Oaks Class is our Year 5 / 6 class, taught by Miss Smith and supported by Miss Giordano. 

We are a bunch of enthusiastic learners, who strive to set an exceptional example around school for the younger children in terms of behaviour, following school rules and upholding our values of respect, kindness, aspiration, resilience and community. 

In Year 6, we are assigned buddies from the Reception class, Pines, helping and supporting them on the playground and in the dinner hall to become confident and independent. We are permitted to sit on benches in assemblies and are often called upon to help out with jobs around school. 

We work collaboratively across the curriculum to help our learning to become embeded and to facilitate rich creative and academic dialogue. 

AUTUMN 1: WAR TORN

We started our new school year off with our residential to Peat Rigg. We made ourselves and our teachers incredibly proud by showing excellent teamwork, determination and bravery. 

We read the novel, When the Sky Falls by Phil Earle, and were hooked on every word! It's full of exciting cliff-hangers! Our writing this half term was based on the picture book, Rose Blanche by Roberto Innocenti and Ian McEwan. We focused on our handwriting, presentation and a range of grammatical structures to help us to become prolific and fluent writers. 

AUTUMN 2: SNOW & ICE

After watching The Frozen Planet documentary, we learned about climate change and its effects on the Antarctic tundra, figuring out what we can do to help and writing a formal letter to our Prime Minister! We explored biomes and climate zones and the different vegetation found in them and read Sky Song by Abi Elphinstone as a class. We produced some fantastic writing based on the short film, Alma. We designed and made our own Arctic Animal soft toys from scrap materials ansd sold them at the Christmas Fair!

SPRING 1: FIRE-BREATHERS

This half term was all about DRAGONS! Using the beautifully illustrated book, Tell Me A Dragon by Jackie Morris as inspiration, we designed our own dragons and wrote prose about them. We worked incredibly hard to produce some fabulous balanced arguments around the subject of whether dragons ever really existed after watching Animal Planet's documentary. We looked at evolution and inheritance and Charles Darwin's contribution to what we know now, and really enjoyed reading Darwin's Dragons by Lindsay Galvin.

SPRING 2: OFF TO THE COAST

We had a fabulous trip to Whitby this half term where we did some field work to find out why people chose to live at the coast despite coastal erosion and tourism. We asked the people of Whitby some questions, completed a field sketch and map of the beach areas, and conducted some litter picking. We also had a cheeky ice cream! We did some fantastic writing based on the picture book Flotsam by David Weisner where we wrote in role from different points of view, some of us choosing to write as the camera!

SUMMER 1: EMPERORS & EMPIRES