Year 6 Update Week 3
September 2- House Captains Announced at Assembly
9th September – CPD Day – School Closed
13th September – Diversity House Day & Mid Autumn Festival
18th September – Camp Information Evening
23rd-27th September – ISA Assessment Week
26th September – Parent Consultation Evening
30th September – CPD Day – Students not to attend school
1st October – National Day Bank Holiday – No School
2nd October – Swimming Commences, continues every Wednesday in October.
4th October – Half Term Holiday – 3pm Finish
14th October – Term Starts again
18th October – Parent Teacher Bowling Evening
25th October – CPD Day – Students not to attend school
28th – 30th October – School Photos
4th – 8th November – Camp
29th November – Wellbeing Day
6th December – Y4-6 Disco
13th December – Term Ends – 12pm Finish
This year, the Mandarin department is working collaboratively with Mr Lowe and the PTA to provide our students with new and exciting opportunities for language acquisition as well as developing understanding and appreciation of Chinese culture.
The students in Year Six kicked off the celebrations with lantern-making this Thursday during double Mandarin sessions. Students were given choices to work with paper, wood or paint brush. Many of them thoroughly enjoyed the experience and are looking forward to carrying on with their work next week.
One of the activities planned for the following two weeks will be making and tasting delicious mooncakes. Students with food allergies will be instructed NOT to participate in the tasting activity to avoid any potential health issues unless parental permission is given in writing in the home school diary.
The ingredients of the mooncakes are listed below for your information.
Flour, syrup, olive oil, salt, baking soda, red bean paste, green bean paste, lotus seed paste
Thank you for your support!
The Mandarin department
Equipment and stationery
Most children have made a great start to the year and have brought the correct equipment. However, some students have not and it is essential that they bring all of the items listed on the letter that they received at the end of Year 5. If your child has lost the letter, they need to ask their class teacher for another copy.
If you have not already done so, please purchase a cheap pair of in-ear earphones for your children to keep in school at all times. We use the Chromebooks to enhance many areas of the curriculum, in order to get the most out of the programs we use, earphones as a must. They are available from Japanese Home Centre (JHC) for 50HKD.
As a year group we are inquiring into the How the World Works through the Central Idea ‘Scientific investigations can help people to make sense of the world.’ We started the week with applied science workshops that were held on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, with students rotating through each Year 6 class, each with unique experiments. Students were able to demonstrate Maths skills by utilising measurement tools in the process of scientific inquiry. Students used a variety of skills such as: learning how to conduct the experiment in groups, recording data, changing variables, sharing ideas about what a fair experiment is and sharing all of their conclusions from their findings. 6P students enjoyed their first workshop, which was creating and testing catapults, measuring distance they could shoot the teachers’ lunch boxes (there are loads of them in the staffroom), recording results related to mass and distance as well as making changes to the experiment (change a variable) to test new ideas.
In addition to science workshops, students visited the Hong Kong Science Museum to explore the science topics that interest them for their own upcoming independent inquiry to end the unit. Students watched demonstrations and exploring the interactive and educational displays in a broad range of topics. Massive thank you to all parent volunteers for your assistance – you helped make the outing a success! We look forward to building these relationships throughout the year as having parents in as guest speakers and volunteers adds value to what we teach.
In number Maths we have continued work on place value, focusing on ensuring students have a good grasp of larger numbers, decimal numbers and the value of digits. As well as studying numbers, students have been using various forms of Measurement in Maths when conducting their experiments. For example, in 6P students used a digital scale to find mass of the ‘teacher lunchbox’ and a meter sticks to measure distance. Students also made conversions to other units of measure.
In English this week, we have been exploring language techniques used by others to express voice. We have critically examined different texts on the same topic related to audience, focus and style. Students were given an extra Learning Centre session to carefully choose texts of their own interest to compare. Students are learning to think critically about texts by discussing how these texts relate to: audience, focus, text features and writing style.
Central Idea
Scientific investigations can help people to make sense of the world.
Lines of Inquiry
- What scientific inquiry is (Form)
- How the scientific process is used (Function)
- How scientific investigations have impacted the world around us (Connection)
During this unit, the aim will be to develop the children’s understanding of the scientific process, changing variables and the effect of science around the world.
Number Maths
Place Value
Central Idea: We use the same rules for the computation of decimal fractions as for whole numbers
By the end of Year 6 children should be able to:
Apply place value to partition and rename numbers to thousandths
Recognise, and order integers (including negative integers)
Recognise, model and order decimal fractions to thousandths or beyond.
Round decimal fractions to the nearest tenth or whole number
Central Idea: Writers use carefully crafted language to educate and inspire
This unit will involve us using inspiring and educational language to inform people about the effects of scientific investigation around the world.
Please continue with Mathletics /Prodigy at home.
Reading
Students should have brought home their reading journals this week and they should be reading on a daily basis, on Fridays we update our Reading Diaries with a quality recount entry. Please can we ask parents to sign next to the comment. Students should be reading every day.
Spelling
Each week I would like students to do the following:
- Choose at least 2 of spelling activities from their grid and have a grown-up initial next to the activity completed.
- Write their spelling words out 3 times in columns. Look, cover, write and check.
- Complete 2 spelling tests at home
