English Year 6 1st term 21-22

Dear families,

We wanted to share with you what we have been doing in Year 6 this first term.

We have learnt lots of new things and have got to know each other this term. We started off the year with group dynamics like the "snowball fight" in which we had to write a brief description of ourselves and have a "snowball fight" wrapping up our descriptions. It was really fun to guess who was who, although it was quite tricky for our new teacher! We also did a backpack to get to know each other and wrote there our likes and strengths to start off the year fully ready and prepared.

The first TAGA that we did was "Fungi". We learnt many things with the readings and oral comprehensions that we did in class. It was exciting to follow the scientific method and carry out an experiment to determine in which conditions mould/fungi spread quicker. We were incredibly surprised with the results, as they were completely different to the hypothesis that we had made. However, we learnt a lot from the results, and we got a chance to practise on writing hypotheses and testing them.

As we were learning about fungi, we also reviewed WH questions preparing interviews for our teachers and interviewing them. It was really cool to get to know our teachers a little bit more.

In October, we learnt about Halloween. First, we prepared our spooky and fun Adam's family song. It was fun to sing it and dance it in front of all the children of the school, they really enjoyed it. We also did a Halloween Escape Room that had us busy for a whole afternoon. Some of the missions were very tricky but we could work them out and escape the room! Following with Halloween, we also wrote scary Halloween stories in groups. We used story roll the dice maps to inspire ourselves and used a chart and word mats to structure our stories. Once we had them written, we read them to our classmates in the dark with a lantern.

We started off November learning about Scottish culture and folklore and enjoying the Scottish dances workshop that our teachers had arranged for us. We used "The Jolly Postman" story to start the new topic, a story about a postman that delivers different types of letters to different characters and stops in for tea. We learnt about distinct types of letters and focused on the informal letter to identify the main characteristics and its structure. We made six groups and each group was given a letter with a reading comprehension to analyse the letter they received. Children also wrote a letter to their teacher, Marta, when she was ill. In addition, they wrote letters to each other to practise letter writing and each child will get one letter at home from one person of the class during this Christmas.

This end of term has been really busy, not only for the letter writing but also because Year 6 was in charge of setting off the new project of La Mar Bella's Christmas Jumper Day. Children did a little bit of research of the classic Christmas Jumper Day organized by Save The Children. With all the information, they had to design posters using Canva to explain the project to the other children in the school. In groups, they went class by class explaining the new project. They also wrote a letter to TV3 to explain our new project and see if they were interested in recording us, but we weren't lucky enough and they didn't answer.

We have had lots of learning and fun this term, so let's keep it up!