Information and Reminders
Monday 18th January: Year 6 Dressing Up day as part of our new Topic unit. Children may come to school dressed as a human or an alien of the future. You should have received a letter about this.
Academic Review Evenings will take place on the 26th and 27th of January from 17.00 – 20.00. You will receive information on how to book an appointment to meet with your child’s teachers; we look forward to see you all soon.
English
As part of our new Topic on evolution, children will use both fiction and non-fiction books about Darwin and the theories he had on evolution. We will use Darwin and his theories as stimulus for the children’s writing where we develop their use of cohesion. Children will embed their knowledge of cohesive devices in writing to produce pieces of work across the week. These techniques will include: fronted adverbials, adverbials of time and place; temporal (time/when) and causal (reason/why ) conjunctions; pronouns. Towards the end of the week children will have the opportunity for a Big Write which will enable them to demonstrate their knowledge of all these skills.
Maths
This week children have consolidated their learning of fractions and their relationship to decimals and percentages. Next week in Maths we move onto the objective: to use positions on the full coordinate grid; using all four quadrants . Children will focus on understanding how to read and plot coordinates onto a grid and use this knowledge in a real life context. Children will also learn to draw and translate simple shapes on the coordinate plane. More confident children will move on to reflect these shapes in the axis and re draw them independently.
Topic
This week we started our new unit of work: ‘ Out of Africa’. Children have begun researching the theories and work of Charles Darwin. As a group children are finding out about: The theory of ‘natural selection’; Darwin’s finches and their different beak shapes; Galapagos tortoises and iguanas and Fossils of the extinct giant sloth and armadillo. Children will present these findings in groups early next week. Also next week children will begin researching and learning about the beginnings of life. Children will learn about how life began at sea and will think about the structure of sea creatures in order to classify them. We will create an evolutionary timeline which we will add to in the coming weeks. Children will refine their research skills and focus on embedding their knowledge and presenting it in different ways.