Hello and welcome to the Autumn term!

I hope you have all had a restful summer and are ready for an exciting term ahead. It has been a great first week and we have really hit the ground running in the classroom. The pupils have been busy and settled well into the new routines. First, introductions, for those of you who don't know me, my name is Mrs Plumley and I will be the class teacher this year. I am looking forward to getting to know the pupils better and supporting them in their learning. If you would like to contact me please do not hesitate to use the class email address (y6-kp@the-castle-primary.devon.sch.uk). I will be checking this regularly and will do my best to get back to you as soon as I am able.

Finally, a few notes for the term ahead…

• Pupils have been given new reading records. Hopefully you have seen these already! I would encourage pupils to read daily at home, even for a short period of time. They should be asking a parent to sign their record when this is done.

• P.E. will take place on Friday this term, so pupils will need to bring P.E. kit into school on these days. I am happy for them to leave their kit here, although when I suggested this to the children they all said they would prefer to take it home to be washed!

• We are lucky enough to be going swimming this half term so please remind your child to bring in their swimming kit on Tuesday's. 

• If you would like to know more about the learning that will be taking place this term, I have attached an overview to this email.

Yours faithfully, Mrs Plumley

Friday 10th September

This morning we went on a nature walk and collected interesting leaves and flowers. We found that the smaller and prettier they were, the better as when we laminated them we wanted it to look intricate. This is what Darwin would've done on his voyage as he visited different countries. He would have created inventories of the plants that he found. He would not have had a laminator to display them though! They look really pretty on our windows. If you are in the playground, you can see them if you look up at our classroom. 

By Roksana and Thomas. 

Monday 13th September 

Today we learnt about the history of sea exploration. It is important that we have an understanding of where the Beagle is paced in this history. We learnt about the chronology of famous voyagers including the vikings, the Greeks, Christopher Colombus and James Cook. We also found out that the first deep sea dive was in 1960. We plotted these famous people and events onto a timeline which was a piece of masking tape along our tables. We would like to do this with the important moments in Charles Darwin's life too and maybe a timeline of all the places that the Beagle visited. Perhaps we could put this on a map! 

Written by Ruby and Tygi. 

Monday 20th September

Today we used our map and atlas skills in Geography. We learnt about longitude and latitude and why these were useful for early sea navigation. Mrs Plumley gave us the longitude and latitude coordinates for some of the places that the Beagle stopped at. We had to locate these using the atlas and wrote them down in our books. We spotted that Darwin travelled to Brazil, then went south down to Argentina and then back up to Brazil. We are wondering if he did this for a reason. Or even if this information was taken from a reliable source. 

Thursday 23rd September

Today was one of our two 'experience days' linked with our English unit on 'Gorilla' by Anthony Browne. We were asked what we thought about keeping animals in zoos. We sat in groups with people who agreed with our thoughts and wrote down arguments which we could use to say our opinion. We then had a group debate with a group who disagreed with us. Some people swapped sides! At the end, we had a whole class debate. Toby was our 'debate umpire'! He did a very good job at making sure everyone was taking turns. It was really fun and it made us all think about our opinions. We concluded that it will be a debate that will always stay and that there are positives and negatives for keeping animals in zoos. 

By Bryony and Igor

Friday 15th October - GYMNASTICS! 

In PE, we have been learning balancing, stretching and group work skills. We had to incorporate all of these skills into a routine which we performed to Mrs Plumley and the rest of the class today. I have personally really improved as I managed to balance on someone's back for 5 seconds. This is because my strength has got better and I knew which muscles to use to keep me steady. It was great to see everyone else's routines. They were really impressive! We have enjoyed doing gymnastics and look forward to our fun session next week where we will be going on the climbing frames to practise these new skills. 

By Alivia

Monday 18th October

Today we started our art project. We were learning the skills we need to be able to draw and sketch well. We learnt about tone (how light or dark something is), texture (the texture and appearance) and line (the joining of a starting point and an ending point). We explored each of these skills and practised using different media. Here are our sketch book pages. We thought about composition of our pages. 

Tuesday 19th October

We moved on to looking at some of Darwin's and Conrad Marten's sketches from when they were voyaging around the world. We had a go at putting our newly learnt skills into practise! We were really surprised at how well we all did and gave each other feedback on our sketches. We thought our pages in our sketch books look just like some of their work! 

Wednesday 20th October

Today we completed a reading session where we learnt about Mary Anning. We did lots of work on inference skills, retrieval skills and summarising skills. We used our knowledge to create a page in our sketch book about Mary Anning. We found that she was an artist as back then they had no way to photograph her findings so she had to draw to record. Therefore she taught herself how to sketch. We explored some of her original sketches and had a go at drawing some ourselves. We can see how well our drawing skills are improving! Look below to see! 

Thursday 21st and Friday 22nd October

Look below at how we developed our skills further to create our final outcome of beautiful fossils on individual canvases!