We had a great time with Mamta from Dorset Cricket Board who led a cricket session for us. She is a professional cricketer who plays for Dorset CC and taught us all about the correct grip for a bat and then developed our batting skills (and our fielding skills too as we ran around after our batters returning the balls!). 

We had a fantastic time on our spring walk. Walking through the local area, we were spotting signs of spring, but were seeing more of the impact of the very wet winter. We met up with our buddies to help them around their walk too so enjoyed sharing our wisdom with them. Thank you to the Casely family for leading our walk and for all of our adult helpers too!

We had an amazing World Book Day! We created newspaper articles which were inspired by our favourite stories as we reported on the events of the book. Keep an eye out for these around school over the next week or so!

In the afternoon, we enjoyed reading to our buddies in Hedgehogs and helping them to love reading. 

This half term in science, we're learning about how technology has changed over time. As part of this, we've been exploring technology which we may no longer see such as VHS players, floppy discs and rotary phones. We then thought about the first longer-distance communication which led us to telegraph machines and morse code. We created switches to allow us to control a telegraph using foil, pegs, paper clips and split pins! 

In our most recent theme day, we were exploring the arts. We loved the Bubble Bach concert before we then explored our drama skills by acting out elements linked to the Black Death, including learning more about the origin of famous nursery rhymes. During the afternoon, we created artwork which reflected a piece of music and came up with a whole variety of different outcomes!

We had a great time finishing our music unit all around composition. We explored musical notation, ensured we could identify different notes then used the glockenspiels to compose our own 8-note piece. 

We hugely enjoyed our maths day today as we took the chance to apply our understanding of maths to different areas of problem solving. We started by exploring the 'magic square' investigation which, whilst seeming very simple, had a lot of maths underpinning it, including the use of odd/even numbers and algebra. We then explored different investigations, including whether the Earth's population would fit on the Isle of Wight, whether all humans stood on each others shoulders would reach the moon, and whether we'd reach around the Earth if we all held hands! We then explored how to make 100 using 4 related numbers before finishing the day with some tessellation. Ask your child about what they were able to find out!! 

We really enjoyed being joined by Jean from Galliford Try who supported us in some team building activities. Once we had a chance to try on the PPE, we were building structures out of paper straws and sellopape. We were very impressed with the creations, including a slightly-wonky rocket, house, raft, bridge and prison cell!  

Year 6 loved learning about the refraction of light in science this week. We tried out different experiments to explore this, including 'breaking' a pencil in water and a disappearing penny! We then explained how light changes direction when it changes medium and how this tricks the eye. 

In our second computing lesson, we learned about how to add motors to a Crumble system. We learned about how to carefully connect them and then used our percentages knowledge to create movement. We then took on the challenge to create a dancing man with the motor making a dancer move back and forth, with sparkles adding disco lights!!

We had a great evening at the Sherborne area hockey tournament (even if it was nearly below zero!). We haven't played a lot of hockey this year so we were really pleased to see how well our players worked together as a team, and with their dribbling and passing skills. 

We hugely enjoyed our visit from the Dogs Trust as we completed a doggy detectives session to find out who was responsible for a child being attacked by a dog. We thought about that actions that were carried out to the dogs and how this led to them being provoked. We look forward to putting our learning into practice!

In our first computing lesson this half term, we started to learn about how to use Crumble controllers. We had to follow instructions carefully to ensuring the wiring was correct before then starting to code. We use 'do forever' and 'wait' commands to ensure that our LEDs did not just consistently light up, with many children managing to make a 'police' light with alternating blue and red lights. 

We loved creating a Bolognese sauce to end our DT work around adapting a recipe. We created eye-catching labels to stick to our jars and hope the children enjoyed eating them for dinner! 

We were delighted to have Nick from Bugfest in school recently as he supported Y6 in their learning about evolution, inheritance and adaptation. The children had a chance to hold a variety of minibeasts and creatures, including snails, millipedes and stick insects.