Y6 jazz band

Year 6 have been studying jazz in their music lessons this half term. They have learnt about jazz performers and styles aswell as learning to play jazz pieces. The biggest skill they have developed is 'improvising', where they make the music up on the spot.

Here are some clips from their performance to parents this morning.

Y5&6 Christmas Performance

Year 5&6 impressed us all with their 'Victorian Christmas'. We are all very proud of their talents.

Art and Music in Year 6

Year 6 have begun a project looking at the impact of music in film, specifically wildlife documentaries. This will link in to their work in English.

Today we studied the composer Hans Zimmer who writes the music for Planet Earth and Blue Planet. We listened to his piece 'Earth' which he has written for the BBC 10 Pieces project. We then responded to the music through Art, using watercolours.

You can listen to the piece here and maybe create your own artwork.

And look at our artwork here:

Year 6 E-Safety

Year 6 E-Safety Week! 

We have been busy in year 6 discussing what constitutes e-safety and how we can keep ourselves safe on the internet. We started our discussion by considering what e-safety means and how we can keep ourselves safe. Here our some of our considerations:

We then watched two videos reminding us how to keep our information, ourselves and other people safe online. These were very informative and enabled us to think about our own safety online. These are the links if you want to check them out to further your own understanding of e-safety! 
https://youtu.be/-PpHQuTnMT4 
https://youtu.be/SPIPOBG8elw 

Next, we looked at three different Instagram accounts. One exposed the identity of a person using their name, pictures and personal information and the other two used avatars as their pictures. However, one used their name and the other used a fake name. This sparked a discussion about how important it is to keep our information and identity private when using the internet and social media sites. We can do this by: 

Year 6 Leavers' Show

We were all so proud of our Year 6s this week! They performed the musical 'Move it!' to Key Stage 1, Key Stage 2 and to their parents.

The talent, enthusiasm and energy they showed was truly amazing.
We will miss you Year 6!

Matilda The Musical!

Fourteen lucky children from Year 6 enjoyed a wonderful day out at the Mayflower Theatre. In the morning we had a tour of all the secret areas of the theatre, including the fly floor and the orchestra pit. We then enjoyed a drama and singing workshop.

After lunch we watched the show and it was AMAZING!

Girls Football - Match 2

Last night, our second team of girls headed to Newlands for a friendly match. We knew it would be a challenge, as this is our first time playing together, and against a strong team!
Everyone gave it everything they had and Miss Dickinson and Miss McKitterick were really proud to be coaching them on the sidelines.
Well done girls!

Girl’s Football (Match 1)

After having trained hard each Thursday afternoon throughout the Spring term, this week brought the first instalment of matches for our KS2 girls against an experienced Newlands team. Despite the unfortunate scoreline, the girls enthusiastically battled through and thoroughly enjoyed the chance to play on a grass pitch. On our return to school it was rewarding to hear the girls reflect on how much they felt they had improved since Week 1, including a quote from AP -  “I couldn’t even kick a ball!” 

Next week, Team 2 make the trip to Newlands to showcase their skills! Good luck girls!

Science Week

The 11th-15th March was Science and DT week in Shirley Warren!  The theme of the week was Journeys with each year group having their own stimulus to explore.

Year R - Looked at tunnels: thinking about what makes a good one before constructing their own.

Year 1 - Looked at bridges: thinking about what materials would be best before creating their own that would have to carry the weight of a beebot.

Year 2 - Looked at static electricity and how it could transport the paper animals they made.

Year 3 - Found out about the important role bees play in pollination and then created their own digital animations to show this.

Year 4 - Investigated forces and the effect they had on the fabulous flying machines they created.  They then used iPads to create their own explanation videos.

Year 5 - Found out all about scientists that had visited space.

Year 6 - Had two mini projects of their own; 6L investigated natural disasters whilst 6W looked at the journey of diseases before creating their own viral videos.

The children thoroughly enjoyed practically investigating these areas and learnt lots during the week! Special mention needs to go to the ambassadors from each class that stood up in a special assembly at the end of the week and shared what they had been doing; they were fantastic.

If you want to find out more, why not ask your child what they discovered during this week or try and carry out your own experiment at home!

Year 6 Songwriting

Year 6 have been learning about songwriting this term and have written an origianl song. Mrs Mead is incredibly impressed with them - what do you think?

Upper KS2 cross-country success!

Last week, Year 5 and 6 cross-country runners - many of whom were racing for the first time - took part in the city-wide cross-country championship. They did so well! Miss Dickinson and Miss McKitterick were very proud of them.

Y6 Artwork

Year 6 have been studying The Beatles in music. Today we listened to 'Lucy in the sky with Diamonds' and looked at the lyrics.

 We were inspired to create our own artwork, using ideas from John Lennon's psychedelic imagery.

Y6 Flutes

The Year 6 Flutes have made a New Year's resolution to practice their flutes at home. This week they have been practising 'Dark Horse' and have made excellent progress.

See what you think?

Ever wondered how safe you are online? If the answer is yes, check out Year 6's e-safety videos

 

Always remember to Lock it, Block it, Show it, Tell it!

6D Scooter Skills Session

6D won a competition when they recorder the different ways they travel to school over four weeks.

They were rewarded with a session from Bike It Jenny who brought in scooters (and helmets) for the children to try.



First, Jenny tested that the children could stop safely. 

There was a course to scoot round including "roundabouts" (hoops on the ground) and a "zebra crossing" (black and white flag).

The children also had a go at playing musical statues on scooters!
These are great ideas that you could try with a scooter in the summer holidays. If you don't have cones, you could put stones down carefully to scoot around.

Fairground Ride DT Day in Year 6

These photos show some children from Year 6 deep in concentration as they work to create their fairground rides from their designs.

Can you spot the amazing unicorns at the top of this ride?

They needed to include a motor to make it spin.

This group were the first to make their motor work.

Well done Year 6.

Football team victory!

Yesterday, the football team competed in the Testlands Tournament against 10 other schools. It was a very hot day; luckily umbrellas at bottoms of bags came in handy for shade!

We had an unlucky start, losing to Moorlands (who went on to win the entire tournament) and Springhill B. This put us into the B league.

However after lunch the games flipped our way as we went on to beat Bassett Green 2-0, Springhill B 3-0, Banister B 6-0 and Banister A 1-0! 

There were some superb passes and interceptions - Miss Dickinson was very proud to be on the sidelines cheering them on!

The tournament ended with us winning our league. Congratulations boys - you have worked so hard this year and after that great performance yesterday, you deserved to win!

Sports Leaders

Over the year, the Shirley Warren Sports Leaders have been training to plan and deliver sports to children across the school. They have been out at lunchtimes running fun activities with Key Stage 1 and yesterday they assisted our coaches with a Year 1 lesson!

Mr Stanley and Mr Ship have been blown away by their patience, dedication and leadership skills and said that they were absolutely amazing in yesterday's lesson. Well done Sports Leaders!

If you are in Year 4 or 5 and think you might make a good Sports Leader, make sure you let Mr Ship or Miss Dickinson know as we'll be looking for new Leaders next year!

Busy times in Year 6!

Year 6 have been kept very busy this week! Not only have we been learning about derived facts in Maths and writing short stories based on 'Alma' in English, but we have also managed to pack in two new topics in Geography and Science!

In Science, we have been recapping what we learnt in Year 4 about electricity and building on this to experiment with making and debugging circuits. We came up with our own research questions and investigated these. We were surprised by our findings!

In Geography, we have been learning about mountain formation using what we learnt about tectonic plates last half term. Did you know that there are five key types of mountains? In the first picture, Miss Dixon is pushing her hands together on the towel, maintaining pressure; this creates folds in the towel, just like what happens with the Earth's crust!
In the second, the balloon represented swollen magma underneath the crust which creates a dome mountain.


We're looking forward to learning more about mountains next week... that is, when we're not busy at Woodmill! Hope the packing is going well, Year 6!

Test on Volcanic Eruptions By CA

Today Class 6C did an experiment about volcanoes in our playground, so that we wouldn't cause too much mess in the classroom!

So we took a bottle of Coke and some polos. Then we set everything up, making sure we had a bucket of water for afterwards.

We used the bottle to represent the crust. The liquid coke we used to represent the magma. 

Then we all went a safe distance away from the experiment and our teacher dropped in the polos to create the eruption.

The experiment ended up being successful, although I think next time we would add something so we could drop in the polos quicker, as you can see from the video how we didn't get it in quick enough.

By CA in 6C