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Westover Green Community School and Autism Centre

Year 6 Beech

Welcome to our class page

FOR LATEST HOME-LEARNING PLEASE CLICK HERE.

We are looking forward to a busy year with lots of exciting learning opportunities.

Curriculum Overview 2019-2020

Curriculum Overview - Autumn Term

Curriculum Overview - Spring Term

Curriculum Overview - Summer Term

End of Year Expectations

English and Maths

Newsletters

Autumn Term

Spring Term

Homework

Set: Wednesday 18th March 2020 Due: Wednesday 22nd April 2020

Maths - Complete all pages in your maths book.

English - Complete all pages in your comprehension and SPaG books.

As part of homework we expect Year 6 children to read at least 5 times a week. We run a reward system in class with prizes for children who manage to read the most over each half-term. When children complete their book, they will need to complete a short book review; templates for these can be found in class or on the link below.

Book Review

In addition to this, we are challenging Year 6 to read around the world. We will be choosing books from different cultures to read in class but also encouraging the children to read books set in different countries. If you think you have read a book set in a different country come and share it with us - you might be able to scratch a country off our world map.

Letters

Christmas Party

SATs Parents Meeting

Year 6 Swimming

Autumn Term Newsletter

Day of the Dead

Spring Term Newsletter

Homework Clubs starting January

Useful Links

Charter House Residential

We had a fantastic week at Charter House. The children took on lots of new challenges including: caving, gorge-walking, orienteering, shelter-building, bog-walking, archery, night orienteering, night walk, fire-lighting, team building activities and an 8 mile walk to Cheddar and back. We are all very proud of the Year 6's attitude, resilience and team work this week - what super-stars!

World Book Day

We celebrated World Book Day by dressing as some of our favourite characters from books. We also completed a trail around the school, guessed the books in trays and were read to be different teachers.

Wonderful Word Day

Everyone made an amazing effort dressing up as different words for our 'Wonderful Word Day'. We learnt lots of new vocabulary and their definitions and even learnt about the etymology of some of the words.

Photos

STRIPES

Self Manager

Team Worker

Reflective Learner

Innovative Thinker

Participator

Enquiring Learner

As part of our 'Building Powers for Learning' we work towards earning half-stripes (certificates) and full-stripes (badges). We have been busy working towards ours in Beech Class.

Inventions and Discoveries

During the spring term we are going to be learning about important inventions and discoveries from 19th century to present day.

We started our learning journey by finding out about Isambard Kingdom Brunel. We researched his many different engineering innovations and then used some of his bridge designs as inspiration for some of out art-work.

The next step on our learning journey was to discover the contributions of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace to the computing world. Babbage invented the Analytical Machine (first computer) in 1837 and Lovelace the first computer programme using Binary Code in 1842. We tried some coding of our own and used it to decipher clues using the binary alphabet and numbers.

We found out about famous inventors Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. We discussed their inventions and why they are so useful. We then thought of our own ideas and created blue-prints for them. We presented our ideas to the class and explained why they have commercial value.

We found about about Karl Benz and his contribution to the development of the motor-car. We then researched the history of transportation and created timelines.

After we completed our timelines, we invented our own modern forms of transport. We had to ensure they we eco-friendly. We used keynotes to create a presentation about our transport then presented our ideas to the class.

We found out about Rosalind Franklin. A famous scientist who helped discover the double-helix structure of DNA. We then completed a scientific experiment to extract the DNA from a strawberry.

Mexico

We started our new topic by tasting different Mexican foods. We are going to use what we found out to design and make our own Mexican meal.

In computing we have been using Scratch Junior to re-tell 'The Legend of the Bat.' We changed and added sprites then programmed them to act out the story.

Also, we wrote the 'The Legend of the Bat' as a play-script and acted it out.

We spent the morning learning some traditional Mexican dancing.

Here is our performance to the school:

We designed and made our own tacos using different Mexican ingredients. We had to think about texture, taste and quantities as part of the design process and also consider what combinations of taste worked well together. Some of it was quite spicy!

We celebrated our own dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Children and staff came dressed up in costumes, we made traditional sugar skull cookies, designed and constructed Aztec settlements as part of our DT project, used quilling to make skull decorations and made traditional paper marigold decorations and skeletons.

We have been researching Aztec life and learning about their culture and different roles in their society.

We designed and sculpted our own Mayan masks. We took inspiration from masks Mayans wore for battles, special occasions and as death masks.

English

We retold the Aztec myth 'The Legend of the Bat'. We chose the ways in which we wanted to re-tell the story e.g. puppet shows, drama, story-telling and comic strips.

We have been busy learning how to write information texts. As part of the planning process for writing a leaflet about Day of the Dead we spent some time making vocabulary banks. Here are some of the amazing words we thought of.

We have been writing our own information texts about Day of the Dead. After we completed our first draft we spent time editing it together and working with our class experts.

We had a visit from Pete the Poet who inspired us to be adventurous with our vocabulary.

Here is one of the poems that we created about diversity.

We have been planning and writing Science Fiction stories based on Eliot Midnight Super-Hero.

Here are some of the amazing DADWAVERs! Beech Class wrote in today's lesson:

We wrote our science fiction stories for Year 1. Here we are reading them to Cherry Class to get some feedback to help us edit our work.

Sorting verb tenses. We then used these to create our own sentences.

Maths

We are learning about place value in Maths. We used place value counters to represent numbers up to 10,000,000 and partitioned them in different ways.

In number sense we have been revising and reinforcing skills that we learnt in Year 5 e.g. formal written methods, problem solving and reasoning, times-table facts, measure and arithmetic.

In Number Sense we have been revising properties of shape - specifically looking at angles.

Using the iPads to support our fraction learning during maths.

Science

Our topic for this half-term is Variation and Classification. We thought about how taxonomists might sort different animal groups.

We have been investigated the Duck-Billed Platypus and discussing why it is difficult to assign it to a particular phylum (group) of animals. We went on to discuss characteristics of different groups of animals.

We have designed and experiment to investigate microorganisms and what conditions they need to grow. We are testing factors such as - heat, damp, light, cleanliness etc. We are going to check our results in a weeks time.

After a week this is what our bread looked like. Through lots of different investigations we concluded that mould grows better in dark, damp and warm conditions.

Wet dirty sock left over from Charter House and clean sock. Dropped in the soil and a control.

We investigated plants in our environment. We then used the identification app iNaturalist to classify the different specimens we found.

We worked together to identify the different plants. We drew labelled diagrams and made field-notes of our plant specimens.

We then thought about how taxonomists might sort and classify different plant species and created our own identification keys.

Light and shadow: investigating and describing opaque, translucent and transparent objects.

Music

This term we are going to be learning how to play the ukulele. We started by learning to play open strings and using these to write our own compositions.

Garage band on the iPads: using the sampler to record our names then layering different instruments to make our compositions.

Singing workshop - learning different rounds.

PE

In gymnastics we have been practising our balancing, rolling and travelling techniques.

Bat and ball skills in tennis. We have been practising our ball control and forehand stroke.

Jigsaw

In our healthy me topic we learnt about what to do in an emergency. Here we are learning how to put somebody into the recovery position.


Eco Creativity Week

Cherry Class came to share their recycling songs the composed.