Welcome to Primary Six

Out teachers are Mrs McCambridge and Mrs Gorman

Literacy: We love to read in Primary Six and our teachers make sure we have lots of books. Our fact books are really interesting and we read a range of novels. One novel we all read together is ‘A Girl Called Blue’ and currently we are reading ‘Stormbreaker’. We are brilliant writers – we have written reports on the Rainforest and The Great Barrier Reef, made brochures for charities we have designed ourselves, written explanation pieces on ‘The Water Cycle’, written and performed our water raps and much much more.. We use drama throughout our literacy using hot seating, freeze frames, tableau and conscience alley through our novels.

We love to carryout talking and listening activities – we show our classmates our work and all take different roles within our groups.

Numeracy: Maths is fun in Primary Six – we carry out investigations – we use geo boards to learn about shape, learn about tessellations through artists such as M.C. Escher, learn about the capacity of streams and oceans, create graphs using our RM Graph and Excel, use food to learn about fractions / decimals / percentages, we will even have a class shop where we will create our own percentage problems for our friends to work out! We measure, weigh and carry out lots of important problem solving activities.

ICT: We use Fronter a lot in Primary Six, some of our class designed and built their very own charity websites, we create animations using Scratch, recorded our very own water raps using audacity and we can’t wait to use Garage Band on the iPads. Both our teachers love music so we will be using electronic instruments, cutting and mixing tracks like real DJ's!

The World Around Us: All our topic work is carried out through ‘The World Around Us. We have taken part in a technology week and made cars to carry cream eggs over speed bumps. We know how to draw detailed plans and hope to go to the technology challenge in Primary Seven. We made very tall towers out of one roll of newspaper and masking tape – some fell down! We carry out lots of experiments like how much water is in fruit, which substances dissolve and we are even making our own water filters. The Blue Planet topic will be brilliant for designing fair tests – and we are brilliant at this. When we learned about Fair Trade we learned about children who work for very long hours , we look at the rights of the child and realise how lucky we are. Some children who work on chocolate plantations have to work from 5am until dark.

The Linen Museum is brilliant for us – we learn all about the Linen in Lisburn and about the River Lagan. We visit lots of local places such as Castle Gardens and took a walk along the toe path.

The Arts:
We are so lucky to have Therese Gorman who works with us in Art. We have all been to the pottery studio in the Island Art’s Centre. We made 3D fish and water tiles. We study artist like Henri Rosseau and have made amazing multimedia fish collages which you can see in our pictures. Our rooms are like artist’s galleries. We even got to draw real fish from the Lisburn Market. We bought crabs, mussels, prawns and mackerel.

Music – we can all play the recorder and read music. We are using Garage Band and are learning to mix tracks.

The teachers love drama and we get to do lots of activities. We have made tableaus of Irish Linen workers, carried out role plays connected to the Linen Industry. We play lots of drama games and when we carried out hot seating activities we got to be ‘Water’. Drama is a really fun way to bring reading alive in our classroom.

P.E: We love PE and we are very lucky to have the Racquet’s Club, Lisburn Leisureplex and The Tennis Dome on our doorsteps. We have learned to play badminton, squash, Gaelic and in P5 we learned to play table tennis with two coaches. We get to learn dance and have fun cheer leading.

Religion: We follow the Alive 6 Programme and love to make up actions to go with our songs! We also learn about different religions through our Education for Diversity Programme. We practise hard for our assemblies.