This is my final post with prior work and it is some the last academic year where I taught Year 6.
1. Transition Day
Something I do on transition day is looking at what makes an outstanding pupil and what makes an outstanding teacher. The pupil one we do as a whole class and it really puts down the expectations early, and it all comes from the children so they show a good understanding of what they need to do to be the best that they can be. For the outstanding teacher, the children break into groups and come up with their own ideas and then they present this to the class. This gives me a chance to look at how pupils work together in groups and also lets me know what the children expect of me.
Also on transition day, I like the children to take part in a project that will all come together to make some sort of big piece of art. In previous years we've made truncated tetrahedrons that have combined to make large icosahedrons and we've designed bunting. I like to put whatever we've done in display when the children come back. Last year I saw these on Pinterest and decided to do handprints, combining them and displaying them outside my classroom. I've done this again for this year.
2. Classroom Setup
Just a few pictures showing the displays I started with this year. I had my reading corner again, but it became a bit smaller (which I've rectified this year). I had science displayed over two boards with a workstation area. The workstation had a mini experiment for children to do (in this case testing which materials conducted electricity).
3. Loop the Loop Topic Launch
I designed my classroom door as a theme park entrance. I used large pieces of card to do this and the idea was taken from the Disney Village in Paris.
I wanted my topic display to look like a riverr apids ride. The topic was called Loop the Loop and it looked at theme parks and rides. The children really enjoyed the topic and we got some great writing out of them.
My HLTA created a window silhouette of a theme park. This looked great from both the outside and the inside.
4. Rollercoaster Design
I've mentioned previously 'launching' topics. We try to choose topics that will interest and enthuse the children and we use the first day of each term to launch our topics. We do this with an activity that excites the children for the topic. For Loop the Loop, the children made their own paper rollercoasters. I found templates online, photocopied lots of different parts and then children worked in groups to build these rollercoasters that took a marble from the top to the bottom. The children measured, folded, scored, cut and really got creative. Each group even managed to get a loop the loop to work. There was a lot of testing and readjusting but every single one worked in the end.
5. Working in the Dark Vocabulary Building
My first English lesson of the year was for a unit where children would write a story based in an abandoned theme park. To build vocabulary, I completely darkened my classroom (black sugar paper on every window) and I had printed some poster sized images of theme parks that had been left to overgrow and were no longer in use. Children used torches to move around the room to look at the images and they used thesauruses to find higher level vocabulary for the feelings and observations that they'd made. These filtered well into the work that the children produced at the end of the unit. At the end of the year, the children told me that this had been their favourite lesson - I'm going to try to not start on such a high this year!
6. Rollercoaster Guides
Another piece of writing we did was an information guide about a rollercoaster. Children had to research their own rollercoaster (they could choose any in the world) and then they had to set it out for a children's book on rollercoasters. They didn't write a massive amount (they were restricted to one A3 page) but the writing they produced was accurate and used good vocabulary and a range of punctuation.
7. Volcano Vocab Gameshow
One of the areas that the children were struggling with was understanding higher level vocabulary. We put together a gameshow type lesson where children were in teams and had to make their way up the volcano. I had a set of question cards and there were a few different elements to the game. We had a coloured die to determine the type of question, a numbered die to determine spaces to move and had coloured spaces with rules. The children loved the gameshow element and the new words we encountered were used in later lessons, initially as reminders by me but then in children's work.
8. Building Bridges
Following the Key Stage 2 Assessments, I set the class a task of building a bridge that met a design specification. It had to span a certain width, a car had to be able to get across without falling off and it had to hold a certain weight. We tested each bridge, recording the results.
So that's my selection of work from the last five years. I'll now move onto this year with shorter but regular posts.
Signing off!
The Yorkshire Teacher
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