Today, Crew Hamill continued their history case study by exploring how life has changed since the early 20th Century. We used various sources of evidence to answer a number of questions in mini crews, focusing on how schools, housing and women’s rights have changed over the last century. We were shocked to see how different things were for the wealthy compared to the poor!
In today’s challenge crew, Crew Hamill had to work as a team to pass a beach ball around crew circle without using their hands. After a few troubleshooting ideas, they first decided to use their elbows and this was successful! After this, they were challenged to find another way. They tried with their knees but found this much trickier and ended up using their feet.
Crew Hamill had so much fun going out into our forest area to complete our next Scotty’s session. This session focused on creating a shelter that we would be able to protect ourselves from the elements in! We worked in mini crews to use the equipment given to create a space that we could hide from the rain. We then looked at what we could put inside our shelter to make it more comfortable! Well done to Kira and Taylor who earned Scotty’s Heroes this week due to their stewardship for packing away the equipment another crew had left behind!
Crew Hamill have been out in the school playground to show our stewardship and we’ve worked hard to pick up some of the litter that has been floating around!
Last week, Crew Hamill were focusing on how we can recognise and talk about our emotions. As part of this lesson, we discussed facial expressions and how these helped us to decide how someone might be feeling. As a crew activity, we decided to take part in a random act of kindness that we could use to spread a little happiness around school to hopefully help others feel more positive emotions. For this, we created some bookmarks which we have placed in the school library for people to take and use when they are reading for pleasure. We hope that these will bring a smile to some people’s faces!
We have been LOVING our times tables stick practice this term, learning different strategies for working out unknown times tables.
Crew Hamill have worked really hard this week on their comprehension skills. We have worked as a crew to remind ourselves the skills needed to solve vocabulary and fact and retrieval questions. Once we’d done this, we worked in pairs to solve some questions of our own.
Today Crew Hamill made baskets from strips of papers and then added their own finishing touches to them. They practiced their weaving techniques and they even helped the rest of their crew if they got stuck. Fantastic crew work today!
Crew Hamill have LOVED reading this week and it has been so good to see their positive attitudes and active participation during reading. We began by looking at a book that is linked to our current expedition: Black and British. We looked at the cover of the book, as well as the blurb, and had an excellent discussion on what we thought the book might be about, what genre it was and what the purpose of it was. We were excited to learn that it contained lots of real life stories about Black people in Britain and how this had changed the world we live in today. Following this, we focused on one of the stories – Black Americans in Britain – and learned all about 4 amazing Americans who have come to Britain and influenced life for the better. Our favourite was Henry ‘Box’ Brown who mailed himself in a small, wooden box in order to escape slavery! We have worked really hard this week on our automaticity in reading which has tested our ability to read words automatically, without the need for sounding out. We have also focused on our words per minute and have challenged ourselves to hit the Year 6 target of 185 words per minute! Finally, we were split into two groups – one working with Miss Hamill and the other working independently in pairs – to answer some retrieval questions about the book. Miss Hamill was really impressed at our ability to do this accurately!
To help consolidate our understanding of mixed numbers (a number with a whole and a fraction), Crew Hamill worked with cubes to build each of our numbers so that we had visual representations that we could then compare. We found the visual very helpful and this helped us to access our demonstration element of our lesson in which we completed sheets relating to the comparison of mixed numbers in our maths books.
