What we’ve been doing this term...

M a r c h 2 0 1 7

Year 6 News Elsewhere in School… Foundation were

visited by a travelling farm, complete with sheep, pigs, hens, ducks a goat and even a donkey!

Year 5 visited one of our local churches, St Andrew and St George, to learn about the Easter story.

Year 1 organised a brilliant Superhero Day, creating superhero characters and costumes, and sharing their work with their families.

Years 1,2 and 5 were visited by a professional artist, who led paper and felt making workshops.

Year 1 loved taking part in an Indoor Athletics Festival organised by Rising Stars.

Our Year 5/6 Boys Football team reached the quarter-finals of the Stevenage Cup after a dramatic 3-2 win.

We raised over £300 for Comic Relief through our non-uniform day.

Indoor Athletics We thoroughly enjoyed practicing for this year’s Stevenage Indoor Athletics Festival, working hard to improve our throwing, jumping, running and bouncing. With everyone joining in, it was great to discover some of our hidden talents (some of us are a lot bouncier than we might look) and we’ve also been able to track our improvements from week to week, again giving some of the slightly less sporty members of class a chance to shine.

All this training paid off in style when we finally reached the Festival itself, held at Barnwell School. With 15 schools (and almost 300 children) from across town taking part, the competition was fierce - but our lightning baton changes, fast turns and utter determination gave us a real edge in many of our races. With points awarded in every event, none of us had any idea where we had finished until the final scores were read out - so we were delighted to discover that we had secured third place in both the Boys and Girls competitions, and excitedly collected our medals.

Y e a r 6 N e w s : M a r c h 2 0 1 7 Stars of the Week

Mark Wells

Taskia Comas

Michael Stone

Andronikos Chalatzioukas

PGL 2017

M a r c h 2 0 1 7 : Y e a r 6 N e w s Stars of the Week

Aanshi Patel

Trey McDonald

Ellie Adams

Ashley Ottery

Y e a r 6 N e w s : M a r c h 2 0 1 7 English: Persuasive Presentations

We’ve managed to pack an awful lot of work and learning into a short half-term, and you can see loads of our work over the next few pages. We began by focusing on recount writing and setting description, linked to our humanities topic, before moving on to explore persuasive writing. After learning our model text and working on comprehension skills using adverts and leaflets, we moved onto creating our own Dragon’s Den style sales pitches for some unlikely looking items. We orally rehearsed our presentations, working in pairs, and delivered them in front of the rest of the class. We were all given £6000 to invest in other inventions, and it was really interesting to see how the most effective speeches encouraged us to part with our cash!

Now You See Me - Now You Don’t Are you searching for a better way to travel? Are you fed-up of traffic jams? Are you ever late for school or a job? Well, we’ve got the solution for you! Now You See Me - Now You Don’t is the greatest invention of the twenty-first century! Designed by Albert Einstein and built entirely from oakash (a type of wood developed by the Ancient Aztec civilisation), the Now You See Me - Now You Don’t product uses only solar power, it is easy to use (with no confusing cables or wires), and it can transport anything in an amazing time of just three seconds - and it’s portable, too! All you need to do is attach the button to you, run towards it and jump - but before jumping, you engage the system. It can take you anywhere as quick as a flash! It is available online at travelfaster.co.uk.

Go. Go. GO!!! Next stop, next dimension! Only people under 65 can use this device. We take no responsibility for injuries or sudden trips to the wrong dimension!

Sally Yu

M a r c h 2 0 1 7 : Y e a r 6 N e w s English:

Reading Booster

We’ve put lots of time and effort into our

reading and comprehension skills

this term, determined to be as ready as we

possibly can be by the time our SATs come

around in mid-May. We have taken part in

weekly Reading Booster sessions,

exploring texts from old SATs tests

gathering information, discussing characters

and themes and breaking down

structure - and then answering the

accompanying SATs style questions.

The impact of this

has been really clear to see, and it was

brilliant to see two-thirds of us

reaching the expected end-of-Year 6 level in the practice

test we completed last week. This also clearly showed that

those of us who complete our reading

homework to the best of our abilities every week really do

make more progress - so we really need to

make the most of the few weeks left before

our ‘proper’ tests [hint—we got a

reading test to com-plete over Easter.]

The SUPER-CUFF Are you scared of being mugged or savagely hurt? Do you want revenge on bad people? We have the exact solution for you! Get the SUPER-CUFF! It’ll solve all your problems, and it is probably the most innovative, high-tech device you will ever lay your hands on. It really is the best of 21st century technology! Designed by Tony Stark (from Iron Man and Captain America : Civil War) and built entirely from Volcanium (an ultra-rare metal that makes up just 0.00001% of the Earth) , the CUFF can sense whenever anyone is trying to escape, and will neutralise anyone who gets in your way. Available online and at a low price of £99.99, surely you can’t afford to miss out? Connor Conboy

The Tranquiliser 3000 Have you ever feared people stalking you? Do you spend your days looking back over your shoulder, staring into the murky shadows? Well, we’ve got the solution for you - The Tranquiliser 3000, the greatest invention of the 21st century. Designed by S.H.I.E.L.D. and built entirely from titanium, the Tranquiliser has darts instead of bullets. The package comes with 500 explosive darts (to combat gangs). Finally it has four simple steps (all of which are labelled on the gun). Available in 30 different colours, there’s a Tranquiliser 3000 to suit everyone - and, with prices starting from just £89.99, surely you can’t afford to miss out?

With the Tranquiliser 3000, never fear stalkers again!

Tranquilisers available from tranq3000.co.uk. Owners use entirely at own peril. No responsibility taken for any death or injury that may result from mis-use.

Michael Stone

Y e a r 6 N e w s : M a r c h 2 0 1 7 Capitals: Maps & Landmarks

Our topic for the term has seen us exploring Capital Cit-ies. We began the half-term by thinking about what makes somewhere a capital, what we’d expect to find there and why cities like London, Paris, Washington and Mexico City are situated in their particular locations. We located these (and many other) capitals on a range of maps and globes, and then explored the way they have changed over time. We pro-duced some excellent posters, too, packed with information about capital cities. Building on all this, we then imagined what it would be like to live in one of these cities, and wrote diary entries in the charac-ter of a child living in Mexico City. Some of our more adventurous writers even wrote two contrasting diaries, to show the difference between the lives of rich and poor here. You can read a few examples of our work on these pages, showing a great balance between English skills and humanities knowledge.

Growing up in Mexico City Dear Diary, It’s been an exhausting day. I had to drag myself out of bed at 6.25am, ready to start school at 8am... I am hating the early morning shifts this term, and can’t wait to go back on to afternoon school next month! Walking to school takes an hour and 20 minutes, and with all the rush hour traffic, it’s a horrible way to start the day. Anyway, 5 hours quickly passed at school, and before I knew it, it was lunch time. We walked to the local park to have a picnic, and while eating we saw ponies being ridden and hundreds of children playing football all around us. It felt like everything was right with the world. After lunch, we started walking towards the museum. Passing dozens of street children, all begging for change as usual, it felt horrid not to be able to help them properly. All we could do was give them the left-overs from our lunch and a drink, and try chatting to some of the kids who looked our age... And after all that, by the time we reached the museum it was closed! We set-off on the long walk home, and got back just in time for tea...

Shelly Gregory

Dear Diary, It’s been another hectic day! I rolled out of bed at first light, ran downstairs, gulped my hot chocolate and dashed to school. When I finally arrived (just as the bell was going for our 8am start), I found my friends and settled down to another 4 hours of boring lessons (the less said about which, the better). After lunch, we went to the park to play football. I hate the early morning starts while we’re on morning school, but only having to come in for half the day is certainly a great thing when the sun’s out! The game started well, but after a few minutes a gang of local street kids turned up. We always feel quite sympathetic to them, and understand how terrible their life can be, but they are also quite threatening sometimes, and started to demand we gave them food or money. We didn’t want a fight, so we all ran off and went home. When I got home, I munched on a taco while finishing my homework, then watched some TV - and now it’s time for bed, so I’ll speak to you tomorrow.

Mark Wells

M a r c h 2 0 1 7 : Y e a r 6 N e w s Capitals:

Recount letters

We completed our topic by planning our

own holidays to one of the capital cities we had studied - either

Paris, London, Washington DC or

Mexico City.

We investigated the landmarks, learnt

about transport in our chosen destination

and even picked-out real-world hotels and

restaurants by searching online. We then picked-apart a

model letter, looking at the way it was

structured, the language used and the

kind of details that were included, so that

we could incorporate all of this in our own

writing. Finally, we used shared writing to

support our work, so that by the time we

came to write independently, we

knew exactly what we were doing.

As you can see from Mahie’s example on

the left, the finished pieces were really

impressive, and gave the impression that

we really had been to these cities -

something that lots of us would now like to do where we’re a bit

older!

My Parisian holiday

Hotel Therese Rue de Rivoli Paris, France

Dear Mum, I can’t believe I was nervous about coming on this trip - I’ve only been here for a couple of days and it’s already the most sensational holiday I’ve ever been on! Arriving at the Paris train station yesterday morning, we initially had no clue where we were going! Fortunately, once we had got directions, we knew exactly what we wanted to see over the next 36 hectic hours. After we eventually found our hotel and unloaded our bags, we headed to-wards the Eiffel tower. We went to the top, which was 300m up, and saw the sensational view of the city (we had learnt from our mistakes and brought a map with us, so we knew exactly what we were looking at). At first it was spine-chilling, but I got used to it after a while. The view was astronomical! Subsequently, I went to my next stop, which was called La Cafeotheque de Paris. I was famished, so on the way it felt like forever! When we got there we had: croissants, coffee and breadsticks, while we looked at the view of Notre Dame and the Seine. Exhausted but excited, I travelled to the Louvre, making some space on my camera on the way there. When I got there, we immediately found the main attraction - the Mona Lisa. It was crowded there, but we were able to take a photo after a while. The painting was extraordinary, and like no other I had ever seen. After a couple of hours, we left to see the Disneyland Paris theme park. I had to try out the rides, and when I saw them they looked thrilling - my favourite was the Buzz Lightyear Laser Blast. It was awesome! If I have time tomorrow, I will try and go on a bus tour of Paris. I just want to sit at the top and take in the marvellous view of all these historic buildings and landmarks. See you soon, Mahie Begum

Y e a r 6 N e w s : M a r c h 2 0 1 7 Diary Dates 19th April Start of Summer Term 1st May May Bank Holiday - school closed 8th—12th May Year 6 SATs Test Week 19th May Stevenage Year 3/4 Football Tournament 29th May - 2nd June Half-term 8th June Year 4/5/6 Athletics Festival at Ridlins Stadium 15th June Stevenage Lacrosse Festival 16th June Year 5/6 Chessington trip 19th - 23rd June Sports Week 2017(including Foundation, KS1 and KS2 Sports Days) 29th June Year 3/4 Legoland trip 11th & 12th July KS2 end-of-year production (afternoon & evening on 11th, evening only on 12th) 21st July End of term

It’s been a really busy few weeks for our sportier girls, in particular, with a run of netball and football matches that have seen teams in action seven times in just three weeks... Netball Our biggest event this half-term was the Stevenage High-5 Netball Tournament. High-5 is a faster, five-a-side version of Netball that ‘s played by mixed teams, with everyone playing in every position over the course of an afternoon - and it’s a sport that we really enjoy too, so we headed to the event, held at Marriotts, with high hopes for the afternoon. Some fantastic play from the whole squad, particularly Ashley, Joe-Lee and Honey, saw us secure impressive wins through the group stage and make our way to the final undefeated. The gold-medal match was a high-quality game, with the lead constantly changing hands - but unfortunately we lost in the final minute of the game, and finished in a hugely impressive second place overall. The Netball team have also been in action against Ashtree (where we were unlucky to be held to a 4-4 draw after having a lot of the ball during the game) and Knebworth, who pulled away in the second half to win by 5 goals, despite some great defensive work by Mo, Kate and Honey. Football Our Girls team have made huge improvements this term, with the line-up finally settling into place and every player growing in skill and confidence. As a result, we scored our first goal of the season against Lodge Farm (a brilliant free-kick from Kate that shot into the top corner) in an evenly matched 2-2 draw, and then followed that up with another draw two weeks later, in a 1-1 tie with Camps Hill that we probably deserved to win. A heavy defeat away at a very strong Giles team took a bit of the gloss off the end to the season, but it has been fantastic to see every player contributing to the side’s improvements in form, with Millie’s all-action, no-fear defending, Ashley’s ‘be everywhere’ commitment and Hannah’s astonishing development in goal really standing out. Chance to Shine Cricket This half-term, we have also had the chance to take part in weekly cricket sessions run by the Chance to Shine charity. Our coach, Jamie (from Hertfordshire Cricket), has helped us to develop our batting, bowling and fielding, and has taught us some great games to pull all our skills together in a fast-paced, energetic way. All this has really enthused us to play more cricket (which is exactly what Chance To Shine aims to do), and as a result we’re looking forward to the Stevenage Boys and Girls Cricket Tournaments which take place at Stevenage Cricket Club next month - so much so that lots of us are keen to come into the school during the holidays for some extra practice sessions.

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