Mayfield Primary SchoolYEAR SIX: AUTUMN TERM
OUR YEAR SIX DURING AUTUMN TERM
OUR CORE INTENTION IN ACTION
AUTUMN TERM READY FOR THE FUTURE: WE ALL STAND TOGETHER
A Learning Story For Autumn
Wow! What a fantastic term of When I Grow Up... it has been. From the outset at the Don't Panic: Air Raid! Stunning Start event, the children have enjoyed learning all about World War Two as part of our We All Stand Together theme. As part of our Stunning Start the children were introduced to their own air raid shelter as the cloakroom was transformed into a bunker! We loved learning about life during the war, and learnt lots of new facts. It has created lots of exciting discussions and debates and left the children wanting to find out more. Clearly this was a History driven term with children studying the home front, The Blitz, war leaders, evacuation and significant moments. Learning all about rationing was eye opening and we even made our own rationing biscuits in Design & Technology!
Our Geography work allowed us to apply our place and location knowledge from the previous years as we studied the key sites, battlegrounds and periods from a geographical worldwide perspective. This allowed us to use of know of counties, continents, capital cities, seas and oceans. Whilst studying the artwork of Henry Moore, the children showed excellent progression in their pencil drawing and shading skills. Their dedication to the task can clearly be seen in their Christmas cards this year. I’m sure you’ll agree, they are worthy of being sold! As well as learning about World War Two in the English language, we have learnt about it in French too. Our topic on ’La Seconde Guerre Mondiale’ was challenging yet fun. We learnt a range of new French vocabulary.
Physical Education has seen us focus upon developing our invasion game and teamwork skills whilst learning to play hockey and netball. In Science the children have investigated evolution, adaptation and inheritance. We also studied Charles Darwin and his theories relating to this area. In Music, we were listening to, responding to and singing a range of popular songs from the 1930s and 1940s and performing our own wartime morale boosting rendition of our national anthem: 'God Save The King', whilst online safety and search engines were the elements we studied in Computing in order to complete a Publisher guide to World War Two tanks and how to search for them successfully. It was particularly interesting to see the impact of the online safety work as this is clearly something very prominent in the everyday lives of year 6 children. During our Religious Education work, we set our children the challenge to research how Muslims show their commitment to God. We then moved on to consider Mary and her important role as Jesus' mother.
Our children have enjoyed the challenge of our English studies this term. We firstly looked at Letters From The Lighthouse by Emma Carroll in 'writing to entertain' with the children writing their own narratives with a focus upon unexpected twists and turns and then drawing upon the World War 2 evacuation theme of the book for our non-fiction writing pieces. We then studied Shakespeare's Macbeth. This was an intriguing unit and the children were fully absorbed by the downfall of Lord and Lady Macbeth.
Mathematics this term has been wide and varied, it has created some thought provoking challenges which has required the children to be more resilient and determined when faced with 'trial and error' situations. We have studied geometry, fractions, place value and arithmetic in detail.
The PSHE & Relationships debates we undertook were combined between our own experiences of huge life-changing national events with Covid-19 lockdowns and how these have affected our own physical and emotional well-being. We related this to the experiences of people during World War Two and tried to draw similarities between these two world changing events. Alongside this responsive issue, we considered relationships: issues of consent in different situations that we may face; civil partnerships, marriage and other kinds of relationship; attraction to others. As well as debating pressure and managing this and the associated feelings.
