We are so happy to be back in school and have settled well into Class 6!
We started the year with a two-week unit on the Oliver Jeffers picture book, 'Here We Are'. We read and wrote lots of poetry inspired by the environment and natural world around us; we went outside to make observational drawings and considered humans' impact on Earth; we discussed recent events such as the Black Lives Matter movement as well as COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions. This unit showed just how glad we are to be back together in school and ready to move forward.
In English, we have been studying and enjoying Polly Ho-Yen's novel 'Boy in the Tower' about Ade, a boy who is left almost alone in his tower block when strange plants start destroying parts of London...
We have produced some fantastic writing, including letters and newspaper reports, to prepare us for writing our own dystopian stories.
Our next unit of work focuses on William Grill's picture book, 'Shackleton's Journey'. We are going to explore the people who journeyed with Ernest Shackleton to Antarctica, writing log-book entries and letters in character after exploring events through drama. It is a beautiful picture book that will (hopefully) inspire some amazing artwork as well as writing.
Our maths work has focused on the place value of numbers to ten million to start with. We have then recapped strategies for addition and subtraction before learning long multiplication and long division (always a tricky one to learn but very satisfying to conquer!) We are now beginning our work on fractions.
We are doing some of our topic work a bit differently this year and 'blocking' our units together. This is great because we don't have to wait a whole week for the next lesson and we can remember facts much better.
Our first blocked study was a history unit on the Anglo-Saxons. We learned where the different tribes came from, how and why they arrived in Britain and how they impacted native Britons.
Next, we had a science study on living things. We recapped our work from Year 4 about classifying animals into groups such as vertebrates/ invertebrates and mammals/reptiles/amphibians etc. We then learned about Carl Linnaeus who invented the classification system that scientists use today. "King Philip, Come Out For Goodness' Sake" helps us to remember that living things are grouped into Kingdoms, then phyla, classes, orders, families, genera and species. Binomial Nomenclature is the system of naming living things using their Latin genus and species names. We did a science investigation to see which food yeast (from the fungi kingdom) liked best. We also hung field mushrooms above a piece of paper to see how far their spores dispersed compared to when they lay flat on a piece of paper.
Our next unit is another history one in, which we are learning about the Windrush Generation. We are learning about how parts of the Caribbean were and are British overseas territories and how this impacted our fight in World War 2 as well events in the years that followed. We will be learning about important people from the Caribbean and how the Windrush Generation helped to rebuild our country after the war with Germany.
Before short studies on French and computing, we are going to learn how to paint wax resists using the technique of batik, creating images inspired by our English text - Shackleton's Journey. (Don't worry, you'll get to see the fruits of our labour when we bring them home as 2021 calendars!)
We are thrilled to be back together for PE and are enjoying football with our POSH coach, Mr Trantor.
Mrs Jordan and Mr Allen help us in class with all of our subjects, and teach us RE or PSHE on Friday afternoons.