F1 Jaguar Club

The three teams have been working each week after school preparing for the F1 Jaguar reginal finals. The children had to design, make, assemble, test and race their cars at the reginal heats. They also had to prepare a presentation about their work. In order to gain sponsorship the children wrote to local businesses and were then able to buy their own merchandise with their very own logo’s on.

All three teams did exceptionally well. Winning awards across all categories. Two of our teams were extremely successful and are heading to the National championships in Leeds!

Year 6 Languages

Year 6 have been using ‘World of Languages, Languages of The World’ resources to discover the fascinating etymology of our days of the week. Children compared our days of the week to French and German days, looking for similarities and differences. We explored and investigated the links between Norse and Roman Gods and thought about the connections between languages throughout the world. Children loved looking for clues and cracking codes in order to understand other languages as well as finding out about how many different languages are spoken amongst the year group!

Inspired by the rest of the school’s Curriculum Day, we also had our very own Year 6 Art Challenge linking to Belgian artist Ben Heine’s pencil versus camera work and using the base of the Eiffel Tower as a starting point. It was great to see the creativity of the children and see them engage so well with this task.

Science Assembly

Today we had a visit from Mad Scientist, Dr D.N.A. who talked to us about various inventors and different types of forces. We watched and took part in air pressure experiments using a Bernoulli balloon. We blew up a balloon with only one puff! We also watched as Dr. D.N.A controlled a huge inflatable football in the air with her industrial ‘hair dryer’! We ended our science show by learning about static electricity. We used a Van de Graaff generator to create static energy. We even managed to create sparks and pass on static electricity from one person to another!

Creation and Science

Creation and Science: Conflicting or Complementary? Year 6 have been exploring this ‘Big Question’ in RE and have had some very insightful and mature conversations in response to it. Children have discussed the Christian story of creation in Genesis as well as The Big Bang and Evolution theories and thought critically about how the two can be both in conflict and complement one another. Using topic-specific vocabulary, they have produced some high-quality pieces of work to visually represent the main ideas of both religious and scientific perspectives. Children have demonstrated great reflection skills whilst also considering their own thoughts and beliefs.

Local Author Visit

To mark the end of world book week, Miss Hicks organised for local author, Nigel Lungenmuss-Ward, to join our school for the day. He visited all of the classrooms today, to read his story and inspire others to write their own book. Nigel’s books: Freddie’s Impossible Dream and What’s That? were illustrated by his son Robbie, who was 8 years-old when he drew the pictures for their first book. The books are about the power of imagination, chasing your dreams and never giving up.

A big thank you to Nigel Lungenmuss-Ward for joining us. You can find out more about his books on his website: www.thatbookguy.co.uk/books

Y6 Mathematics Challenge

We sent four of our young mathematicians to represent Queen’s Hill at a county wide mathematics challenge, held at Norwich School.

They were given a set of letters and numbers and worked through the ‘equations’ allocating the letters values. They then attempted to make the total indicated using six values provided while only using the four operations. The final challenge was to solve questions to test their lateral thinking and problem solving.

All four of them worked extremely hard and represented Queen’s Hill with pride – we are so proud of them!

The Arrival by Shaun Tan

This week, Year 6 started their English unit based on the graphic novel, ‘The Arrival’ by Shaun Tan. A graphic novel is a story without words and it can still be just as powerful and detailed. We discussed how every illustration is included for a reason and that if you look very closely you gather a huge amount of information from a single image.

‘The Arrival’ is a migrant story. A man leaves his wife and child in a poor town, hoping for better opportunities in an unfamiliar country on the other side of the sea. He eventually finds himself in a mysterious city of different traditions, strange animals, unusual drifting objects and foreign languages. With only a suitcase and a little money, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of employment. He is helped along the way by supportive strangers, each carrying the weight of their own past: stories of struggle and survival in a world of upheaval and hope.

Our Topic this term is ‘Tolerance’ and already Year 6 have been able to identify some of the key themes of the book as respect, diversity and multiculturalism. We look forward to seeing the work that the children will produce based on this powerful story.