Author: Mr Hayes

The start of the final half-term is always a funny time for year six – the SATs are finally behind us and we have enjoyed the school journey that we had been looking forward too for so long, and whilst the children are naturally beginning to look forward to the adventure of secondary school, there is still so much to do and enjoy here.

The end of key stage assessments for writing are based, not on tests, but on the writing the children do day-in and day-out, so high expectations and good effort are still as important now as they have every been. We have finished the content of the maths curriculum and so we are keeping our maths understanding ‘fresh’ through a number of projects: this week, we have been making plans for our bakery and look forward in the coming weeks to putting on our masterchef hats and cooking up a treat, using our data handling and measuring skills to make this happen.

We also have to begin looking towards the end of term and planning to go out with style and so, to that end, I have completed the worst job I have to do each year and cast our leavers’ production. We have our scripts and parts to learn: this is always an ensemble piece, where the children can enjoy putting on something special and memorable which can only be achieved by working together. I do not doubt that they will have a blast and that they will do themselves (and us) proud.

I plan to share the limited photos from the Isle of Wight at the open evening towards the end of this month as part of our celebration of our learning. For now, here is a taster from the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth.

Pope Paul VI reminds us in his Encyclical on the Month of May that this “is a time when Catholics in every part of the world offer up to Mary from their hearts an especially fervent and loving homage of prayer and veneration. In this month, too, the benefits of God’s mercy come down to us from her throne in greater abundance”

In school, this week, we have marked the beginning of May by joining together for a liturgy to celebrate the Crowning of Mary. Children across the school worked together to create posters to proclaim Mary as Mother of God and Queen. In year six, our poster recognised Mary as Queen of the Most Holy Rosary.

This week, we have celebrated Earth Day and explored the theme of ‘Planet vs Plastics’.

As part of our geography week, we have used our field-work skills to conduct a survey of packaging in our packed lunches. Our analysis of this data has shaped our thinking on what we can practically do at St Adrian’s to reduce our plastic waste.

In English, we have learnt more about the issues facing our planet, reading Georgia Amson-Bradshaw’s book ‘Plastic Planet’. We are putting this expertise to good use as we combine it with what we have learnt through our field-work to prepare speeches for the school council’s ‘Talk It Out’ competition.

We have also shared our knowledge by creating a class website in Computing to share some of the issues that we face living in an increasingly ‘plastic planet’.

In other learning, we have enjoyed exploring light in science, using our understanding of reflection to make periscopes.

As we reach the end of the season of Lent, our year six chaplaincy team led the school in solemn reflection through the stations of the cross.

Following our solemn Passion assembly, we got ready to celebrate the joy of Easter with the Easter art competition, organised by the chaplaincy team. Well done to Archie and Rukksika on your winning paintings!

The class have also been busy this week completing their playground design project in DT. I have been very impressed by the creativity and careful construction!

After such a short whirlwind of a term, year six are heading towards their final term of primary education: there is still much to learn and lots to look forward to.

Have a happy and blessed Easter!

Relive the magic!
Happy Mother’s Day to all of our mums.

Every year, World Book Day promotes the power of reading. There are so many ways to enjoy reading and it is important that you find your way to read:

• Take books home to read.
• Listen to books being read aloud (or listen to audiobooks)
• Choose the books you want to read.
• Ask for ideas on what to read next.
• Make time to read.
• Find ways to make reading fun!

To celebrate their birthdays, children are encouraged to donate a book to our class library. The reward for doing this is to come to school in a favourite outfit.  You can view our class wish-list on Amazon.

It was great to see Year Six getting into the spirit of the event, sharing their joy of reading through their costumes and pairing up with children in Year Two to read stories to the younger children. We are currently writing our own stories for our friends in this class and we are looking forward to meeting up again in a few weeks to share these special stories.

This week, we have started our new computing topic: programming.

Although we have written programs before using scratch, this was our first lesson in programming for the Microb:t computers, using an emulator before downloading our algorithms to the microb:t computers. We are looking forward to extending our skills and knowledge further next week.

Over the past few weeks, we have been fascinated to learn about the fight for women’s suffrage in David Roberts’ excellent book, ‘Suffragette – The Battle for Equality’.

The children have hotseated key figures, watched the Epsom Derby, cheered on their favourite horse – even watched Eliza Doolittle encouraging Dover to come home – to help immerse them in the events of the 1913 Epsom Derby and write their own newspaper report of the fate of Emily Wilding Davison. This was great writing that the children enjoyed publishing as their own front page.

Wednesday marked the beginning of the Church season of Lent and we joined the parish community at St Bart’s for the Ash Wednesday service. This penitential season calls us to live closer to God through prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Our Lenten promises set out our private intentions for the season ahead.

This has been another busy and exciting week as we have looked for ways to care for our well being, including keeping ourselves safe online. We have learnt about the positive and negative affects of influencers, enjoyed a taster of street dance and found a moment of calm through yoga. As we have gone along, we have taken time to reflect on the golden moments in our day too.

As we have thought about ourselves, we have also thought of our place in the global family and learnt about the pushes and pulls of migration. Our posters bring together our personal views, together with what we have learnt about the benefits and disadvantages to source and host countries from migration and our persuasive writing skills.

We are enjoying learning algebra at the moment, but the children were insistent that there are more dynamic things to share as part of NSPCC Number Day.

Ironically, in support of the NSPCC, we have been squashing children by making human pyramids: Our maths challenge is to calculate how much mass each person in the pyramid is supporting? Can this amount be expressed as an equation?