Sharks

Welcome to the Sharks Class page!
 
Here, you can find out about some of the things we have been learning recently as we are growing and learning together with God.  
 
This summer, Sharks are celebrating DIVERSITY as our new topic.  This means we can learn about lots of different people, places and things!  Here, you can access our Summer Term Newsletter, our Class Timetable and our current Home Learning Projects.
Year 6 Leavers
 
Our lovely leavers have had a busy last couple of weeks full of fun events to help them celebrate their time at Fritwell and wish them well as they move on to new adventures!
 
Highlights have included the flour race on Sports Day, complete with aprons, chef's hats and mixing bowls full of flour (well, they were full of flour before the flour ended up all over Year 6!); the leavers trip to Hill End, where the children took part in lots of active team-building challenges; the Year 6 BBQ and the leavers service.
 
We have loved growing and learning together over the last few years and are so proud of our leavers, who we know are ready for all the opportunities and challenges ahead of them at secondary school and in the future.  Good luck Year 6!
Forest School
Sharks enjoyed their Forest School sessions with Mr 'Pebble' in July.  They used natural resources to create art work representing their ideal holiday, and in the second week to create a 'family' tree using leaf self-portraits.  Mr Pemble introduced the concept of 'autonomy' so Sharks had to make their own decisions about groups and organise themselves for their learning.
 
The work they had done on natural art with Mr Pemble tied in brilliantly with our whole school art project, creating work in the style of artist Andy Goldsworthy.
Sports Day: Friday 2nd July 2021
 
We enjoyed a fantastic week of sports as we held heats to find out the winners of our field events and the egg and spoon race.  Sports day itself was a fantastic day of races, including firm favourites the three-legged race, the Year 5 obstacle race and the Year 6 flour race, complete with aprons, chef's hats and mixing bowls.
 
The whole class showed many of our school values throughout the day: respect and compassion in their sporting attitudes, community, citizenship and service cheering each other on, and personal success with humility for our winners and those who achieved personal bests!
 
Thank you FoFS for your kind donation which we used to buy Gratitude Journals for every Shark.  These lovely journals give us a place to enjoy some mindful colouring, giving us a brain break from our busy days of learning.  They also help us to build the attitude of gratitude, so that we focus on the positive moments from our day: this was one of the strategies that the Activators recommended for building positive mental health and we enjoy our daily reflection.
Leavers 2021!  The Summer Term is always an exciting time for our Year 6s as they start to think about the transition to secondary school, and ordering their leavers tops is a great way to celebrate this.  Luckily, we still have a term of learning, fun and friendship together before our Year 6 Sharks migrate to waters new!

English

Sharks started reading the picture book Malala's Magic Pencil, which introduced us to Malala and the impact she has had on campaigning for girls' education in Pakistan and around the world.  We wanted to find out more about Malala's life, so read extracts from her autobiography, I Am Malala, and we found out what it was like living under Taliban rule and how Malala had the strength to stand up to the men who were telling her she could not go to school.  We learnt a lot about the lives of people living in Pakistan and it made us appreciate some of the rights we take for granted in our own lives.

We then read Blue is the Proudest Colour about a girl wearing hijab to school for the first time.  We enjoyed a drama lesson which helped us to think about the possible motivation behind the way some of the characters acted; this helped us to appreciate the importance of our school value of Respect and Compassion.

We were visited by the Calipha Scheherezade who asked us for stories she could tell to her husband the Caliph.  We gave her the Iraqui story, The Word of Power, which we had read in class and then wrote our own versions of another story, The Fisherman and the Genie, to send to her.

At the end of term, all of Sharks entered one of their pieces of writing from this year in the Fonetti Young Author's competition.  We are super proud of Evie who received a Highly Commended mention for her short story, and Katie for winning the poetry competition!  Well done for your great writing this year everyone in Sharks!

Maths

We have been consolidating our understanding of place value this term, building confidence exchanging between place value columns and partitioning large numbers and decimals in different ways.  We have been using a range of equipment to help us demonstrate our understanding, including making our own ‘decimal dienes’ where we had to cut a cube into ten ‘sheets’ to make tenths, and then cut each tenth into ten little ‘sticks’ to make hundredths, and then each hundredth into ten tiny ‘dots’ to make thousandths!  We had to use our resilience when cutting up these fiddly little pieces of card, but this has helped us to visualise what decimal place value means, and why 0.1 is greater than 0.099!

In the second half of term we have continued to build upon this understanding of place value, including reading scales to help us calculate with measures and graphs; we have also learnt how to convert between fractions and decimals.

When we were confident with fractions and decimals we then learnt about percentages so we can now convert between all three FDP!  We finished the year by working on time, including converting between units of time and reading timetables.  We even calculated how many days we have to wait until Christmas!

PE

In PE we loved our first lesson playing Rounders, where lots of children showed our school value of Personal Success with Humility when they discovered that they were better at batting than they anticipated.  We were a bit disappointed when our second Rounders lesson on developing our fielding skills was rained off… until we realised we could hold a Benchball tournament instead!  Our skilled defenders showed great Confidence, Self-belief and Endurance in this fast-paced game!

 

One of the highlights of the term have been our Mental Health sessions with the Oxford Activators.  In these sessions we get to do a half hour of physical activity - Getting Active being of the Five Ways to Wellbeing - and then we have had a classroom session learning about different aspects of positive mental health, such as strategies to cope with stress and anxiety, setting goals and being resilient.

Art
 
Sharks are passionate about protecting our environment, so really enjoyed the first step in the Bicester Art Festival project making clay tiles to raise awareness of coral bleaching caused by global warming.  The children were inspired in their unique coral designs by Miss Price's scuba diving videos... featuring some super sharks!

RE

As part of our RE unit, ‘Does belief in Akhirah (life after death) help Muslims lead good lives?’ we have started considering what we mean by ‘right’  and ‘wrong’ and thinking about the consequences of our actions.  We have revised what we know about The Five Pillars of Islam and understand that the Koran gives Muslims instructions on how to live a good life.  In groups we created posters to share our research on Muslim beliefs about family, women, food and education.  We finished the unit by reflecting on what Heaven means to us.

Topic

As part of our topic work on the theme of Diversity, we have learnt about the life of Muhammad, pbuh, and how he founded the Muslim religion.  We found out about the struggle for power following Muhammed’s death and voted on who we thought the next Caliph should be. We have also played a trading game to help us understand The Silk Road – an important trade route that influenced the location of the founding of Baghdad.  Finally, we found out about the importance of the location and building of Baghdad; what we learnt about the importance of a water source and land for farming inspired lots of our homework 'Town Planner' projects.

Science

In Science we are continuing with the unit on Electrical Circuits which we started during the Spring lockdown.  Now we are back in school, we are enjoying practical Science lessons, using our understanding of circuit diagram symbols to help us construct circuits, and investigating the effect of increasing the voltage of the battery on the brightness of the bulb… including what happens when a bulb is ‘blown.’

We then moved on to our new topic of Light, using human models to demonstrate how light reflects of an object into our eye to helps us see, and investigating shadows.

Harvest
 
As Summer turns to Autumn and it is Harvest time, Sharks listened to The Byrds' song Turn, Turn, Turn. In our Science lessons we have learnt about the movement of the Earth through space and we wanted to explain to everyone how this movement causes the different seasons which lead to the Harvest.
 
Please click on the link below.