Even with it being the penultimate week before the Christmas holidays, Willow have been working harder than ever! In maths, we have been learning how to convert fractions into decimals so that we can order and compare them. This meant we had to build on our previous knowledge of common factors and common multiples, as well as long and short division! It's a good job we've been practising our timestables! Phew!
In Talk for Writing, we have been analysing a discussion text, which we debated in class. We have then started to come up with our own discussion texts, creating a toolkit to write our own discussion and planning out paragraphs. We will be working on this more next week!
With the beginning of advent came the beginning of the festive activities in Willow! The children created paper snowflakes to decorate the windows and were able to take part in a virtual messy church via YouTube live. We created Christingles for the live streamed Christingle service, as well as angels made from books! Very messy and very fun!
A Christmas goody-bag will be sent home on the last day of term containing the angel and other seasonal crafts.
We have also been learning about the decimal number system in maths, as well as other types of number systems used around the world. Can you remember what some of these are?
This week we had a visit from The Anne Frank Trust. We learned about Anne Frank's family and their time spent in the annex during World War II. We also learned about discrimination, prejudice and stereotypes, not just for Jews in the war but in today's society too. We discussed gender stereotypes and challenged our own opinions about what men and women should or shouldn't do.
Leading on from this, members of our class created and delivered a PowerPoint for collective worship to the whole school! You can see images of the slides below. We also created this week's school newsletter so make sure to take a look for more information on this topic.
Welcome back Year 6!
It was great to have Year 6 back in school on a week which marked Remembrance Day. We spent time in class researching the fallen soldiers of Barwick, creating posters on each soldier and their life. These have been attached to lamp posts around the village so why not take a walk to learn about some of our village heroes!
On Wednesday 11/11, we took a walk up to the Barwick war memorial to lay our crosses and poppies at the eleventh hour, paying our respects with a 2 minute silence alongside the rest of the country.
Lest we forget.
Remote Learning Update
Well done to Year 6 for getting so involved in remote learning this week, despite your absence from school. It has been a pleasure engaging with you all on Teams, and I have no doubt that organising your days at home around remote learning will stand you in good stead for high school.
Check out some screenshots from our Class Zone on Teams below!
What a week of persuasion!
I think we have a class full of future politicians, activists and master advertisers on our hands! We have continued the innovation stage of our Talk for Writing journey, with a focus on being persuasive by giving reasons, explanations and evidence.
Check out our maps below:
This week in Year 6, we rounded up the first leg of our Talk for Writing journey by spending time learning how to effectively edit and redraft our final pieces. We chose sections of our 'hot write' to edit and improve, focusing on elements we might add, remove, move or substitute. We then learned some important elements of UKS2 grammar and spent time applying these into our writing.
On Tuesday, we visited All Saints Church as part of the virtual Harvest Service. The children were keen to share some of their prayers on the website. You can find these below:
Dear Father God,
Thank you for this festival, when we can celebrate the harvest and feed the mouths of the hungry. Thank you for our nutritional, healthy crops and for the opportunities we have to share meals with our loved ones. Thank you for taking care of the ill in these difficult times and for making our world a tiny bit safer every day.
Amen
~Lyra
Dear Lord,
We thank you for all of the fruit and vegetables.
Help us to remember that someone is always less fortunate than us.
Bless those who grow all our food.
Amen
~ Samantha
Dear Lord,
We thank you for our lives as they raise us.
We thank you for our sins as they humble us.
Thank you for the harvest and the food we eat.
Amen
~Mia
What a week! Year 6 have been making great strides this week, as we have continued our Talk for Writing journey, exploring the writing of dilemmas, resolutions and endings in our work on Mystery Stories. We have seen lots of excellent work in the independent writing the class completed on Friday.
In maths, we have revisited the children’s knowledge of written division, moving on from short division into long division. The enthusiasm shown to learning a tricky new skill has been a joy to behold! We’ll be developing the children’s knowledge of long division next week, and are already looking forward seeing how the class gets on!
This week, Year 6 have absolutely blown us away with their work ethic and enthusiasm to learn. We have continued our Talk for Writing journey into the 'boxing up' phase, editing and planning our mystery stories in great depth.
In maths, we have explored three of the four operations: addition, subtraction and multiplication. The reasoning and problem solving skills demonstrated in the classroom have been absolutely out of this world! Onto next week, when we begin to unpick short division and, of course, the dreaded long division!
This week, we continued onto the next stage of our Talk for Writing adventures, beginning to retell the story 'Alien Landing' by Pie Corbett. As part of the imitation phase, we focused on performing the story as a reader, with the inclusion of some actions to help us memorise and dramatise the text. The next phase of our learning will involve retelling the story in the form of a story map. Keep an eye on this page to see our incredible story maps next week!