Base 5 news

It has been a busy week for Year 6. The children have worked with commitment, collaboration and growing confidence. It can be quite daunting having a new teacher and not being sure of the expectations but the children have approached all their learning positively. Lots of the children have already started engaging with learning for themselves at home without being given specific homework tasks (practicing spellings and having a go at the steps for Inferential Reading with their own reading at home) — I am impressed.

READING and WRITING
We started the week continuing our inferential reading of the first few paragraphs of 'Serafina and the black cloak'. It was great listening to the children share their insights, working out the meaning of unfamiliar words, posing their own questions to delve deeper into the text and share their in-depth thinking.

We have read the opening of our class read Wolf Brother — we found it quite tense and can't wait to read on. We have undertaken a reading assessment too this week.

Following on with the 'wolf' theme, we read The Wolves in the Walls' by Neil Gaiman. For a picture book, we found it quite scary and there was a lot of discussion around the illustrations and the use of colour to suggest mood and atmosphere as well as the author's use of language — the repetitive sentences, the use of assonance (sounds within words to suggest internal rhyme) and the clever way the author used verbs in the past tense. We have used the story as a stimulus to plan and write our own stories, which we will finish tomorrow.

MATHS
We completed our maths assessments and then went on to solve some number grids of increasing difficulty, applying our knowledge of multiples, prime and square numbers alongside other number facts.

ART
On Monday afternoon, Mrs Clarke helped us complete our Hapa Zome art works. Some are on display in the classroom. We continued our leaf art work — helping us focus on the shape, size and structure of different leaves. These, too, are on display.

SCIENCE
We started our science work on grouping and classifying and began by finding different ways we could group ourselves using questions. We developed this by sorting 'Liquorice Allsorts' using our own keys (and were very good and didn't eat any!) We moved onto looking at leaves and compiling fact-files, which we will use to create a key to sort and identify the leaves. We've been learning the correct terminology to describe leaves: cordate, deltroid, orbicular and lanceolate for shapes; serrated / toothed, entire, lobed and wavy for leaf margins as well as using terms such as compound and simple for broad leaves.

RE
Mrs Clarke began our RE focus on Values with us this week.

PE
We had our first swimming lesson of Y6. It was a new experience for everyone with us having changed to Nantwich swimming baths this year. Keiron from Sportscape led our second PE lesson, which ended up being inside because of the torrential downpour.

FRENCH
We have our first French lesson tomorrow with Madame Sharpe, although we've already been exploring French vocabulary as part of our science work: 'The word dandelion is from French dent de lion, in Medieval Latin dens leonis, meaning lion's tooth, from the toothed outline of the leaves'. It's great when we can make extra links between subjects in our learning!

Keep up the great work Y6!

We have the Y6 Pastoral Meeting on Wednesday at 4.45pm. Mrs Francis and I very much hope you'll be able to join us.

Mrs Cador