Prep | Year 6 News

English

Year Six have begun to investigate poetry this term. We looked at the many types of poetic devices including metaphors, similes, personification, alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia. In addition, boys are currently attempting to write their own poetry. The challenge is to write a poem that has a hidden meaning. Perhaps a poem about rain is actually about emotions or a poem about trees is actually about power struggles.

Relatives Relate

Unbeknownst to us,
Power lays asleep, waiting to pounce, to get one final meal-before all is gone,
We ride across battlefields of uneven dirt and ammunition.
Bodies lay strewn, smells of rot and decomposition
And hurried burials with splintered crosses
An area where no man enters
Where no one leaves scarred images behind.
We bury in trenches and lay in wake.
Waiting, waiting for prey.
Conjuring weapons of Hell, each bullet collecting a soul.
He writhes in pain, squirms, struggles and stills.
Life still rests in his eyes, a fire struggling to stay burning against snowstorms,
Bring him back, I plead and call, when shadows appear and hope turns bright.
Gleaning badges of distorted crosses, of pitch black relentless, blood red background

But, like calls to like, I answer to War, one bullet of Hell to collect a soul.
And wipes out half the seeds of Europe in one go.

Chenyu Liu

Maths

Over the last few weeks students have been using the four operations when performing calculations and are continuing to explore the relationship between decimals, fractions and percentages. We have been exploring three-dimensional objects, with a particular focus on prisms and pyramids. We are developing our knowledge and skills related to cross-sections, nets and properties. Through these investigations we have also been exploring the volume and capacity of a variety of objects. At the start of next term, we are looking forward to generating, describing and recording numbers and geometric patterns whilst also exploring algebraic expressions.

Unit of Inquiry

We have kicked off the 2022 PYP Exhibition with a bang! To provoke the boys’ thinking, we played 10 hit songs from before they were born that they were familiar with. This sparked deep questions about how they recognised the song, and when are songs considered classics. This led us to uncover the themes of popularity, power and influence and discuss their relevance when inquiring into place and time. We have established a central idea to guide our inquiry “Historians have a responsibility to consider the relationship between power, perspective and culture”. The boys have written justifications for some issues that they’d be interested in exploring, and from that have since created groups.

There is a great sense of excitement and anticipation building for the Exhibition. We are excited to see where this takes us after the break!

Music

In Music, the boys performed so confidently at the Primary Arts Festival of Hamilton Highlights in Week 6. They have also been focussing on their stand alone unit: the fusion between art and music. We have explored how music has been explored in various abstract artworks and how to analyse the musical intention before the audio is played, purely by viewing the artwork. This can be achieved by looking at light and shade, movement, line and order, different sound sources, structure, highness and lowness of sound.

This idea further developed into the musical concept of graphic notation. Graphic notation is using lines, shapes, symbols and colours to represent what is occurring in the music (e.g. different shapes could represent the different instruments used in the excerpt). The boys used the iPad app Keynote to do a graphic notation presentation. Firstly – they individually found a graphic notation score of their choosing online, and annotated/ drew a key regarding what they thought the different symbols and pictures represented. Then, they did another slide where they did their own graphic notation to a famous pop song called ‘Viva La Vida’ from Coldplay. They used the draw and shapes tool to individually and graphically represent what was happening in the introduction and verses. The boys did an excellent job in representing how the music developed in relation to the musical concepts of dynamics, pitch, instrumentation, duration and textural layers.