Malta Class Year 6
Autumn Term 2023
Malta has settled in well to year 6, and has been very busy over the last few weeks! As well as having a go at our very first Year 6 SAT practice (actual tests in May), we have started the Street Child book by Berlie Doherty and are immersing ourselves in the life of a young Victorian boy named Jim Jarvis. He has just managed to escape the nightmare of a Workhouse and now we are about to find out how he copes on the City Streets alone. What will happen to him?
History - Industrial Revolution
We have looked at photographs and paintings of Queen Victoria, what we remembered about her and how some sources of evidence show biased opinions.
We researched the question: What was the industrial revolution and how/why did it happen? In groups, we looked at the six elements that brought about change.
Our final task was to answer this question: Would you have moved to the city during the industrial revolution?
Alongside Street Child, we are finding out about how the invention of the steam engine transformed Britain and led to railway mania! Some of us quite liked the idea of being a navvy, as the pay was good, but didn’t like the fact that the Tavern owner, who also owned the railway we were building, was taking back our hard-earned money when we spent it on the ale at the end of the day!
Art – William Morris Printing unit
Linked to our Industrial Revolution topic in history, we are studying the work of the Victorian artist and designer: William Morris. Here we are creating our Victorian colour palettes:
Science – Electricity, Volts
In our science topic we have been studying electricity. We will be making a ‘steady hand game’ in DT so we need to know how to make a complete circuit and draw circuit diagrams in our plans. This week we learned to associate the brightness of a lamp or the volume of a buzzer with the number and voltage of cells used in the circuit by observing and explaining the effect of different voltages in a circuit.
We experimented ourselves with lightbulbs, buzzers or motors and explain the impact of differing voltages on the circuit.
We found out that the higher the voltage the brighter the bub and louder the buzzer. If the voltage is too high, the bulb may blow, and the buzzer may stop working!
Indoor PE-Real PE ‘Creative Unit’
In this unit, the children will develop and apply their seated balance and floor work balance through focused skill development sessions, modified/non-traditional games and sports and healthy competition. This was our second session.
Computing – Coding
In Computing we have been coding – we were relieved when we fixed the broken code that the Purple Mash monkeys had messed with!
Maths – four rules
We have revisited long multiplication and division in maths (which we call ‘bus stop’ division at Milford), and the new times tables approach is helping with our speed of recall. We are revisiting the 8 times table at the moment building on the 4 times table that we started the year revising.
March 2023
This half term, has been full of excitement. Not only did we get to make our chocolates, we have had a book day, celebrated science week and we visited Paignton Zoo as it was their centenary year. It was a lovely day spotting our favourite animals. We especially enjoyed the monkeys at monkey heights and could have stayed watching the funny baboons for hours!
We celebrated World Book Day on Friday 3rd March and some of us enjoyed dressing up as characters from our favourite books. We looked at the author Frank Cottrell-Boyce and his book: Noah's Gold. It is written as a series of letters which is an unusual way of writing a story. We don't write letters much anymore. He wanted to imagine life without the internet – would we write more letters? We looked at some other example letters before writing our letters from a World War 1 frontline soldier who wrote home about the Christmas Truce in 1914.
Our science topic has been about Light. We had to use torches and card to prove that light travels in straight lines. We also investigated reflection and refraction.
One of our topics we have covered this term in maths has been measures. This has included area and perimeter work as well as measurement conversions. In our talk partners, we planned a route through France. We converted the miles to Kilometers for our journey. We worked out how far we travelled altogether.
February 2023
Malta class is happy to be back at Milford! We love our new classroom and it’s great being able to see our younger siblings and friends. At the moment, we are working together to make an inviting reading area.
At the start of the year, we enjoyed finding out about Mischievians in English – an ancient race of global mischief makers who do all the things that embarrass you! All the things that bug you! All the things that you get blamed for! Using our imagination, we created our own Mischievian that was to blame for the problems we face. It’s not Mrs Farrant that eats all the chocolate – it’s a Mischievian!
Now, we have started to read Michael Morporgo’s War Horse and are working on our narrative writing skills.
After revisiting decimals in Maths (multiplying and dividing decimals by integers), we have been finding percentages of amounts and linking percentages to decimals and fractions.
Our Science topic about ‘Light’ has led to experiments to find out how light travels, how shadows form, reflection and most recently refraction. It was strange seeing how an arrow changed direction as it was moved behind water.
Music has a couple of us dancing round the room (well possibly just Mrs Farrant!) as we have started ‘Disco Fever’! In the lessons, we are reading musical score to follow the pitch, rhythm and rests as we sing along.
We have been revisiting skills in Geography. For example compass point games, world flags, capital cities and the size of our world’s oceans.
Finding out about binary code in Computing lessons has been interesting: a code containing only 1’s and 0’s can programme computers to follow all sorts of commands.
Our favourite topic of all in Geography is learning about Ghana and the chocolate trade. We have followed the process from bean to bar and tasted chocolate containing different amounts of coco-solids in order for us to design (and soon make) our own chocolates in DT.
December 2022
Year 6 have been very lucky this term and had an artist called Darrell Wakelam visiting us to do some amazing art workshops. Malta class was split between the other three classes, so we have been able to have a go at three different projects: Mayan Masks, Locomotives and War Horse. On Remembrance Day, we worked as a whole group to produce a piece based on Michael Morpurgo’s ‘War Horse’ in remembrance of our fallen heroes. This artwork is going to be displayed at the new Milford Junior building!
In English, we practiced our oracy and we took part in a class debate: Should Zoos exist?
To start with we practiced our arguments in small groups before writing a persuasive letter whether to close all zoos or to keep them open.
In Maths, we have been learning skills in problem solving by using the ‘goal free’ strategy. In this way, we can predict all the possible questions by using the information we are given, and have answers ready before we have even read the question!
November 2022
We are still loving the book ‘Street Child’ and have met a new character called Shrimps. He’s the same age as the main character (Jim) and we’re hoping they become friends.
In Maths, we have begun our work on fractions and are becoming more confident converting fractions to a common denominator in order to compare them. This will also be needed to add and subtract them which is coming up next!
Finding out about mould has been interesting in science – we grew some over the holidays as we experimented how to keep bread fresher for longer. Definitely don’t get it wet!! There was so much mould, it began to liquify in the bag! Yuck!
As well as beginning to create our own games using code in our computing lessons, we have been discussing internet safety and what to do if we experience cyberbullying on top of why social media apps have age restrictions above age 13.
20 OCTOBER 2022
Malta has been very busy over the last few weeks! We have started the Street Child book by Berlie Doherty and are immersing ourselves in the life of a young Victorian boy named Jim Jarvis. He has just managed to escape the nightmare of a Workhouse and now we are about to find out how he copes on the City Streets alone. What will happen to him?
Alongside Street Child, we are finding out about how the invention of the steam engine transformed Britain and led to railway mania! Some of us quite liked the idea of being a navvy, as the pay was good, but didn’t like the fact that the Tavern owner, who also owned the railway we were building, was taking back our hard-earned money when we spent it on the ale at the end of the day!
We have revisited long multiplication and division in maths (which we call ‘bus stop’ division at Milford), and the new times tables approach is helping with our speed of recall. We are revisiting the 8 times table at the moment building on the 4 times table that we started the year revising.
In science, we had a go at classifying a ‘Curious Creature’ that our partner had created in our science lessons. We had found out it had taken nearly 100 years to classify the platypus as a mammal because it had characteristics from other areas!
In Computing we have been coding – we were relieved when we fixed the broken code that the Purple Mash monkeys had messed with!
Pharrell William’s song ‘Happy’ has been the focus of our music lessons and we’ve managed to learn the melody, backing vocals and a syncopated clapping rhythm to accompany it. If we’re feeling brave, we may even record it!
In addition to all this we had a go at our first Practice SATs too!
AUTUMN 2022
Malta have been settling in well at Buckler's Mead Academy and have been enjoying writing our Dream Giver stories. We recently learned about the Industrial revolution and how it changed our cities. When we voted on whether we'd prefer to move to a city for more job opportunities, most of us still voted to live in the peace of the countryside!
In maths we have been working with factors and multiples recently and we really enjoyed watching the Prime number video. Today, we looked at how we record square numbers. We completed square number skyscrapers. One group made their skyscraper 14 Storeys high!
We also learned a lot during the SCARF decision making workshop with Helen.
