Team LL were set the challenge to work as a team in groups to create the highest freestanding structure in the time given - using only cocktail sticks and marshmallows. Top job you lot!

​RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
KEY QUESTION 4: Why are some times special? Pupils learn to describe religious artefacts, festivals and practices, linking them to special times they have studied –.
LO: Explore how Christmas is celebrated around the world.
SC: I can work as part of a team and ensure that everyone shares the work
I can research a chosen country and find out about beliefs and traditions
I can create a poster presenting my findings
I can include the following: location on  a map, flag, text boxes detailing information about beliefs and traditions. I can share with an audience

The class enjoyed singing Merry Christmas Everyone and learning the Makaton signs to go with it. The class thoroughly enjoyed performing their poems and creating lyrics. Please check our the video on our YouTube channel.

We have continued our learning about natural disasters through exploring the makeup of the earth including tectonic plates. We have learnt all about how these can cause natural disasters such as volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis. We have developed our map and atlas skills and we loved taking on the world map challenge where we had to locate various places we have been learning about on the world map and use locational language to describe their position. We also had fun combining our maths, geography and computing skills to book a trip to Japan including flights, accommodation, transfers and attraction tickets. Some groups had to work to a tight budget others were given the brief of catering for the luxury market. We had lots of fun.

In Team  LL  and AF we have explored fiction and non-fiction. We have been looking at features of historical narrative through reading extracts of Emma Carroll’s Secrets of a Sun King in preparation for next terms work on the Egyptians. In our work on non-fiction texts we have explored biographies. We have explored a wide range of biographies identifying key features. Pupils then carried out research around Guy Fawkes, the Gun Powder Plot and Guy’s gruesome demise. Each child in year 6 then wrote their own biography of Guy Fawkes. Using the features checklist created earlier in the half term pupils were able to evaluate their own writing identifying what went well and setting themselves targets for development. During our grammar work this half term we have looked at a wide range of punctuation including semi-colons and colons. Lots of children are now using these as appropriate within their own writing. We have also been identifying the subject, object and verb within a given sentence and identifying active and passive voice.
 
In our reading work, pupils have read a wide selection of non-fiction including biographies, information texts linked to natural disasters, historical sources, information texts and web pages linking to our RE topic on Buddhism. We have been equally enthralled by the fiction texts we have read including: a range of modern and historical narratives by authors such as George Layton, Emma Carroll and Derek Landy. We explored Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky poem and read, learnt and performed a selection of Christmas poetry – which we recorded for our Christmas performance. We continue to work on our VIPER skills but have had a more detailed focus on inference reading comprehension questions around characters and their emotions and also questions requiring more detailed comparison description.