This week in Year 6, we’ve been working extra hard in our afternoon maths intervention sessions. In our groups, we’ve been focusing really well and challenging ourselves with tricky problems.
It hasn’t always been easy, but we’ve shown lots of resilience and kept going even when things felt tough. We’re really proud of how much progress we’re making and how well we’ve supported each other along the way.
Maths can be challenging, but with determination, we’ve proved we can do it!
Today in our reading lesson, we worked really hard as a crew and showed just how confident we have become at discussing the texts we read. We had in-depth discussions about our text and made some great links to our expedition topic. Mrs. Rankin was incredibly impressed with our ideas and opinions, and we were proud of how well we used our retrieval skills to answer questions. We are really growing as readers and enjoying our non-fiction texts along the way!
Crew Rankin continued their geography journey by learning all about deforestation, the causes of this and how this impacts on people, animals and the planet. After looking at an image to really stimulate our learning, we were shocked to see the stark difference between a thriving forest and one that has been effected by deforestation. We then watched a video to help build our background knowledge, making notes of anything we found important. We then came together and created a class anchor chart to bring our learning together. Finally, we used this information to generate our own persuasive arguments as to whether or not we thought deforestation was a good thing. At the end of the lesson, we stood proudly and delivered these arguments to the rest of our crew. Miss Hamill was REALLY impressed with our emotive language and the facts and information we included.
During our first computing lesson today, we began by talking about what coding is and why coding was used during the war. We then had some time to work in pairs to break some different cipher codes; some involve moving letters around the alphabet while others have hidden items within the text.
Today we worked together as a whole school crew to design and create our very own graffiti wall! With the support of expert graffiti artists, we learned new skills and used our creativity to celebrate everything that makes Crew special. From sharing ideas and sketching designs, to choosing colours and spraying the final masterpiece, we collaborated as one team to bring our vision to life. Our graffiti wall now stands as a bold reminder that when we work together, we can achieve something amazing!
To bring Hook Week to a close, before revealing our guiding question, UKS2 took part in a Virtual Reality experience that immersed them into the rainforest. They got to look at each layer of the rainforest as if walking around it and come face to face with some of the animals that live there including sloths, tarantulas, capuchin monkeys and jaguars. Throughout this experience, the guide was sharing his wide range of knowledge with the children which they were fully engaged with listening to. What a fantastic experience!
To continue Hook Week, we focused on the artist Frank Bowling and took part in a gallery walk in which we looked at examples of his work to critique. Following this, we began looking at his medium of choice – oil pastels – and investigated how we can use these with different techniques to produce different effects.
Crew Rankin have had their team working skills put to the test with two separate challenges.
They had to work in teams of 4 to see who would be most successful in building a bridge that was sturdy enough to hold a pile of school books and a tower that would stand freely and still be tall. It definitely tested their perseverance but it was lovely to see how well they communicated with each other and took turns to ensure everyone had a job role or contribution to the overall product.
UKS2 all came together in the hall to take part in some across-phase learning to kick start Hook Week. We began by spending some time watching a video that allowed us to immerse ourselves into the rainforest, learning about the different animals and layers of the rainforest. Following this, we became rainforest explorers and worked in mini crews of 4, each investigating one of the four layers of the Amazon rainforest. We used information from around the room and took notes that we then shared on our class Padlet (you can see this if you follow the QR code). Finally, we took part in a Kahoot quiz to test our knowledge and see who had learned the most during the session.
During this lesson, Crew Rankin began looking at animal classification. We began by taking part in a Kahoot quiz to test the knowledge we already had, seeing what we could already answer about the different classifications. Following this, we spent some time taking part in a carousel activity in which we read brief fact sheets about each animal group and answered comprehension style questions about what we had read. Once we had built up our knowledge on each group, we then worked in mini crews to create a class set of google slides that detailed as much information about our given classification as we could. You can see our work following the QR code.
