focussed much of our discussions on a character’s feelings, we spent some time thinking about what brings us joy! Our latest display has brought lots of lovely comments from the staff, and made many people smile.
Collaborative Maths
To get our maths brains going again after the summer break, and to begin revising key facts and concepts from Year 5, we've been doing an activity called Talk It, Solve It.
In pairs, we have a set of 8 number cards and 8 clues. We work through each clue, and discard any number cards which don't match the clue. We work our way through all clues until just one card is left.
Sounds easy... but not as easy as the children first thing... just following the instructions after 6 weeks off can be a challenge!
My favourite bit about the activity, is the buzz in class while the children work through the cards, and the 'gentle' disagreements, when someone doesn't agree with their partner!
Unfortunately not the ones with chocolate chips.
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