Yr6 Weekly Update – 11/11/16
How the World Works
Y6 Camp is almost upon us… Each class will be setting up the Camp groups over the next couple of weeks. The Y6 Teachers went out to the camp site in Tai Po on Tuesday morning to look at the facilities. We will be camping right on the site with toilets and showers right near by. The students will spend 2 nights in a dorm and 2 nights in a tent. The facilities are great and the students are bound to have a fantastic time!
Please make sure that you have all of the equipment that is recommended by the camp. Due to the fact that the students will be moving from the dorm to the tent or visa versa, students will benefit from packing and unpacking their big bags. They will therefore be asked to bring in their camp bags on Wednesday November 23rd all packed and ready to go. The bags will be returned home the same day. We won’t need them to bring in their sleeping bags and sleeping mat, but of course they will need to take these on camp.
PARENT MEETINGS
Thank you again to the remainder of the parents who made it in for Parent Meetings this Thursday. We are sure it was an interesting and informative evening.
STUDENT LEARNING
For our unit of inquiry this week we have put our inquiry and research skills to work and by asking questions and collecting data about how certain communication technologies work. Some students have done interviews at home to ask parents what they remember from before the time we had so many digital devices, what changes they have seen in their lifetime, and what they think will happen in the future?
In Literacy we have continued with our Explanation writing. This week we deconstructed some different explanation texts to discover the language features of those texts and how they are organised.
All Explanation text have the following features:
Text organisation:
- Title
- Statement (defines and describes)
- Explanation sequence
- Concluding statement
- Supporting diagram/illustrations
Language features:
- present tense
- action verbs to describe
- causal connectives (eg If… then) – complex sentences
- time connectives (eg After that, Finally…)
- technical terms/vocab
- nouns and pronouns
- passive voice
We have now gone back to their initial writing about how their favorite toy or gadget works and we are going to rewrite it using all of the features of an Explanation text.
We have continued with the thinking skill of Synthesizing. As one class has discovered, “Synthesizing is putting things you already know together and making a bigger picture and coming up with a new understanding.”
For maths this week we are continuing with Multiplicative thinking and what the best way to solve a problem could be. We have also started to look at the Binary system of numbers. The binary number system plays a central role in how information of all kinds is stored on computers. Understanding binary can lift a lot of the mystery from computers, because at a fundamental level they’re really just machines for flipping binary digits on and off.
Students have also been using the computer program of Scratch to be introduced to coding. The ability of students to code is essential as coding is the key to innovations in the future. They will be explicitly taught how to break a problem down into a smaller part, use logical reasoning to solve problems and identify bugs in their code.
