Santa dash Friday 11 December
Impressive Improvements
This young lady has shown amazing resilience over the last few months. She came to share this amazing arithmetic score with me yesterday – 34 out of 40. Her smile says it all and she was very proud to tell me that since September, she has more than quadrupled her score! Absolutely amazing!
School menu change and Christmas meal
Living and Learning: Anti Bullying
This week, Y6 were tasked with showing they know how to stop bullying in a creative way.
Here are some of their amazing submissions.
We also have had some brilliant talks this week surrounding how to be respectful (and ensure it’s mutual respect), how to be a little bit friendlier, how to deal with conflict if it should arise and how to communicate you’re not feeling OK or not happy with an interaction.
As always, I’m super proud of this class’ honesty, maturity and creativity with their homework.
It was great to see some fantastic spellings being practised, too!
Take a look!
Virtual after-school sport club
Aimed mainly at primary-aged children, a different theme has been assigned for each day of the club – Adventure Monday, Tuesday Play, Wild Wednesday, Thinking Thursday and Fun Friday.
Click here to find out more.
History: pyramids
Why did the Ancient Egyptians build pyramids? Y6 know!
After researching some cool facts (check them out below), we made and decorated our pyramids with our information and even some hieroglyphics.
One of our History words is the Rosetta Stone.
Albie said, “The Rosetta Stone was found in a fort near Rosetta, Egypt. It has three different languages on it: cursive Egyptian, Greek and hieroglyphics. Scholars knew Greek and cursive Egyptian so they used it to work out what the hieroglyphics meant.”
Rayn said, “It’s now located in the British museum and it was found by a soldier!”
Leo said, “It was found by a captain called Pierre in 1799 and in 1801 it was transported to the British museum. In 1802, they managed to find out what the hieroglyphics meant!”
Safiya-Mishal said, “I found this task easy and hard. Finding facts was easy but when we came to actually sticking the pyramid together, mine kept falling apart but I had help from Yusayrah!”
Hifza shared, “I found it challenging because you had to fold every part carefully and use the glue to put it together. Finding out the facts was interesting because there was lots of things I hadn’t learnt before.”
Maths: fractions
This week, we’ve started a new topic of tricky fractions!
I’ve been so impressed with how we’ve learnt to find equivalents, add and subtract and convert mixed numbers to improper fractions and back again.
Take 2 and 1/3 for example:
Yusayrah said, “First, you multiply the whole number by the denominator. 2 wholes x 3 = 6 or 6/3 (six thirds). Next, you add the extra 1/3 to give you a total of 7 thirds because the denominator always stays the same. The answer would be 7/3.”
Challenge your child to do the opposite of this and explain how to convert an improper fraction such as 7/4 (seven quarters) to a mixed number!
Battle of the Bands
With one day left of the battle to decide who is the current best class at times tables, here’s how the scores are shaping up!
The excitement in the air has been palpable! Both classes have definitely improved their timings with these last two days alone!
Take a look at these rockers at the top of the leaderboard!
We’re excited to find out who has nabbed the top spot tomorrow in assembly!
Living and Learning: United against bullying
This week, it’s Anti-Bullying Week and the theme for this year is ‘United against bullying’.
Don’t forget – we are also taking part in Odd Socks Day on Monday 16 November.
STOP is a key message linked to bullying. In our school, STOP stands for two things:
- the definition: Several Times On Purpose
- the solution: Start Telling Other People
Recently, our school council met to review our school definition of bullying and our child friendly anti-bullying policy. Thank you to the school councillors for their valued contributions. As a result, our definition and policy have now been updated.
Child friendly anti-bullying policy
What is bullying?
In our school, this is what bullying means:
Bullying is where you hurt someone, physically or emotionally (including online), several times on purpose.
What might bullying look like?
If any of these things happen several (lots of) times, it is bullying.
- Hurting peoples’ feelings, for example, name calling, teasing, threatening, ignoring, leaving people out or spreading rumours
- Hurting peoples’ bodies, for example, hitting, punching or kicking
This could be in person or online (cyber bullying) and could be because of someone’s race, disability, gender, appearance, age or any other protected characteristic.
What could you do if you are being bullied?
Start
Telling
Other
People
Who could you tell?
- Mrs Weekes/Mrs Freeman/Mrs Russell/Mrs Small (they are child protection staff)
- Mrs Taylor (Health Leader)
- Any other members of staff
- Friends
- Someone in your family
- A trusted adult
- Childline (0800 1111)
- Write a worry slip and put it in your Living and Learning box or the whole school worry box
- Email stayingsafe@spherefederation.org
Our views on bullying
STOP bullying – bullying is wrong! We’re a happy and healthy school.
Times Tables Rock Stars
Times Tables Rock Stars is an app and website that we use in school to quicken the recall of tables facts. In Y6, we love it!
We have been using this app on a regular basis and there has been clear progress in our recalling speed of our times tables.
But don’t just take my word for it – check out the evidence below! The following graph shows our average recall speed measured against Y6 expected standard.
A clearer image, if you need it, can be found here.
It’s great to see so many engaging with TTRS…
…but I’m sure we can improve our average daily time. Each game is short so you don’t need lots of time – ten minutes each day would be ideal!
A clearer image, if you need it, can be found here.
It’s also a great tool for me to see how we’re doing as a class (or individual pupils) and can therefore tailor our practice to fit! I can have a look at minutes played, points scored, strongest/weakest table facts etc.
The first picture below is a heatmap to show recall speed – the greener, the quicker! (Ignore the red one in the bottom left. That was a user error.) We can use this to see that, as a class, our slowest recalls are with 9 x 8, 8 x 4 and 8 x 6 / 6 x 8. Challenge your child to recall these now! 🙂
On the right is our average score for random tables out of 25. Each bar represents a pupil and the aim is to get everyone consistently at 22 or more out of 25. Currently, we have 13 pupils doing this – well done!
A clearer heatmap is here and average score out of 25 is here.
All of these graphs can be downloaded for each child so if you want to know exactly how your child’s getting on and how to improve, send me an email and I’d be more than happy so let you know their individual stats!