Year 6 Roman Exhibition 18th December 2012

On Tuesday afternoon of week 15 Year 6 invited the entire school to see our Roman creative curriculum exhibition. We demonstrated all of our learning througout this term and invited every other class and every member of staff to see. We even had a hefty number of parents and relatives attend the afternoon which was enjoyed by all.

The entire morning was devoted to preparing for this exhibition including finishing off our Roman stories, selecting our art exhibition pieces and setting up the hall, but it was worth it.

Pupils were invited to see our Roman coliseums, read our stories, hear our reports and view our wonderful art gallery. Here's a reminder of how it all went...

Morning preparation was essential to make sure all of our work was ready to be exhibited

Parents and pupils alike were blown away by the sheer size of the art exhibition

It was great for the younger children to catch a glimpse of life in Upper Key Stage 2

I was delighted by how well the Year 6 pupils explained their work to the younger children

Everybody had the chance to exhibit work - even if it wasn't theirs...

The Roman art gallery in all its glory

Some people contributed slightly less than others to the exhibition

The younger pupils were impressed with our art work

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Year 6 Creative Curriculum - Mini Challenge 3

As soon as we came back from our half term break it was time to get back into our Romans topic. This mini-challenge will focus on design and technology and our aim is to design, construct and evaluate a Roman gladiator arena in order to understand how people in Roman times entertained themselves.

We began by discussing the features of a Roman arena and creating questionnaires (a key geography skill!) to ask people what they would expect to see in such places.

Once we had agreed it was time to design our arenas and then follow our design plans carefully. We selected our materials, planned the steps of our work, made sure everybody had a job to do in the construction teams and then made changes when necessary...

Making careful measurements and choosing the right tools for the cutting and joining stages are all crucial skills to master when working on a large-scale design and construction project.

As in Roman times, slave labour was used by some children in order to 'get the job done' ; )

Opening out our boxes allowed us to make more realistic arena shapes - but how will the corners be constructed? 

Year 6 Creative Curriculum - Mini Challenge 2

Before the half term holidays we followed on from our detailed Roman reports by creating individual art exhibitions. Instead of creating ‘one or two’ pieces we experimented with a variety of wet and dry media such as chalks, water colours, charcoals and observational drawings.




We developed our work from early sketches right through to final exhibition pieces, as you can see below. This work will be on display at our special Year 6 Romans exhibition which will take place in the school hall on Tuesday December 18th from 13:00 – 15:00 and all parents, carers and small people are more than welcome to attend in order to see our term’s Creative Curriculum work in full.

The close up of Mars, the Roman god of war, was Ben's centrepiece as it was his favourite exhibit.

Look very carefully at this exhibition - notice the same piece represented in many different media

Ellie's work focused mainly on bright, abstract water colour pieces

New games to play on Year 4's blog

Head over to Year 4's Activities page to play some games Mrs Warner has added.
There are some new ones about making safer choices when on line.

Year 6 PE - Autumn term 1

This half term we have been creating our own circuit training programmes in order to keep us fit for life. There's a world of difference between what children 'do' at school and what they actually 'learn' and, to be honest, anyone can follow a set of instructions. But what happens when it's the students themselves who are creating the activities?

We decided to split the body into three sections; lower body (legs), core (bottom, hips, stomach and lower back) and upper body (chest, arms, neck, shoulders) and then we set about devising a set of warm up movements followed by a circuit training routine. Here's what we came up with...

Building core strength by thrashing our abs - this is also key to developing our balance.

 

 

There has been a great deal of effort put into this topic, but what have we actually learned from it? Here are the skills we have put into practice throughout this half term...

·          Explore, improvise and combine movement ideas fluently and effectively.

·          Organise their own warm-up and cool-down activities.

·          Show an understanding of why it is important to warm up and cool down.

·          Know why warming up and cooling down are important.

·          Develop consistency in their skills.

·          Decide what approach to use to meet the challenge set.

·          Choose and apply skills more consistently in all activities.

·          Know and understand the basic principles of warming up, and understand why it is important for a good-quality performance.

·          Understand why exercise is good for their fitness, health and wellbeing.

·          Understand the need to prepare properly for games.

·          Choose and use information to evaluate their own and others’ work.

·          Suggest improvements in own and others’ performances and develop our work in order to improve it.

 

   

Creative Curriculum topic - The Romans

This year we have decided not to have DT books, art books and geography books in Year 6. Instead we have creative curriculum books and we learn all of our foundation subjects together under one roof, so to speak. The Romans topic will be split into 4 different mini-challenges and we will be adding photos when they are ready in order to demonstrate our learning. Enjoy...