Week 2 of remote learning has built upon the successes and solutions discovered in week 1. The children have adapted marvellously and are approaching levels of mastery as they get to grips with their home learning devices and the range of softwares and websites they have been tasked with getting used to .

Year 6 have completed their first reading text of the half term – delivered through MyOn to ensure all children have access to the text – and have learned a lot about the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina through the eyes of a fictional young boy in Storm of the Century: A Hurricane Katrina Story. This half text/half graphic novel text really engaged and enthused the children to read on and learn more about the fates of the characters.

To flex their writing muscles, Year 6 have been looking at pieces of writing designed to persuade the reader. They started out by thinking about creating a leaflet for a fictional zoo that Sir David Attenborough himself wanted to sponsor. They then moved on to the very different task of creating an advertisement to try and attract people to Delightful Dagenham. They came away from the sessions understanding more about persuasive language and they further understood the power of rhetorical questions and their usefulness in this style of writing.

Ratio and proportion have been occupying the maths parts of the Year 6 brains and they have really got to grips with the idea of part-whole models and the idea of shares of a whole. They are still getting to grips of being able to use this information to solve various scenarios and problems but they will be looking at deploying their knowledge in more practical ways next week.

In the afternoon, the Year 5 & 6 groups have come together to discover and learn about the water cycle. They have shown great aptitude at understanding the key vocabulary associated with the process and were delighted/disgusted in equal measure to find out that they are drinking the same water as the dinosaurs were millions of years ago!