Year 6 Blog 2024/25

  Each year the European day of Languages is celebrated on 26th September. Year 6 found out about Polish culture, food and some facts about Poland. They also located Poland on a map of Europe and had a go at pronouncing some greetings and counting  in Polish. They then created a visual fact file of everything that they had found out.

 Today in computing we have been exploring the concept of variables. Variables are information that is changeable, for example a score or timer in a game. To help us to understand the concept we first used code that included a changing variable, before modifying it and then making our own. 

You could not hear a pin drop in the classroom today as the children were fully engaged whilst watching clips and films about the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004.  80% of earthquakes and tsunamis happen inside the Ring of Fire near the Pacific Ocean and often happen as a result of an earthquake, volcano or landslide underneath the water. Tsunamis can go as fast as 500 miles an hour, nearly as fast as a plane. Once the clips were finished the children organised 6 statements into order of how a tsunami forms. They then identified what effects a tsunami has on the people and the environment. Finally, they researched how animals can detect tsunamis and their reactions. 

  Today we had great discussions around birthdays and how we celebrate them. This led on to us thinking about how the Hindu God Ganesh's birthday is celebrated. We noticed lots of similarities between how some people celebrate Ganesh's birthday at Ganesh Chaturthi and how we celebrate our own birthdays, from decorating with lots of color, sharing special meals with friends and families, to having sweet treats and music. We attempted to draw our own Ganesh which proved to be tricky but overall successful. Finally we thought about how Ganesh Chaturthi is similar and different to a Christian Christmas. 

As the week draws to a close, year 6 have been concluding their unit on place value by studying negative numbers and rounding. We spoke about how we encounter negative numbers in every day life (temperature, finances etc). This week's mathematical word of the week was integer; please ask your children what it means and for them to give some examples.  

 Year 6 have been learning to tell the time in French. They revised numbers and learnt how to say: Quelle heure est-il? And to reply with Il est …….. heures. They also learnt quarter past, quarter to and half past.  S ? 

 Children recapped the vocabulary focus and epi-centre as well as seismic waves. Then, they looked at a seismograph and how this works as well as the Richter Scale and the different magnitudes and their impact. As a group the children then came up with ideas about how an earthquake could affect the land and the long term effects on people’s lives.  Furthermore, the children watched the live web cam of earthquakes that day and one happened in North America as we were watching it.  Finally they watched a clip from an earthquake in Kathmandu in 2015. Using a photo they highlighted the impacts they could see in the pictures.  They were then introduced to Shelterbox who are a charity that helps earthquake victims. The children really were engaged and were asking really good questions to deepen their knowledge.

 What a great lesson where the children were so engaged and inquisitive about how earthquakes are caused, measured and their impact. To begin the lesson, the children recapped the movements of the tectonic plates from year 3 and then they delved deeper into the Earth’s layers to find out their composition. Using this information the children were introduced to the epi-centre, focus and seismic waves. Finally, they watched live footage of an earthquake in Turkey in 2023. This inspired the children to record what they heard, could see, and any questions about the disaster. A great enquiry lesson. 

 In today’s computing lesson, we discussed how computing can be a really helpful tool to use in our everyday lives. We talked about the things that we use computers for, and how to keep ourselves safe when using them. We then explored some of the units that we will be covering this year, including web site design, collaborative working and physical computing on the Micro:bits. Our first unit, however, is Game Design in Scratch, so we spent the rest of the lesson exploring games made in Scratch and ‘cheating’ by changing and adapting the code!