Y6 Brass Class have made a great start to the school year! We began by launching an exciting new topic ‘The Mysterious Maya.’ We spiced up some delicious Mayan-style hot chocolate, explored the Mayan number system and wrote messages using Mayan glyphs. It was fun filled day and we enjoyed moving from class to class to try each activity.
In English, we are reading a book called ‘Rain Player’ which is about a village (that is suffering during a year long drought) and an over-confident boy who challenges a rain god to a game of pok-ta-pok in an attempt to bring rain to his village. In maths, we have been developing our place value knowledge – reading, writing and comparing numbers up to 10 million! In Whole Class Reading, we are enjoying a book linked to our topic called ‘Middleworld’ it’s a challenging read but it has given us lots to discuss. We enjoy sharing our opinions about the characters and we use evidence from the text to support our answers.
In the afternoons, we take part in a range of subjects linked to our topic including art, computing and history. In art we have been learning even more about the Maya! They used a lot of Jade stone in their masks. Did you know pottery works were highly regarded and makers even signed their work?! We’ve been looking closely at Maya Stelae’s, which are stone monuments covered in Maya glyphs. This week, we did some observational drawing trying to capture all the details in a stone glyph. It was tricky to capture all the chips and grooves in the stone. We used a range of mark making techniques, like stippling and cross hatching, to make our drawings look as realistic as possible. We can’t wait to start designing our own glyph!
