Year 6
In our History lesson this week, we learnt about how Adolf Hitler came into power and what he did when he had power in Germany in the mid 1930s. We learnt that Hitler believed that war was the only way to gain the necessary 'Lebensraum' (living space) for the German race to expand. He secretly began to rebuild the army. Shortly after, Germany annexed Austria followed by Czechoslovakia and Poland, which led Britain to declare was on Germany in 1939.
We learnt about the Battle of the Atlantic, which was the longest running military campaign, running from 1939 to 1945. We found that the aim of this battle was to gain control over goods that were transported across the Atlantic ocean. We learnt about how the German U-Boats (known as the Wolf Pack) hunted to intercept the goods being transported by cargo ships that were protected by Naval Destroyers with the use of submarines (UNCRC Article 38 Protection in war).
Our main activity was to look at an interview transcript (a source) from a crew member of a Destroyer during the Battle of the Atlantic. We read and highlighted how the U-Boats attacks impacted on the British navy both physically and psychologically (UNCRC Article 24 Health including physical and mental health).
PSHE - Mental Health Week - Happiness
In our PSHE lesson this week, for Mental Health Week, we discussed what happiness meant. We discussed the things that make us happy and shared some of these in our classes. We discussed how important it is to be happy and to show happiness for our mental health referring to Global Goal 3 - Good Health and Wellbeing. We then wrote two sentences, answering the questions: What is happiness? and What makes you happy? We picked out leaf templates and wrote our answers on them. Below you can see the happiness tree we created in Year 6.
Happiness Poems
As part of Mental Health Week, we thought about what makes us happy. After completing a mindfulness activity, which calmed us and left us open to learn, we thought about what makes us happy and wrote our ideas on whiteboards before sharing them with each other (UNCRC article 13: Sharing thoughts freely). We then listened to a happy piece of music and added any happy thoughts that came to mind whilst we listened. We looked at a poem called 'When I Heard the Music', focusing on the structure and poetic devices used.
Once we had these happy moments written, we thought about structuring our poems. We wrote three stanzas, which each began with the opening line "When I heard the music - ". As poems have no rules, we allowed our ideas to flow and to be inspired by the happiness we felt. It was lovely to see how each of our poems were unique and special to us. This links nicely to Article 24 of the UNCRC: Health as we need to ensure our Mental Health is looked after as well as our physical. This activity allowed us to really think about ways in which we can find happiness and allowed us to be grateful for the many things that make us happy.
Science - Solubility
Caring on with our "States of Matter" topic in science, we tested 8 different substances to see how soluble they were. As we were changing the substances, we kept all other variables the same to ensure a fair test. We used the same amount of water, same temperature of the water and same amount of the substance to mix in. This showed us how soluble the item really was.
The eight substances we tested were:
- flour
- oats
- Vitamin tablets
- cocoa powder
- coffee
- oil
- salt
- baking powder
“Would different temperatures of water affect how quickly something dissolves because if you think about making coffee, you use boiling water.” Sam, Defiants
“I was most surprised by the vitamin tablet as it seemed very solid but created a lot of bubbles when dropped in the water. Although it did not fully dissolve in the time given, I can predict that, with more time, it would have completely gone so believe it to be soluble.” - Leo, Defiants.
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