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In Crew Tymon we are learning about animals and we had a lovely surprise that came to visit us! We had lots of fun, we loved stroking them and learning more about them. The donkeys were super friendly and so soft. We didn’t want to leave.
In our expedition lesson (science), we have been learning about grouping animals. We learned (through some reading) that the scientific word for this is taxonomy and that the reason we do this is because we like things to be organised and orderly.
We discussed some ways that animals could be grouped and looked at some examples. Children then had an opportunity to group some animals using a Venn diagram. After this, they were given a larger group of animals where they worked in pairs to decide how they could be grouped. Children were able to show a good understanding of how they could be grouped differently and it was great to see them using language such as vertebrate, invertebrate, mammals, warm blooded or cold blooded. We’re now ready to move on to classification.
We are loving our times table stick!
A fab arithmetic lesson today 🙂 We worked on our timestables, consolidated different question types then worked on our written methods. Our extension allowed us to practice dividing by 10 and 100. A great lesson by all!
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!
Here’s a selection of beautiful work from across the XP Trust from this week. To read about other stories from across the XP Trust, visit xptrust.org.
In RE last week, we learned about Humanism. We discovered that Humanists don’t believe that God created the world but that we evolved through Science. The world started with a single organism and these continued to multiply and adapt. We discussed what makes humans special and it was lovely to hear the children share their thoughts on this.
In reading we have been having a huge focus of prosody(fluency) and ensuring that we are reading a text how it should be read. This has involved lots of echo reading and time to practice reading before answering some questions about the text. It has been great to see some children having the confidence to stand up when it’s their turn to perform. We have also introduced feedback focused on the positives and what we enjoyed from the group reading.
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.
