Howard Junior School

This week we welcomed Rock Kidz into school. Rock Kidz gives Primary Schools all over the UK the opportunity to raise the profile of well-being and PSHE in their community through the power of music. The first session in the morning culminated in a Dance Battle between the year 5/6 teachers, who gave it their all and the pupils. After an audience vote and some stiff competition, a pupil from 5/6H won – whoop whoop!

Elsewhere in the curriculum we studied:

Maths – areas of triangles

English – we focused on dialogue, adverbial phrases and personification as we continued our sentence stacking.

Guided reading – our retrieval and inference centred around the work of J. K. Rowling

History – we continued to look into the slave trade and wrote a letter home explaining life on the plantations

Science – a secret mission had us helping Jamie Bond work out which surface gives him the best grip as we delve deeper into forces.

Geography – looking further away from home, we explored the regions and cities that make up Australia.

P.E. - Basketball 

Spring has sprung in 5/6 H, and we have settled well into the new term.  The first week back is always filled with excitement as we find out our curriculum for the weeks ahead.

Maths - Perimeter and area

English - our new text driver for this term is Gorilla

Guided reading - we were introduced to Sunshine Simpson as we explored new vocabulary, retrieved answers and applied our inference skills.

Science – Forces, specifically air resistance when we explored how parachutes work.

History - Transatlantic Slave Trade

Geography - Australia

RSHE - Vaping and the its effects

P.E. - Baskball recap 

The last week is always a busy week but lots of fun too. We had our Christmas Performances as well as a visit to KLA to watch their Christmas Showcase. We had a class party on the last day and made festive cards and decorations for our families. When we weren't singing and crafting, we were working hard across other areas of the curriculum, including:

Maths - word problem using all four operations

English – completed our independent writes, a persuasive letter 

Science - investigated the idea that all changes are either reversible or irreversible. 

History – we wrote a persuasive letter to Napoleon Bonaparte

Geography – identify the key features of a volcano

RE - What are the key beliefs that Christians have?

PSHE - Understand how name-calling is a form of bullying and how to deal with it.

Music – performed a signed version of 'Starry Night'

Week 4 has been very musical! Not only have we started rehearsals for our Christmas show, we have been improvising music too.

In other areas of the curriculum we have been studying:

Maths – we have made the switch back to multiplication and developed our fluency at 3 by 2 formal multiplication

English – we are continuing with our sentence stacking. The class have really impressed me with the quality of their independent sentence work.

Science – we tried separating mixtures and solutions to varying degrees of success.

History – our study of the French Revolution saw the introduction of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Geography – our focus turns to earthquakes, fault lines and tectonic plates as we looked more closely at the 2023 disaster in Turkey and Syria.

RE - we continue to challenge beliefs and question areas of the Christmas story 

PSHE – we are shining a light on racism and what it looks like and feels like to those affected by it.

Music – singing and playing continues to be our focus as we play along to Ghost Parade

PE - Tag rugby 

It was another busy week for 5/6H. We smashed our attendance with over 98% and as reward for this amazing achievement, we had a non-uniform day on Thursday followed by another non-uniform day on Friday to celebrate Children in Need.

Back in the classroom, we studied the following:

Maths – we tackled equivalent fractions.

English – we came up with some beautiful prose to persuade the footballing community to get behind Child Free Labour.

Science – we investigated thermal properties in our experiments to see if cotton wool, paper towels or tin foil would insulate best.

Geography – we moved to the Alps to find out more about a 5300-year-old mystery man named Ortiz.

History – Off with her head! We continued our study of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in the lead up to the French Revolution.

Music – we got the glockenspiels out and tried our best to not only keep time with the music but also remember the lyrics.

Art – we took to the paints to colour in our first attempt at Islamic art.

Spelling – we are looking at the very tricky 'ough' sound as we try to crack if it is an oh, uff, oo, or, sound