Welcome to Year 6 2019-2020!

Date: 12th Sep 2019 @ 1:03pm

WELCOME TO YEAR 6 2019-2020!

A big, warm welcome to every one of our new Year 6 children! We have been in school for just over a week now and have spent the time getting to know everyone and settling in. Based on first impressions, Mrs Hrabowenskyj and I are very impressed with the way the children have come back to school and their attitude towards work has been outstanding. During our first week back, we have completed lot of activities and made a start on our new topic, Identity. Below you can find out what we've been up to!

Come and See

Domestic Church topic - 'Loving'

Over the past week, we have been exploring what it means to love someone and we have talked about what unconditional love means. In partners, we used the computers to produce a montage of photos and words that sum up what unconditional love means to us.

We have since moved on to the Reveal part of our topic, where we have spent lots of time looking at scripture which shows how God loves us unconditinally. We spent quite a bit of time looking at the parable of The Prodigal Son, which is a story Jesus told His followers to encourage them to be more forgiving and accepting of those who made mistakes. We now have a much better understanding of God's unconditional love for us and the many ways it shapes our lives through our words and actions.

We have also reinforced this message through our use of daily collective worship in class. 

Reflection Area

As the children are new to Year 6, they will clearly have some worries and anxieties. With this in mind, we have created a reflection area for the children to go to if they feel the need. In the reflection area, the children are encouraged to take part in some breathing exercises, write a prayer and stick  it on our prayer wall, make a note in our anxiety journal of anything that is worrying them and they have a selection of religious stories, prayers and doodle books that they can peruse at their leisure. I am pleased to say that the reflection area is being used and the children have been very interested in using it (the comfy cushions, rug and nice footstool help!) Below you can see a few photographs of it in use. Throughout the year, we will be using this area to host some of our collective worship sessions as it is a very calming and spiritual area. 

Happy, Healthy Me!

This year, we are introducing a new PSHE curriculum to St Mary's, which incorporates lots of different elements of children's Personal, Social and Health Education. Our new curriculum includes things such as RSE, road safety, stranger danger, mental health, managing money, business and enterprise and much more. Intertwined throughout the curriculum are our school's core values and our country's British Values. Our first activity as a new Year 6 class was to create a set of class rules. We followed a democratic approach and every child was asked to suggest rules that thought should be kept (by children and staff) to make sure our classroom was a safe and happy place - just like our school. The children's ideas were collated and we came up with a set of rules which everyone signed. 

To fit in with this, we looked at rules in general, why we need them and what would happen in society if rules did not exist. We thought about what we could do if we didn't agree with a school rule (some of us thought the best thing to do was protest- bit harsh!) Below you can see a few photographs of this activity, where we discussed the importance of Democracy and The Rule Of Law.