Category: Our Classes

We have been exploring our senses and using them to investigate and gather data.

This week, we have been working hard in year six to prepare for our class assembly. We celebrated our learning from this first half-term with our parents and the rest of the school.

In our assembly, we shared some of our work inspired by Oliver Jeffers’ book, ‘Here We Are’; we enjoyed using Oliver Jeffer’s voice and style to write about how we work together to make our school a great place.

Our assembly also echoed our learning in RE and our calling to show love in all that we do. We found a good example of this idea lived in the life of Harriet Tubman, who we learnt about as part of Black History Month. Eloise Greenfield’s poem is a powerful celebration of Harriet Tubman’s life, and we enjoyed performing this in our assembly.

In geography, we have learnt about the challenges of a growing world population. We remembered in our assembly that, as well as being part of the St Adrian’s community, we are also part of a global family. This made us appreciate the privileges we enjoy alongside our social responsibility to others – an idea we will explore further in our Harvest celebrations next week.

A big ‘thank you’ to all of the parents who came to share our celebration with us, and for support that you gave to the children in preparing for their roles.

The children have practising the skills needed to write a report, or chronological recount; and writing plans for their report on last Friday’s trip. We’ve talked about including lots of detail, using technical language, a variety of time adverbials and including their feelings and next questions about what they saw and learnt. We also revised the rules on spelling past tense verbs. Next week we’ll start writing the full report.

Today the children used acrylic paints for figures in the style of Julian Opie; and the result is some very colourful and striking pictures of people.

The class is enjoying using the library with the librarians carrying out their duties very well.

We’ve continued learning about electrical circuits, with the children building both complete and incomplete ones. In Maths, we’re coming to the end of our first unit about place value and will move onto addition and subtraction soon. In computing, the children are writing programs with increasing complexity to write capital letters.

I look forward to seeing you all at some point next week to talk about your child’s progress. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the sun this weekend.

We had a fantastic day at the St Michael’s Junior School Sports Competition. The sun shone and everyone enjoyed the challenge, playing in either the boys 7-a-side, girls 6-a-side, or the mixed netball competition. The children conducted themselves admirably and were rewarded with runners-up medal in the girls football and winning the mixed netball competition, playing against some much larger schools. Well done to everyone and thanks to all of the parents who ferried the children to and from St Michael’s.

To mark National Poetry Day on Thursday, we enjoyed sharing our performances of poems. Our approach to sharing poetry is to treat the poem as a poem: letting its verbal magic work through the enjoyment of its sound. Reading the poem aloud. Hearing its sound in the air, feeling its shape in our mouths, seeing which lines draw us in. Noticing, and thinking about what we like and are reminded of in our reading and experience.

We looked more carefully at Eleanor Farjeon’s Cottage and used this as the starting point for writing our own poetry.

Later in the year, we will be sharing details of the national Poetry by Heart competition, so watch this space.

An enormous ‘thank you’ to all of the Year Six parents who organised our cake sale and to the children who advertised it: we raised over £180, which the class are now busy planning how to spend. We are looking to get some ‘quality of life’ items that will make our final year together even better!

We are looking at the work of artist Vincent Van Gogh. Here are some of our artworks.

We have also been comparing number and learning how to record “greater than”, “fewer than” and “equal too” using symbols.