It’s been a busy first week back in Year 6! In English, we have explored the poem The Listeners by Walter de le Mare and used this as inspiration to create our own setting description. We have been securing our knowledge of decimals in Maths before we move onto comparing them with fractions and percentages in a few weeks, and we continued to work on our class song in music with Mr Bell.

In our project learning, we started a new Design and Technology unit, called Engineer. We started the week by learning about engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his influential engineering work, specifically the Clifton Suspension Bridge. We learnt about the four different types of bridges: suspension, arch, beam and truss bridge and how their different structures help to ensure that they are stable and secure. Using this knowledge, we then had a got at investigating some different types of bridges made from paper. We learnt how more layers of paper made the bridge strong, how a u-shape bridge is stronger than a flat bridge and finally, how the shape of a concertina can add strength to the bridge due to the folds in the paper. We also explored how triangles are used by many architects and engineers in order to add strength to their structures.

Then, it was time to design our own bridges! The children were given a limited amount of resources and they had to design and build their own bridge that was strong enough to hold 2ps and some weights. I was really impressed with how resourceful and resilient the children were during the task as they worked together as a team to apply the knowledge they had learnt from previous lessons. Each group managed to produce a bridge which was able to hold 10 x 2ps and some weights. We also had a visit from our buddies which was great as we were able to show them our bridges and explain what we had learning about in DT.

Well done Year 6 – I am looking forward to next week where we will be working on building even bigger bridges!