The Write Stuff ✏️

24th February 2024Hannah McLoughlin

This week in writing we have been writing a setting description linking to our stimulus The Jungle Book. We have done two grammar days to consolidate prepositional phrases and figurative language. We have completed our first draft and we’re eager to share to our audience – our Carcroft blog. So here is a sneak peak of some of our hard work so far. Watch this space as we will share again when we have critiqued and revised to up-level our writing.
Disclaimer: Jack had the idea to read in a David Attenborough voice and Lydia went for it!

To write an effective description, you need to “think beyond what a character sees, and provide a sensory feast for readers.”

Voice overs

✏️Our independent writing journey✏️

12th February 2024Hannah McLoughlin

We then used our planning, working wall and TWS help box to ensure we were reaching our ME.

After having our work read, Miss wasn’t satisfied we were all writing for genre and purpose. Some of us slipped into narrative writing. We had a lesson unpicking a diary and another child’s example and up-levelling. From what we had refreshed, we then went back and redrafted our writing.

Addressing gaps in maths

12th February 2024Hannah McLoughlin

In maths we have been revisiting gaps in our learning from the year so far. Our arithmetic of four operations is secure so we are revisiting multi-step worded problems which we found tricky at the start of the year. To begin with we unpicked various problems together – starting with one step to build our understanding. Then in partners did lots of wipeboard work. When miss assessed we were ready to move on – we picked SATS problems from around the room to solve – it really helped collaborating with others to read and understand the given problems. Y6 are smashing their learning!

Chinese New Year🧧

12th February 2024Hannah McLoughlin

In Fridays Crew we learnt about the celebration Chinese New Year, we watched a video and discussed the tradition. Chinese New Year 2024 is the Year of the Dragon according to the Chinese zodiac. Each year in the Chinese zodiac is associated with an animal sign, and the Dragon is considered a symbol of strength, courage, and good fortune. It is a time to embrace Chinese traditions, enjoy delicious food, and wish for prosperity and happiness in the year ahead. It was lovely to hear that one of our crew members will be celebrating with their family. As our crew activity we had to find the stolen dragons head costume; solving lots of maths problems along the way.

Crew Mcloughlin – Music 🎶💃🏻🕺🏻🪩

8th February 2024Sarah Mcglone

We have been having a lot of fun with our current unit of learning in music. We have been looking at the song ‘You To Me Are Everything’ by The Real Thing. We explored the genre of music and even practised some disco dance moves from the 70s. So that we knew a little more about the band and their music, we discussed information and researched answers to help us to understand their story a little more. We then looked at the song in more detail, discussing the meaning behind it. We found out that the song was released in Summer 1976, and that year was particularly memorable to those that experienced it because it was a very hot summer and therefore this song became a soundtrack to the glorious weather. We ended the lesson by getting to know the lyrics and melody more by learning the words and trying to sing it at the right pitch with the correct notes. As an added challenge, we then added in some of the 70s disco dance moves that we had practised earlier in the lesson.

The following lesson, we talked about cover songs and how different bands and artists can take a song that already exists and do their own version of it – a cover. Discussions were had around how covers can have similarities and differences to the original version. We listened to three covers of ‘You To Me Are Everything’ (by Sonia, Anthony Strong, and The Overtones) and talked about how there were elements of similarities but also very clear differences. Once we had listened to them all, we took a vote on which was our favourite cover – it was a draw between The Overtones and Anthony Strong. We then ended the lesson by looking at the first verse of another disco song ‘Celebration’ by Kool and the Gang, before continuing to learn ‘You To Me Are Everything’.

French – Crew Hamill, Crew Thompson and Crew Mcloughlin 🇫🇷

1st February 2024Sarah Mcglone

We have started to work on our next unit of learning in French – Numbers and Age! We began by being given a maths calculation, only it did not have digits, the numbers were written in words… French words! We had to work together to recognise any cognates or near cognates that might help us to work out the English definition. We managed to work out the French for 6 and 3 and then used this information to decide what 1, 2, 4 and 5 were. It was a little tricky as some of the French equivalents are nothing like the English but we managed it eventually!

We then embedded our understanding by playing a game where Miss McGlone said a number in French, we had to hide our fingers and once she said un, deux, trois, allez we then revealed our fingers. We were successful if we held up the matching amount of fingers to the number called out. This helped us with our listening skills.

To improve our pronunciation skills, we then played a board game where we had to roll a dice on the iPad. We then moved our playing piece the same amount of spaces only we had to count out loud in French. As an extra task, if we landed on a space where there was a colour splat, we had to say the colour in French. If we got it correct, we earned an extra turn to throw the dice! The winner was the one who arrived in the centre space first.

French – Crew Hamill, Crew Thompson and Crew Mcloughlin 🇫🇷🖼

31st January 2024Sarah Mcglone

We looked at the artwork of the French artist, Matisse and talked about how he uses colour and shape to create abstract pieces of art. We looked at some of his pieces based on animals and decided to create our own piece of Matisse-inspired artwork… with a twist! So that we could create our piece, we had to work with a partner to ask them in French for certain shapes, but we were only allowed to use 6! We had to include information about the size, shape and colour we needed. Some of us even challenged ourselves by saying ‘I would like…, please’ and ‘thank you’ in French too!

Once we had finished, we did a gallery walk around the classroom to view the pieces created by the rest of our crew. We shared praises and notices whilst we were moving around the room. Take a look at some of our finished pieces! ✨