Emmaville Primary School

South America Year 6

Welcome to the South  America Year 6 Class Page.  Here, you can find out about everything that we've been doing this term.
Thursday 28th March
 
This week has been another fantastic one here in South America! I can't believe we have already arrived at the Easter holidays. I have been so proud of the children again this week, we have been learning all about British Values and Protected Characteristics. 
 
Teaching British Values in schools is designed to help create communities that are tolerant of the diversity reflected in modern Britain and help children become successful members of society. The British values are:
  • Democracy
  • Rule of law
  • Respect
  • Tolerance
  • Individual Liberty

The ‘characteristics’ are protected by an important law – this means that people cannot be discriminated against for any of these reasons:

  • •Age
  • •Marital status
  • •Pregnancy
  • •Gender
  • •Disability
  • •Choice of partner/ who they love
  • •Religion
  • •Race
The children have been so mature in their discussions, we have all learnt so much from each other this week and I have been blown away by their responses to some of the challenging questions we have been asking this week. 
 
I hope you all have a wonderful Easter holiday.
Friday 22nd March
 
This week has been a very busy week in South America! On Wednesday, we were lucky enough to have a World War II history workshop with Mr McKenzie. We already know lots about the war, but we learnt so much more on the day. He taught us all about rationing, life in Britain and also about the war from the German perspective (he was actually German himself). It was a great, interactive day and we all learnt so much from him. 
 
We also had prayer space on Thursday morning, where we talked about the Easter story. Again, we had just written about Easter so it was fresh in our minds, but we learnt a lot from the prayer space and had lots of fun with the activities. 
 
We also managed to finish our light-up Easter cards. We have been working on our DT project this half term, and this week we assembled all of the parts. I was so proud of the children, they all showed brilliant determination and perseverance as building the circuits was very tricky. I'm sure you all agree that they look fantastic!
 
I hope you all have a lovely weekend! 
Friday 15th March
 
Another wonderful and busy week here in South America. The children have been working so hard and I am so proud of them as usual. This week, we finished our entries to a nationwide competition called 'If you were an engineer, what would you do?'. It is an opportunity for children across the country to design something that they would create if they were an engineer. The competition encourages children to try and solve real world problems with their designs. 
 
  • All the entries are read and given a grade by engineering professionals. These grades are added to the learners’ certificates and sent to the schools. 
  • Shortlisted entries from each year group in each region are sent to judging panels to select the two winners in each age group and nominate any highly commended entries.
  • Winners are invited to regional awards and a range of entries put on public exhibition​.
  • At the Awards our University partners unveil a Prototype they have built from an idea selected from the previous year’s entries.
 
I have been so impressed with all of the designs and the amount of thought that has gone into each one. I'm sure you'll agree that they are all fantastic and we are looking forward to hearing the results soon. 
 
I hope you all have a fantastic weekend! 
Friday 8th March
 
Another fabulous week here is South America. In our English lessons, we have been looking at the poem 'The Highwayman' and are just about to go into our innovate stage, where we will be re-telling the poem in our own words. The children have been exploring the characters within the poem, and what part each one played in the story - even becoming the brain of one of them for the rest of the class. I can't wait to see what they come up with next week.
 
Also, this week we had World Book Day. We had a day full of reading and sharing stories with the youngest children in our school and South America were fantastic, I was so proud of them. They showed such patience and enthusiasm when working with the little ones, and a great time was had by all! 
 
Don't forget about the £1 tokens as well, there are a number of free books that can be exchanged for one of the vouchers or it can come off the total price of another book of your choice. Here is a map of all participating retailers.
 
https://www.worldbookday.com/books-and-tokens/books/participating-retailers/
 
Hope everyone has a lovely weekend!
 
Friday 1st March
 
I can't believe we are in March already, what a brilliant week back we have had! The children have been fabulous as always, and it has been a lovely start back after half term. This week, in Science we have started a new topic... Electricity! We have been reminding ourselves of the components we need to make up a successful circuit. We had chance to explore, construct and draw some circuits in our lesson, and we discussed the importance of using electrical symbols when doing this.
 
At the end of the lesson, we looked at the energy transfer model and how electricity is another form of energy, like light or the food we eat. We then created a class-size electrical circuit to demonstrate this. We used cubes in a large tub to represent electrical energy stored in a cell or battery, we had a buzzer and a switch in our circuit as well. Each person took 4 cubes from the box and travelled round the circuit, dropping two off at the buzzer when passing it to keep them working. We looked at how the energy had moved from the cell, around the circuit (unless the switch was open) and used by the buzzer - some was also wasted as heat energy. This was a really fun way to see the way energy is transferred around a circuit and helped us understand and see electricity as another form of energy.
 
Hope everyone has a lovely weekend!
Friday 2nd February
 
I can't believe we're in February already! Another wonderful week here in South America. This week we made the final piece of our art project. We have been working on sketching and designing a water-themed pattern that we would use to print with. We drew our designs in our sketch book, experimenting with patterns and shapes and then carved our designs into polystyrene tiles. We then rolled on a thin layer of paint and used our tiles to print on paper. The final designs look amazing!! All of the children did so well, as carving into the polystyrene was tricker than we expected but all of them showed great resilience and the finished pieces look fantastic, well done everyone!
 
Hope you all have a lovely weekend!
Hello,
 
Here is a link to this week's reading homework. This will be used to answer the questions in the homework books. If you need another paper copy, please let me know and I can send one home. 
 
Thank you! 
Friday 26th January
 
Happy Friday everyone! This week in South America we have finished our recent computing project of designing and creating our own Emmaville primary school video. We worked in groups to write scripts and come up with ideas to showcase some of our favourite things about Emmaville and the results were amazing! Everyone worked so well within their team, and I am so proud of how everyone took on their role in producing the videos. I'm sure you'll agree that the finished products look very professional and I loved watching all of them!
 
Have a lovely weekend everyone!

Friday 19th January
 
I can't believe another week has gone by already! We have had a great week here in South America and the children have been working so hard. This week, we were lucky enough to have a musical workshop in which the children were treated to an array of songs from around the world. We had lots of fun guessing the flags, joining in with the music and one of our own class members was even the newsreader. 
 
Hope you all have a lovely weekend!
Friday 12th January
 
Well, I can't believe the first week of the new year is over already!​ It was so good to see everyone's faces again on Monday and hearing all about your lovely Christmas holidays. We have had a fabulous week here in South America and one of our favourite lessons of the week was Art. We spent some time looking at the life of Vincent van Gogh and then re-created his famous 'Starry Night' with coloured pencils. The children's work was AMAZING! We spend lots of time on this piece, with many of us dividing the original into 9 sections and working on one at a time to ensure we captured all of the detail. These are just a selection, but I'm sure you'll agree they are fantastic - I was so proud of all of them!
 
Hope you all have a great weekend!