Autumn 2
Home reading
Autumn 2
Well done to the children who completed their home reading sticker charts at the end of Autumn 2. Remember to keep reading at least three times a week at home!
Curriculum Carousel
Textiles with Mrs Marsden
This week 6R had their final session with Mrs Marsden on a Friday afternoon with the focus on textiles. Using wadding, they stuffed their hanging decorations, attached a loop of ribbon to hang it with and closed them up using blanket stitch. 6R are really pleased with their end result and feel confident with the different types of stitch they have learnt during this unit of work.
Well done 6R!
Design Technology
Christmas hanging decorations
This year for our Christmas hanging decorations we made our own tassels and turned them into little Christmas Gonks! We got in a little bit of a tangle with our wool when it came to starting off our tassels, but once we got going things became a lot easier and in the end we think they're quite cute!
Art
Botanical drawings - Margaret Mee
This half term we have been looking at new artist in our sessions with Mrs Marsden.
To link with our Geography topic of The Amazon we have been looking at the botanical drawings created by Margaret Mee, a British artist. In 1952, Margaret Mee left England to go and live in the Amazon. She explored the Amazon where she studied and painted the plants and flowers of the rainforest for the next 30 years. She also found and recorded new plants which are now named after her.
We looked at some of her drawings and reproduced these in our sketch pads. We thought about her use of colour, line and tone.
Curriculum Carousel
Textiles with Mrs Marsden
6R have continued to work with Mrs Marsden every Friday afternoon focusing on textiles. This week 6R have been working on attaching the fabric together. Using blanket stitch, 6R have been able to attach their front and back sections of fabric ready for it to be stuffed and closed up.
Computing
Formatting tools
After the introduction to google classrooms earlier in the academic year, we have been exploring the different formatting tools available to use in google docs and google slides. We have learnt how to add text boxes, highlight areas of text, add shapes, change the background colour and format fonts to change the font type and size.
English
Armistice runner - Hot seating
Today we have used the events from Chapter 9 and 10 of Armistice Runner to try to understand how Lily's dad would be coping with the situation at her Grandma's cottage. After reading through the chapters everyone thought of some questions they could ask Dad about the different points in the chapters, then we "hot seated" dad to find out his responses to these. This will be used to inform our writing tomorrow when we produce an internal monologue for Dad.
Christmas has arrived in 6R
Throughout school the classroom doors have slowly been transformed into little pieces of Christmas joy and today our door was added to the collection!
English
Editing and Revising
As part of our unit of work around Armistice runner, by Tom Palmer, we have been having a go at a different way of drafting and editing our writing. We used Tom Palmer's quick write technique, using the 5 steps to ensure our paragraph was the best it could be before moving on to the next. We were really proud of the setting descriptions we were able to create using this technique and were so excited when Tom Palmer Tweeted us back!
Curriculum Carousel
Textiles with Mrs Marsden
6R have continued to work with Mrs Marsden every Friday afternoon focusing on textiles. This week 6R have been working on starting to combine the different elements of their hanging decoration. Using running stitch and overstitch, 6R have started to add their detail to the shapes they prepared previously. As you can see we have robins, snowmen and Christmas puddings starting to take shape!
Maths Day 2020
Angles
To help us remember the names of the different types of angles we created some actions. This is what we came up with!
Maths Day
Angles
Part of our focus for maths day was angles. Before we were able to measure any angles we needed to learn how to use a protractor. We spent some time finding the base line and cross hairs on our protractors and looking at which part of the protractor we needed to use when finding internal angles to the right or to the left. Then we had a go at measure angles on our tables!
Maths Day 20th November 2020
We had a colour array of characters in class today thanks to the efforts people made for their maths day costumes. From our rock stars to those who chose to wear a number or a shape everyone looked great! Thank you for your donations towards Children in Need and new maths resources for school.
Black History
Music
This morning 6R enjoyed an African Drumming workshop. The children learnt about the construction of the drums and then enjoyed creating different rhythmic patterns. Th children were able to develop their use of the drum by changing the point in which it was hit and thinking about the amount of pressure they applied to chance the volume. The children also thought about changing the tempo of their patterns.
The children took part in some call and respond activities and were able to do some African chanting along with this.
Black History
Art
This week we have started to work towards creating our own piece of segregation art work. We looked at the work of M.C Escher who is a famous graphic artist and looked at how people have taken inspiration from one of his pieces of work and used this to highlight issues which are important to them. This brought us on to look at a number of pieces in this style which highlighted segregation.
Curriculum Carousel
Textiles with Mrs Marsden
Now that we are in Autumn 2, 6R have started a new curriculum carousel focus. This half term 6R will be working with Mrs Marsden every Friday afternoon and focusing on textiles. 6R will develop their use of different stiches and work towards making a "stuffed" item ready for Christmas. This week 6R have prepared their fabric.
Black History
Segregation
6R took part in an experiment that was designed in the 1960s to demonstrate what it felt it like to be segregated and discriminated against due to the colour of one of your features.
Mrs Russell sorted the class into three groups:
Brown eyes
Blue eyes
Other coloured eyes
The class were told that the aim of the lesson was to learn to count in Japanese from 1-10.
The children who had brown eyes, like Mrs Russell, were able to be taught how to do this, however the children with blue eyes and other coloured eyes were not.
The children with brown eyes realised they had not thought about how unfair it was for the children with eye colours other than brown because they were so happy to have the support of Mrs Russell and were really pleased they could count to 10 in Japanese!
Some children in the class felt very strongly about how unfair the task was - this allowed the class to have a very tiny snapshot of how children of black origin felt in the times of segregation in America. When the real focus of the lesson was revealed to the class we were able to have very empathic discussions about how it must have felt for African American citizens at the time of segregation.
Autumn 1
Home reading
Autumn 1
Well done to the children who completed their home reading sticker charts at the end of Autumn 1. Remember to keep reading at least three times a week at home!
Art
Christmas Cards For Schools
6R really enjoyed designing their own Christmas cards and loved seeing their final designs printed and ready to be ordered for their family. They were really proud of their work!
We hope that the families of 6R will enjoy sending these to their families and friends as much as the children enjoyed designing them.
English
Peer conferencing
This week 6R have been able to share their narrative writing with each and work with each other to support the editing process. We really enjoyed reading each others flashback stories about Juliane Kopecke (the girl who fell from the sky) and it was a very useful to have someone else's view point and skills set to help us ensure we included the skills required of us from the End of Key Stage 2 writing criteria.
31 Miles in October
A Sponsored Challenge
Come rain or shine 6R are taking time out of their busy day to make sure they add more to their total amount of miles completed for their sponsored challenge! We are well on our way to hitting the 10 mile mark! Keep it 6R!
English
Drama - The Girl Who Fell From The Sky
Today we have concentrated on Phase 2 of our sequence of lessons around the story of Juliane Koepcke. We created freezeframes then a re-enactment of the scene, concentrating on the emotions felt by the passengers on board the aeroplane as it was hit by the storm. The children were then interviewed in character about their journey and how they were feeling.
31 Miles in October
A sponsored fitness challenge
We took full advantage of the sunshine and dry weather today and complete our mile on the field. We really enjoyed having the open space and hope we can complete more of our 31 miles on the there!
Science
Classifying living things
Building on our unit of work in Science, we have this week been thinking about we can classify within the plant kingdom. We explored our school grounds, looking for different samples of leave from trees, and brought them in to look at their features. We thought about the features that can be described to differentiate between each leaf. We then became plant detectives (with our very clever wheels!) and determined the trees that the different leaves had come from. We discovered we have a number of different tree species at Blakehill, including Oak, Sycamore and Hawthorne.
PHSCE
Secondary School Transition
This morning we took part in a virtual meeting with Mr O'Neil from Hanson Secondary School. He spoke to us about the choices we need to make for our application to secondary school. Mr O'Neil talked us though all of the changes we are facing as a year group and what we need to expect over the coming year. He also introduced to the expectations that are placed on pupils in secondary schools. Mr O'Neil spoke to us for an hour and took lots of very thoughtful and key questions from the pupils in 6R and 6S during the meeting.
After the meeting Mr O'Neil got in touch with Mrs Russell and Mr Sidebottom, saying the following:
I just wanted to say a big thanks for the call yesterday.
Your students were amazing and did incredibly well to sit and listen for so long (to a screen!). They are a credit to the school.
I wish them all the best for Year 6 and good luck with their SATS.
Mr Sidebottom and myself were very proud of how well Year 6 represented Blakehill.
PHSCE
Mindfulness
To support our mental health and to help equip us with tools to keep ourselves focused we have been learning some mindfulness techniques. By stopping, concentrating on our breathing and refocusing our mind we have been able to think about being the here and now, the present, rather than worrying about things that have happened or that might happen in the future.
31 Miles in October
A sponsored fitness challenge
Today 6R started their 31 Miles in October challenge by walking a mile and a half around our playground. We are going to try to complete our miles in different ways as the month progresses.
Computing
Google Classroom
This week we have been familiarising ourselves with Google Classroom. We have joined our online class (Maple) and become familiar with the layout of the application. Over the next few weeks we will be completing our homework using this remote learning team so today we had our first go at completing a task on Google Docs and submitting it. We were all quite excited by this new way of accessing our learning and liked the idea of having our homework tasks set in this way.
PHSCE
Secondary School Transition
This afternoon we took part in a virtual meeting with Mr Wood from Benton Park Secondary School. He spoke to us about the choices we need to make for our application to secondary school. Mr Wood told us all about the exciting developments at Benton Park and how these will affect anyone who chooses Benton Park for their secondary school. He also introduced to the daily routines and the expectations that are placed on pupils in Benton Park. Mr Wood answered lots of very thoughtful and key questions from the pupils in 6R and 6S during the meeting.
Art
Develop skills of line and tone
This week we worked with Mrs Snaylam for Art. We looked at the work of Maria Hayes then developed our use of line and tone, building up to making an observational drawing of a sea shell. We thought about the shadows created and how we can use line to show the shape of the shell.
English
Mr Lindon's Library
6R have hit the ground running in a fantastic way this year by producing these amazing pieces of writing. Using an image from Mr Lindon's Library as the stimulus for their writing and the phrase: He warned her about the book. Now it was too late... The children have produced their own narratives about Mr Lindon's Library and "the book".
When writing the narrative, 6R used the end of key Stage 2 writing criteria to help them think about the different techniques they needed to include in their writing.
You can see our wonderful writing on display in the school entrance.
Science
Classifying Living Things
As an extension to our task from last week we have looked again at how we classify living things. We have used the branch diagram system for organising the different living things we were given by using their features to distinguish them.
We particularly enjoyed being able to write on the tables with our whiteboard markers while organising our living things!
Art and Design
Settling In
Another of the tasks we have been completing to help us settle into Year 6 and back to school after COVID-19 lockdown is hanging proudly at the back of the classroom. We have worked on making our own dream catchers. This calming task allowed us some time to be mindful of things that worried us over lockdown our during our transition back to school.
Art and Design
Settling In
Our classroom is really starting to feel like it's our own, now that we have put our stamp on it. To help us settle back into school life and give us time to talk about anything that may be worrying us we have spent some of time in afternoons completing some art and design tasks that allow us to put a bit of our personality across. The first of these tasks were our names to add to our windows in class. We love the way the light shines through the tissue paper and it has really brightened up our classroom!
Science
Classifying Living Things
As an introduction to our new Science topic we had a go at grouping living things into different categories. We chose our own categories and justified why we had decided to classify the living things into these groups.
PHSCE
Mental Health
Over the last two weeks we have been thinking about different ways of ensuring we look after our own and others' mental health. We thought about how we can show our emotions and how we can use different strategies to help others who are struggling with their emotions.