Yoga
We enjoyed a yoga session today. It linked well to the Life Big Topic as the children used different animals to inspire their movements and poses.
Science
Here are some pictures of what we investigated today. Can your child give these pictures a caption to describe what they learnt?
Mini-topic: ‘Loving Reading’
For the next two weeks, we will be completing a new mini-topic: Loving Reading.
The emphasis of the topic is all about enjoying reading. As you are aware, we already give reading a high profile within our class but this topic will put reading (and a love of reading) at the forefront of our learning.
Lots of research suggests that children who read for pleasure perform better at school and reading is certainly a life-skill!
As part of the mini-topic, children were given some reading challenges to complete over the next two weeks. It would be great if they could finish them all (some are easier to achieve than others).
You can help at home by:
- Encouraging your child to complete the challenges.
- Raising the profile of reading at home (Family reading time? A visit to a bookshop/library? Discussing reading over a meal?).
- Reading with your child regularly; whilst reading for pleasure is important, understanding what you read is even more so. The only way to be sure that children are practising their reading skills properly is to read with them and ask questions.
- Encouraging your child to read more than usual.
- Showing your child that reading can take many forms (fiction books, non-fiction books, e-books, audio books, magazines, newspapers, trusted websites, instructions, recipes, online news).
Again, we thank you for your continued support!
Holiday activity idea
Phonics
This week we will start Phase 4 of the ‘Letters and sounds’ phonics programme.
During this phase, children will continue to practise previously learned graphemes and phonemes and learn how to read and write words with four phonemes.
These are called CVCC words and include words such as, tent, damp, toast and chimp.
For example, in the word ‘toast’, t = consonant, oa = vowel, s = consonant, t = consonant.
They will also learn to read and write CCVC words such as, swim, plum, sport, cream and spoon.
For example, in the word ‘cream’, c = consonant, r = consonant, ea = vowel, m = consonant.
In addition, they will be learning more tricky words and continuing to read and write sentences. There are no new phonemes taught in this phase.
Tricky words in phase 4
said, so, do, have, like, some, come, were, there, little, one, when, out, what
Big Topic Review
A big thank you to those parents that were able to attend our open afternoon on Wednesday. We hope you enjoyed finding out about all the great learning that’s happened in Y6 during our ‘Life’ topic.
For those that didn’t attend, we reflected on each piece of learning we have done by writing down on big sheets something we remembered.
Then, we created a ‘diamond 9’ of the skills we have learnt/practised and some of the knowledge we have gained. It was interesting how everyone had different ideas of what they’d learnt most about.
Finally, we sat down to review our big topic book. It works as a diary of all the great topic-related learning we do!
If you’d like to find out more about our brilliant ‘Life’ topic, ask your child how they’ve found it.
How are you feeling?
Across school, we’ve been trialling the use of colours to represent children’s emotions. Children are then encouraged to think whether this is a blocker or driver for their learning.
- ‘I feel blue because I am calm.’
- ‘I feel red because I had a fall out at lunchtime.’
- ‘I feel orange because I am excited to celebrate my brother’s birthday.’
Here is a new website to support young people’s emotional wellbeing in Leeds.
‘If you’re a young person, MindMate can help you understand the way you’re feeling and find the right advice and support. If you’re a parent, carer or professional, MindMate can help you support a young person you know.’
Children are also encouraged to speak with an adult, friend or use our class SEAL boxes to share any worries.
Leeds Youth Council
All young people aged 10-18 in Leeds can now join the Leeds Youth Council (LYC).
This week’s maths learning
This week, in maths, we’ve been learning all about measures.
After exploring mass through weighing items using different methods, we moved on to capacity. We spent time measuring, estimating and converting between units. (Remarkably, we didn’t make much mess!)
You can help at home by:
- Encouraging your child to find examples of measures in every day life
- Encouraging your child to estimate the mass/capacity of things you find in the house (eg what do you think is the capacity of that glass? What do you think is the mass of the laptop? What do you think is the capacity of our bath? Hint: benchmarking helps – ask you child about this!)
- Practising converting between units (eg ml to litres, g to kg)
- Using the revision books handed out last week
We’ll continue our learning by solving problems involving different measures.
Marvellous Mathematicians
We’ve been learning about multiplication this week. We began by looking at groups of objects. Here, one marvellous mathematician has shown us that 10 groups of 10 is 100! After drawing 10 groups and placing 10 items in each group, she counted in 10s to find the answer. Wow!
This marvellous mathematician really wanted to try out her new skills with some large numbers! 2 groups of 100 is 200!
5 groups of 6 is 30. What a great way to show that calculation using a picture! Notice the repeated addition: 6+6+6+6+6+6=30. In lessons, we are mainly working with groups of 2, 5 and 10 as we can count in multiples of these numbers. This marvellous mathematician did this work independently and chose to do groups of 6 and 7, however, Year 1 are only expected to count in 2s 5s and 10s. Keep practising this at home!
