Our Year 6 Guinea Pigs have settled into their new home and the children have loved learning to look after and care for them. Our furry friends have even been going home with children over the weekends!
QHYear6
Year 6 Reading
Thank you to our wonderful community volunteers who gave every Year 6 pupil the opportunity to read aloud! The children loved being able to share their favourite stories with our visitors.
The Arrival by Shaun Tan
This week, Year 6 started their English unit based on the graphic novel, ‘The Arrival’ by Shaun Tan. A graphic novel is a story without words and it can still be just as powerful and detailed. We discussed how every illustration is included for a reason and that if you look very closely you gather a huge amount of information from a single image.
‘The Arrival’ is a migrant story. A man leaves his wife and child in a poor town, hoping for better opportunities in an unfamiliar country on the other side of the sea. He eventually finds himself in a mysterious city of different traditions, strange animals, unusual drifting objects and foreign languages. With only a suitcase and a little money, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of employment. He is helped along the way by supportive strangers, each carrying the weight of their own past: stories of struggle and survival in a world of upheaval and hope.
Our Topic this term is ‘Tolerance’ and already Year 6 have been able to identify some of the key themes of the book as respect, diversity and multiculturalism. We look forward to seeing the work that the children will produce based on this powerful story.
Dance Club
Here are two of our amazing dance club children recording ‘We’ll Meet Again’ in preparation for their performance!
Mayan Printing
Year 6 created wonderful Mayan prints this week in Art. Inspired by the geometric shapes and repeating patterns used by the Maya people, children first made cardboard tiles and glued on their designs using string. They then painted the string on the tile and pressed down onto their piece of paper using a variety of colours. They all used their creativity and concentration crowns during this process!
Big Garden Bird Watch
Linked to this year’s Big Garden Bird Watch, here are some photos from Year 6’s bird watching activities in Outdoor Learning this morning. Children enjoyed constructing their own bird hides, watercolour painting and making bird feeders.
Year 6 New Arrivals
This week, Year 6 have acquired some new members- two baby guinea pigs, who have been named Stormy and Hazel. The children are very excited about having class pets and the opportunity to look after the fur babies at the weekends. Look out for a letter providing more information about the new arrivals.
Year 6 Mandarin
This week in their languages lesson, the Year 6 children have been learning about the traditions of Chinese New Year. Miss Chen brought in a traditional lion’s head and body and the children had the opportunity to try these on and pretend that they were part of this animal. They also created special red envelopes that bring good fortunes in line with Chinese New Year traditions.
Hapazome: Outdoor Learning inspired by Japanese art
In Outdoor Learning, to tie in with our art topic about dying materials, we learned the Japanese craft of hapazome. The Year 6s collected fresh leaves and safely used mallets to bash the colour onto triangles of cotton material. Some children made their own tools out of chunks of bark and stones to hold down the material in the wind. They discovered the lighter they tapped with the mallets the more detail their prints revealed.
Quite literally meaning ‘leaf dye’, hapa-zome is the Japanese technique of smashing flowers and leaves into fabric. The plant matter is often arranged into a mandala, but you can create any pattern you like. Be sure to use fresh, juicy plants though; these will leave the best imprint.
Maya: Ancient to today!
Across our subjects we have started our new Topic: the Maya. In Art we learned about the importance of art in Mayan culture and how they were prolific storytellers, and one of the reasons we know so much about this ancient culture is because of their frescoes and sculptures.
In History, we looked at where the Maya live today, what sort of climate and landscape they live in, and then detailed what we already know and what we would like to know.
