Amethyst Class

Welcome to Amethyst Class!
I am Miss Oldroyd and I will be your child's class teacher.

Spring 2

Please find attached information about what your children will be learning during this half term. Check this page weekly as I will post lots of lovely photographs and messages about what your children have been learning.

Tuesday 4th March
Today we had a visit for Thrills and Skills. We took part in a full day course about how to provide emergency first aid. This involved how to identify if someone is injured and how we can help them. We also learned about the importance of CPR and how to perform this. Everyone in Year 6 now has an official qualification in emergency first aid and are fire wardens. It was a very informative day!

Spring 1

Please find attached information about what your children will be learning during this half term. Check this page weekly as I will post lots of lovely photographs and messages about what your children have been learning.

Tuesday 11th February
Today we joined the thousands of other people around the UK to celebrate Safer Internet Day in school with the theme ‘Too good to be true? Protecting yourselves and others from scamsonline.’ Our assembly was based around this and children took place in a BBC Live lesson. We then had the opportunity to take part in a competition to design an internet safety poster, the winners will be announced on Friday in assembly.
 

Tuesday 11th February

This evening the Y6 netball team represented the school in two games at the Beacon of Light. They drew the first game 1-1 and they won their second game 5-2. They played excellently and they were super representatives for Hetton Primary.

Friday 7th February

Today we took part in NSPCC Number Day. We all wore different numbers on our tops to school and we took place in a number challenge where we had to use our super calculation skills to help unravel the mystery.

Tuesday 4th February

This evening the Y6 netball team represented the school in a game at the Beacon of Light. They came away with a 3-1 victory! Well done Y6.

Monday 3rd March
Today we took part in the Secret Bunker Challenge with a box of WW2 artefacts we borrowed from the Discovery Museum. We learned all about Kenton Secret Bunker in Newcastle. This was where all of the RAF for the North East, Scotland and Northern Ireland were commanded during WW2. We learned about the jobs they did inside the bunker and how important they were in helping save lives. One of the activities we took part in was a plotting activity where someone had to act as the commander whilst the others used plotting sticks to move the enemy aircraft and friendly aircraft around the map following the commanders instructions. We learned that it was vital to stay calm as any mistakes could cost lives. 

Other activities we took part in was learning how to plot enemy and friendly aircrafts,

examining real artefacts from WW2, exploring maps to find there bombs had dropped,

learning morse code and identifying different types of British and German planes.

I’m sure your children will be able to tell you all about what they’ve been doing today!

Friday 31st January

Today Year 6 visited our new school fire pit for the first time during opal time.
We toasted marshmallows which was very fun!

Thursday 30th January

This afternoon we talked about how different charities around the world are helping people less fortunate than us. We were then given time to research a charity of our choice and create a poster all about the charity to inform people about it.

Tuesday 28th January

Tonight our Year 5/6 netball team represented the school in 3 matches at the Beacon of Light. They played very well and received lots of compliments about their sportmanship and their behaviour during the games. We are very proud of them.

Thursday 23rd January

In Science we continued our learning on evolution and inheritance. Today we focused on adaptation and how certain animals have adapted to survive in their environment. We then designed our own creatures and labelled them to explain how they had adapted to live in a certain place. Below are two examples of our work.

Tuesday 21st January

Today in English we took part in a drama activity. We had to create a missing scene from our class novel, The invention of Hugo Cabret. In this we had to think about how the characters Hugo and Uncle Claude would interact with each other. We then worked in small groups to create our drama pieces, we had to direct and video them ourselves.

Friday 17th January

This half term we are studying evolution and inheritance in Science. Today we took part in an activity to develop our understanding. We had to roll the dice to see whether our child would inherit characteristics from their mother or father. This created our child which we then compared to others in the class. We discussed how different children had inherited different characteristics which made them look different.

Wednesday 15th January

In PSHE we are learning about dreams and goals this half term. Today we discussed what our goals are for this year and how we can achieve them. We talked about the learning steps and came up with our own individual steps to help us reach our goals.

Friday 10th January

Today we started our new topic in Science, evolution and inheritance. We began this by looking at the Mr Men and Little Miss characters. We discussed how all of the characters had different key characteristics and used this to create our own characters and what they would look like if they reproduced. We had to annotate which characteristics our offspring had inherited from each parent. Look below to see some examples of our work.

Autumn 2

Please find attached information about what your children will be learning during this half term. Check this page weekly as I will post lots of lovely photographs and messages about what your children have been learning.

Friday 20th December

This afternoon we took part in a reindeer run to raise money for St Cuthbert's Hospice. As a school we raised a lot of money for such an important cause. 

Thursday 19th December

This afternoon was our Christmas party. The children all looked great in their party clothes, we danced and played a range of different games. A wonderful end to the autumn term in school. We hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and we'll see you back in January 2025.

Wednesday 18th December

Today we had a very special treat (oh yes we did!) The whole school watched the pantomime Beauty and the Beast, it was very funny and we laughed a lot. Thank you to the company for visiting our school and helping to spread festive cheer!

Friday 13th December

This week in English we have been researching an endangered animal of our own choice to write a non-chronological report about. I was super impressed with the detail that the children put into their work and can't wait to read their final reports that they are writing and presenting today.

Thursday 12th December

Today was Christmas jumper day and Christmas dinner!

Thank you to Lisa and all of the kitchen staff for making us such a lovely meal.

Wednesday 11th December

This afternoon we took part in a project with Year 3. We looked at the paralympian Ellie Simmonds and explored why she was an inspirational person and what her achievements have been in her life. We then worked in groups to create posters all about Ellie.

Monday 9th December

This afternoon we researched different countries in North America. We looked at different human and physical features of our chosen country and then created our own non-chronological reports about our country. Take a look at some of our amazing work.

Wednesday 4th December

Today we analysed what made an effective non-chronological report. We identified the features and looked at a range of examples discussing preferences and why we liked certain reports. We will be using these to help when we write our own non-chronological reports about endangered animals in English next week.

Monday 2nd December

Today we worked with Y3 on descriptive writing. We read the beginning of the story ‘The Journey’ and used this as a hook for our writing. We had to imagine and write a description of where we would end up if we went through the red door. We then input our writing into AI and it created a pictorial representation of our writing. We think the pictures turned out amazing!

Friday 29th November

This morning, some lucky children in Year 6 took part in an art workshop with a local artist. She worked with us to design a wildlife mural for the new building housing development in Moorsley. Our designs will cover the wall where the houses are being built behind.

Friday 29th November

Year 6's behaviour and attitude towards learning has been fantastic this week!

As a little reward we had doughnuts in class this morning.

Monday 25th November

Last week we analysed the poem ‘The Tyger’ by William Blake. We discussed the themes of this poem and the key features. We then worked in small groups to write a stanza for a class poem about orangutans. Read our class poem below.

Thursday 21st November

Today we took part in a workshop with the NSPCC. We discussed which trusted adults we could speak to if we have any concerns and identified different types of abuse. Year 6 were very mature and asked some insightful questions. 

Wednesday 20th November

This morning we looked at using commas, dashes and brackets to parenthesise. We were given chopped up sentences and had to work out what the main clause was, what the embedded clause was and which punctuation we needed to help the sentence make sense. We started with sensible sentences and then made some silly ones too.

Friday 15th November

Today we celebrated Children in Need. We wore non uniform and took part in a game of sponsored bingo (this was not your ordinary game of bingo, it involved lots of songs and dancing!) As a school we raised over £800!

Tuesday 12th November

Today we took part in Odd Socks Day as part of our Anti-Bullying week celebrations. The theme this year is ‘Choose Respect’, we talked about how we can show respect to others and ourselves.

Thursday 7th November

Today was Outdoor Classroom Day. We had the most amazing day.
Watch our video below to see what we got up to.

Wednesday 6th November

This afternoon we were given a box of components to see if we could make different types of circuits. We were given time to investigate to see what we could discover.

Monday 4th November

Today we took part in a drama activity where we had to pretend we were poor farmers and a predator had arrived and was killing our livestock. We had to work together to decide how we would tackle this issue and then held a debate to discuss our ideas. We ended with a vote to decide what our next steps would be. We had no idea what the predator was and at the end of the session we found out it was an endangered tiger, lots of our opinions changed on what we should do once we knew this.

Autumn 1

Wednesday 23rd October 

This afternoon was our final lesson in our RE topic for this half term. Our key question we needed to answer was ‘Are Science and Faith compatible or are they in conflict?’ We used all of our learning and discussions we’ve had this term to create a piece of artwork to represent our responses to this question. 

Friday 18th October 

We have almost finished our class text ‘Letters from the Lighthouse’. In todays chapter we revealed some key events that helped us to make connections between different characters in the story. We used this information to create mind maps to demonstrate our understanding of how all of the characters are interlinked.

Friday 18th October 

Today we helped to raise awareness for Breast Cancer.

We wore pink to school to show our support.

Thursday 17th October

Tonight our new Year 5/6 football team represented the school in three football matches. They got better with each match and were a credit to our school

Thursday 10th October 

Today was World Mental Health Day - we wore yellow to show our support for this. We also took part in a zoom with the author A.F.Steadman who introduced us to her books the Skandar Series. The session was very interactive and we spent time creating our own unicorns and their traits. We’ve asked Mrs Hill to buy us this series for the classroom!

Thursday 3rd October

Tonight our new Year 5/6 football team represented the school in two football matches. They worked extremely well together as a team and showed wonderful sportmanship. Well done! 

Wednesday 2nd October

Today we took part in a Science investigation linked to our heart rate.

Monday 30th October

In English this morning we looked at the next section of our story. We had to infer what we thought was happening at the different points and think about the actions the characters were doing and record adverbs linked to these actions. Later in the week we will be using these to write our own playscripts.

Friday 27th September

Today we dressed in green in support of MacMillan. We also took part in an art workshop where we looked at various techniques including embossing and printing. The art we created all linked to our local area with a focus on coal mining and Houghton Feast.

Thursday 26th September

In History this afternoon we took part in a drama activity. We each picked a character card and had to read about how our character felt about the new railways being built. We then moved around the room to hear other people's views about them and share ours. We looked at positives and negatives of the railways and the impact that they had during the Victorian era.

Monday 23rd September

Today we explored tones and tints in painting, we looked at how adding black and white paint to our colours helped us to achieve lots of different shades and what these would be useful for.

Thursday 19th September

Today we have been recapping our knowledge of rounding numbers and extending this to learn how to round any integer. We started by learning the song 'We will round you' and then had some time to practice rounding to the nearest ten, hundred and thousand.

Wednesday 18th September

This morning we took part in a drama activity. When we entered the classroom we found ourselves on a boat travelling to a new country on our own. We needed to think about how the character would be feeling and how they would react during this journey. We then thought about how their emotions and actions would change at different points, finishing with arriving at our new country and finally feeling safe. It was a great lesson and the children had some very mature responses.

Monday 16th September

This morning a group of very brave Year 6's stood up in front of the whole school during assembly to read their Mini SLT speeches. They explained why they believed they were good role models and deserved to represent our school. The rest of the school then voted for who they thought it should be, well done to the children involved. We're very proud of you.

Thursday 12th September

This afternoon we visited our library in school for the first time. We really enjoyed looking through the books and seeing all the different genres that are available. Next week the children should be receiving their library cards, which means they will be able to take books home to read. 

Tuesday 10th September

Well done on a great first day back Year 6. We have been so impressed with your behaviour and attitudes to learning, keep it up. We started our English text today, 'The Arrival' which is a powerful picture book with no words at all. This means the children will have to use their inference skills to decide what they think is happening throughout the text and the key message it sends. 

Monday 9th September

Welcome to Year 6! I hope you've all had a lovely relaxing summer holidays and are ready to tackle the year ahead. You're going to have such a great year and I know you are all going to be super role models for the rest of the school.