6A

There are a couple of competitions going on at the moment which you may be interested in.

Art Competition – Growing Up Where I Live

A Manchester company called Browne Jacobson are running this competition.

To enter, submit your work to me on an A4 piece of paper on Monday 25th February (the first day back).

It should reflect your local environment and you can use pencil, paints, chalks or pastels.

The shortlisted work will go on display at The Cube Gallery in Manchester.

First prize – iPad

Second prize – Samsung Galaxy tablet

Third prize – iPod Nano

As the UK ground to a halt last week, the heavy snow somehow managed to largely avoid Manchester.

We did get a little snow though, just enough for some of our class to make a tiny, grubby snow man.

Both Y6 classes combined to create this display of Victorian information.

Everyone chose an aspect of Victorian life that they found interesting and researched these subjects to make tgeir own notes. The next step was to create thumb-nail versions in their sketchbooks, showing how the information would be set out and what colours and media would be used.

Then they began testing the technology they had planned for to see if it had the desired effect. Finally, the backgrounds and images were assembled and the reports were then handwritten over the top. We tried to keep the colour palette appropriate to the Victorian period whenever possible whilst also attempting to ensure that the writing could be easily read against the different coloured backgrounds.

Let us know what you think.

Y6 Victorian Display on PhotoPeach

Y6 Victorian Display Too on PhotoPeach

Y6 Victorian Display 3 on PhotoPeach

As we are studying mountains this term, I thought we could explore mountains as a metaphor.

Due to mountains being steep, high and often treacherous, mountains are often seen as very difficult to get over. Consequently, if you had a mountain to cross in a journey it would usually be considered a tricky or problematic journey. This means that a mountain can be used as a metaphor to sum up problems we face in life.

If we think of Cinderella, a tale we all know, although she has many problems (her wicked step-mother and sisters) one of the most obvious problems in the story is when the Prince has the glass slipper, how can he use this to find the lady of his dreams?

We know the story, we know that he sets out to find the person whose foot fits the glass slipper perfectly – this is the Prince’s challenge; his personal mountain that he must climb!

Your task is to write a section of story, 100 words long, that tells how your main character (it could be anyone) sets about beating their personal problem (it could be anything).

Remember to use a range of sentence types and to try to describe their determination to reach their target/climb their mountain.

This week the focus is back on all times tables knowledge and their inverses to ensure speedy recall of all tables’ facts. Also, use this week to brush up on any parts of your maths subject knowledge that you may need (measurements, data handling, properties of shape etc.) ready for assessment week next week. Use some of the links on the sidebar to find games to support your learning.

This week the spelling homework is all about words that end in ‘ly’.

Note: Many of these are adverbs and you get bonus marks in tests for using adverbs in your writing

equally
finally
gradually
naturally
really
usually
beautifully
hopefully
successfully
truthfully
wonderfully
definitely
excitedly
immediately
noticeably
sparsely
family
particularly
probably
quietly
truly
voluntarily
wholly

I’ve had a few conversations about emoticons over the past couple of weeks so I thought I’d repost this blog from our old Y4 page.

Lots of you have asked me how to do different types of smileys.  Here is a table that shows you what to do.  The only thing you need to do is to get rid of the spaces between the colons (:) and the text.  It’s a bit like spelling, to spell a word like ‘dog’ you need to put the letters ‘d o g’ together with no spaces to make the word. 

This is the same with emoticons, if you type : lol : without spaces you get

	: )	: – )	: smile :		: lol :
	: D	: – D	: grin :		: oops :
	: (	: – (	: sad :		: cry :
	: o	: - o	: eek :		: evil :
	8 O	8 – O	: shock :		: twisted :
	: ?	: – ?	: ??? :		: roll :
	8 )	8 – )	: cool :		: ! :
	: x	: – x	: mad :		: ? :
	: P	: – P	: razz :		: idea :
	: |	: – |	: neutral :		: arrow :
	; )	; – )	: wink :		: mrgreen :

This table has been copied from a blog by someone called Bethany.  If Bethany or any of her friends are here, thank you for typing it all out, I hope you don’t mind me showing my class how to make emoticons using your work. 

Your spellings this week are all ‘soft c’ words. This means they all contain the letter c when it is followed by an e, i or y, creating an ‘sssss’ sound.

For your 100 Word Challenge, I would like you to write a paragraph containing these types of words.

The best pieces of writing will make sense and will contain lots of the other features which we talk about when writing (e.g. vocabulary, connectives, openers, punctuation).

The spellings this week are:

 accent, access, accept, accelerate, accident, circle, circus, circumference, circumstances, criticism, decide, excited, excitedly, medicine, notice, noticeably, office, practice, proceed, process, receive, success, succeed.

We were lucky today to have some Y10 pupils from Chorlton High visit our school, including an ex-pupil too!

They came in to talk to our Y6 about what it’s going to be like in High School. They began with a performance that THEY had written themselves, all about what we THINK is going to happen at High School. Then they went on to tell us that those horrible stories are not true.

Finally they spoke about our rights as students and people while encouraging both Y6 classes to create their own performances to demonstrate these rights.

Thank you very much Ms. Jordan and all the Y10 team for coming in. We all had an enjoyable and educational afternoon!

Transition – Gold Fish on PhotoPeach

We had a special visitor in school last week to teach us about electricity.

We learned how to make a complete circuit; how to draw circuits; how to make circuits from drawings; about cells (1.5 volts); about different types of circuits; about electrical safety and about which materials are conductors and which are insulators.

Here is a slide show showing our day.

Bright Sparks – Electricity Day on PhotoPeach