Spring 1

We have had a very busy start to 2025 in Year 6! The children have been working hard to apply their skills in Maths to reasoning questions by unpicking the questions, working out what calculation they need to do followed by utilising the strategies they have learnt to solve the questions. The children are developing their growth mindset through embracing challenges and showing huge amounts of perseverance, which is great to see.

We have had a big focus on growth mindset this half term, which will support the children during Year 6 but also in preparation for secondary school. The children all have flower pots with their pictures on, displayed in the classrooms and they earn a part of the stem to show a growth mindset, building up to grow their flowers. This could be for a number of different things for example; trying your best, showing determination, learning from mistakes, embracing challenges, not being afraid to have a go, perseverance and practice. Alongside this, the children have been working very hard to earn signatures and rewards in their SPELL books. Children can achieve signatures for; stretching themselves, progress, engaging in learning, listening and showing a love for learning.

This half term, we have kickstarted our Year 6 breakfast. The children love coming in and making themselves a bowl of cereal or enjoying other healthy breakfast options such as: fruit, yogurts and pancakes. This has been very popular and some days we have run out very quickly but don’t worry we are regularly re-stocking! We find this is a great start to children’s day at school and gives their brains the energy and focus for the day ahead. We have also started tuition where we support children with specific areas of arithmetic, reasoning and Reading. Children and parents/carers have enjoyed challenging their brains with the tricky word and number problems during Tuesdays ‘Stay and Solve’ sessions. It’s lovely to see so many parents join us and get involved.

In English, we carried on our learning around WW2, where the children wrote a letter in role to Winston Churchill sharing the reasons that they believe evacuee children should be allowed to come back home. It was great to hear the children’s ideas and they had the opportunity to show off their persuasive skills in this letter. After this the children wrote narratives based on ‘The Varmints’. They enjoyed gathering vocabulary such as personification, similes and metaphors to include in their narratives. As the children really enjoyed ‘The Varmints’ we used this as inspiration for their poems.

In Maths, we started the term recapping on shapes which included exploring nets as well as reflecting and translating shapes. We also refreshed our minds on time, thinking about solving real life word problems involving durations of time as well as bus and plane timetables.

In P.E, we have been doing gymnastics, where we have focused on different types of balancing then joining into pairs and small groups to create a gymnastics routines. The children worked well collaboratively and enjoyed sharing their performance with the rest of the class.

We can’t forget our Zones of Regulation day where children could dress up as one of the zones colours. We use zones of regulation throughout the day and have strategies in the calm corner to support children when they are in different zones.

We are all ready for a restful and enjoyable half term and will be raring to go for Spring 2.

 

Autumn 2

It has been a jam packed half term and everyone is excited for the Christmas holidays. We have continued working on our WW2 project ‘We are Evacuees’. The children continued to become experts in their chosen area and then became teachers, presenting their learning to the rest of the year group through posters and Google slides. We then delved deeper into evacuees and created our own: ration books, gas masks, gas mask boxes, ID cards and luggage tags which cumulated in our Evacuee day. The children came to school dressed as Evacuees and took part in WW2 learning. This included listening to WW2 songs, writing a letter home and creating our own propaganda posters. To end the project, we visited ‘The Imperial War Museum’. We loved exploring the planes, tanks and WW2 artefacts. The children even got to go inside an Anderson shelter and a Morrison shelter. It was a tight squeeze, but it gave the children an insight into what it would have been like during an air raid. 

In Maths, we have been working hard solving fractions, decimals and percentage problems. We have also started unpicking reasoning questions to understand the steps we need to take to solve the questions. In Writing, we have continued focusing on WW2 books. We enjoyed reading ‘Friend or Foe’ and wrote a letter as ‘David’ , who was an evacuee, back to his Mum in London. Next, we moved onto ‘Rose Blanche’, we explored the themes in the book, the character’s emotions and the contrasts at different points in the book. We then worked hard to write an additional scene where we conveyed life in Germany during WW2. 

We  enjoyed taking some time to be present and mindful during our yoga sessions in P.E. We learnt a range of different breathing techniques and positions. We are looking forward to the end of the year and will  be ready to continue our journey in Year 6 in the new year. 

Autumn 1

We have had a great first half-term! We have all settled well into Year 6 and have been working hard, showing perseverance.

In English, we delved into the book 'The Viewer' and explored the setting of the junkyard, built a bank of vocabulary and then wrote setting descriptions. We also explored how the character felt at different parts of the story. We won't give the story away, but we were quite shocked by the ending.

Our History focused Project this term is 'We are Evacuees'. We enjoyed exploring the WW2 books, artefacts and videos during the hook into our projects. We came up with lots of questions we wanted to find out more about. We looked at ration books, clothes and even gas masks. Imagine having to carry that around everywhere you go. Then we chose an area to focus on, which included; life in WW2, Women in WW2, Allies and Axis, Anne Frank and the Blitz. We have worked in groups to research the areas and are creating presentations in order to teach the rest of the year group about the area we decided to become experts in.

We also loved Beyond class' assembly, learning more about what it was like to be an evacuee in World War two and listening to some letters home that people wrote. We are looking forward to learning more about what life was like for evacuees next half term.

October is Black History month. Our theme this year is social change and legacy. We choose individuals to focus on that have been influential and made big differences. Some of these include; Martin Luther King junior, Ruby Bridges, Hariett Tubman and many others. Infinity Class assembly was very informative about this and we all learnt a lot from it. 

In maths we have spent the half term focusing on the four main operations and making sure we are able to apply all the different methods and answer reasoning questions to further our understanding. We are also working hard on our arithmetic skills trying to get quicker at answering the questions. 

We all need to have a restful half term so we are refreshed and ready to continue some amazing learning when we return.