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Internet Safety Week - BBC Live Lessons
Year 6 had a brilliant Internet Safety Week, taking part in the BBC Live Lessons - always super fun and interactive! We learned how to stay safe online and talked about simple ways to spot scams, such as poor spelling, unexpected links or messages trying to make you act with unnecessary urgency. Check out our posters which include more top tips!
We also explored artificial intelligence, discovering how helpful it can be for research, while remembering to check facts carefully. We helped the BBC team to build an artificial intelligence bot that could give facts about vultures. We made sure it only gave correct information, spoke politely and didn’t include any opinions or biased comments. Check out our drawings of the bot! It was a fun, informative week and Year 6 are now feeling more confident and responsible when engaging with the online world.
National Number Day
Year 6 had a fantastic time celebrating National Number Day by diving into equations that used a mix of operations. We learned how to tackle these confidently by using BIDMAS — a helpful rule that reminds us of the correct order to solve calculations: Brackets, Indices, Division, Multiplication, Addition, and Subtraction. Through speaking and listening tasks, we practised explaining our thinking and helping each other remember the BIDMAS steps.
We put our skills to the test with fast‑paced BIDMAS quizzes, which everyone found exciting and challenging! By the end of the day, we were solving mixed‑operation equations successfully - and having great fun with numbers along the way!
Suspenseful Stories
Our classroom has been filled with chills and excitement as Year 6 began crafting their own suspense stories inspired by a short film clip. We explored how to help the reader imagine eerie and mysterious settings through detailed descriptions and negative, Halloween‑themed vocabulary. It has been so much fun experimenting with this demanding and unusual writing style! We also focused on keeping our readers on the edge of their seats, making sure not to reveal too much too soon and building tension carefully throughout each paragraph.
To make our stories even stronger, we took part in editing and revising workshops. We worked in pairs and small teams to improve the spelling, punctuation and grammar in our drafts. We enjoyed giving each other thoughtful feedback - in a polite and supportive manner - and seeing how small improvements could make the suspense even sharper.
It’s been a wonderfully fun and unusual writing journey, and we can’t wait to share our spooky stories with you soon!
Class 6 - Spr 1 - 2026
Travelling Through Time
We have been exploring how our local area has changed over the past century. Using historical maps and photographs, we saw how the land shifted from farming, industrial shipbuilding and commercial fishing industries to becoming the mainly residential community we know today. We were thoroughly taken by how important and impressive these industries once were.
We loved locating our own homes - or where they would eventually be built - and were amazed at how many streets only appeared during the 1900s. We also explored the old Gateshead train stations (on the Quayside and in the Freight Village) that predominately served the mining and shipbuilding activities of these areas. The photos of the stations looked just like Beamish, and it felt magical imagining the steam trains, busy platforms and trams that once filled our well-known streets and roads.
Super Scientists!
We explored Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. We started by learning about inherited characteristics such as eye colour and hair type. We were so fascinated by variation in ourselves that we decided to carry out our own whole‑school investigation! Year 6 visited classes across the school, surveying pupils about their hair colour, eye colour, hair type and gender. The children loved collecting real data and spotting all the amazing variation around our school.
Back in class, we used our results to build complex tables in Excel and added formulas to help us analyse the information quickly. We searched for trends, compared classes and looked for interesting patterns across the school. Not only did this help us understand a core concept behind evolution, but it also showed how powerful learning can be when it focuses on the real world and involves teamwork, careful research and clever computing skills all coming together. A brilliant mix of crucial life skills - and Year 6 loved every moment of it!