Based on a World War II Topic, the lessons explore Picasso’s life throughout WW2 and how his artwork depicted his feelings towards conflict and war. The end result is for the children to choose between three different Picasso inspired artwork. Some may decide to create a sculpture using cardboard, whilst others can create the more conventional Picasso paintings. Those that feel more confident can create the more detailed pieces that depict the violence during the times of war and conflict.

Year 6 focused Managing Change PSHE lessons. The lessons consider change as both positive and negative with reference to the current pandemic. It the moves on to looking at how we manage our emotions during a time of change through looking at a clip along with different scenarios. The children have an opportunity to consider the transition to secondary school and how this will create change in their lives and themselves. The final lesson encourages children to recognise a growth mindset and seeing the good qualities in themselves. The lessons all include a range of activities from a journal, a self care leaflet, a labeled drawing and lots of discussion and self reflection in groups, as a class and also individually.

Inspired by Mantle of the Expert this notebook and planning takes the children on a journey which places them in the shoes of possible experts and individuals involved within a natural disaster. The notebook is then in the structure of chunking to ensure the children are including and making reference to key grammatical and writing techniques. The writing my Year 6’s produced within this topic was incredible and very empathetic. By using the Mantle of the Expert at the start really meant the children felt apart of the disaster which really showed in their high quality writing.

The notebook plans out a set of lessons that explores how to plan, create and rebuild areas that have been hit by natural disasters. Children will have to think about cost along with the geography of maps and symbols to include various buildings that towns and villages need. This includes schools, rivers, shops, motor ways, train tracks. They will various resources to build their own model within a shoebox.

Upper KS2 ICT lessons to encourage children to evaluate and accurately gather research to then present it in a creative, independent way. Children will look at different sources, from social media to news websites to consider the reliability of the information. In pairs the children then have to consider how best to log their information and how to display it. This could be in a bar or line graph; for those that want a challenge they can work with the teacher to create a pie chart. They then decide how they wish to present their findings (A blog on publisher, a film on IMovie or a presentation)