Sixth Class is the eighth year in primary school and typically accommodates students from the ages of 11 to 13. In this final year of school, children are consolidating the skills learned across all subject areas and engaging in group work, debates, problem solving, digital project work, cross curricular assignments and self reflection.
The curriculum in Maths continues to focus on real materials, expanding on the areas of Number, Algebra, Measurements, Shape and Space and Data. The tasks and practical problem solving activities that a child works on in 6th Class are similar to those in previous years but they will become more challenging and complex.
In SESE (Social, Environmental and Scientific Education) children continue to use the classroom, school and local area as a resource for learning. Their learning broadens to explore other places in Ireland and beyond to explore the lives of people in the past. Children use a range of investigative skills as they work as Scientists, Historians and Geographers.
In the Arts, (visual arts, music and drama), children continue to have many opportunities to be creative and to develop his/her imagination through art activities, music and drama. The focus is not so much on the work produced, but on what the child learns by engaging in creative activity.
In SPHE (Social, Personal and Health Education) children are encouraged to recognise the importance of treating his/her body and that of others with dignity and respect and to learn about the changes that take place in his/her body at various stages of development, for example, at puberty.
For more information on the curricular areas and how you can help your child in 6th Class please see some advice from the NCCA
Curriculum Link
News from Sixth Class
September 2024
6th Class have had a busy start to September. We have hit the ground running, learning about our diverse school community, completing a scavenger hunt to find people in our class who share our interests and who are different to us.
We learned the importance of teamwork, co-operation and listening skills in PE through collaborative games such as Rock, Paper, Scissors relay and 'Spud'.
Place Value is our topic in Maths this week, and we have been using games and concrete materials to explore value, larger numbers and problem solving.
October 2024
6th Class have continued to prove themselves as hardworking students as we near mid term break. The attitude towards learning and the motto of improving a little each day in our class is truly infectious! During our History lessons this month, we have been learning about World War One and we have integrated what we have learned with the writing genre of Recount which we have also been studying in Literacy. Students wrote recounts of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which is said to have been one of the main causes for the beginning of the War. In Art, we used our knowledge of place value from September to explore Mondrian art. We rolled dice to find a random 3 digit number. Using base ten blocks as stencils, we then represented our numbers through Mondrian inspired art, using primary colours to capture Mondrian's theme.
We are currently revising for our Mid Term Break assessments in Maths and Literacy. We are revising for these by completing a Halloween Mystery Challenge, which encourages problem solving skills in groups. The class are completing multiple maths tasks to crack a code and figure out who the Halloween prankster is.
Our studies of human values this month have led to very creative entries into our Values copies, including comic book strips, podcast scripts, diary entries and even crosswords. Honesty and Self Worth have been inspiring fantastic discussions with very thought provoking questions and group discussions. In Music, we have completed a music study on the popular band Queen. We dissected the famous "Bohemian Rhapsody" and learned about the band's origins and their back catalogue of hits. We then listened and responded to music from scary movies such as Tim Burton's "Nightmare Before Christmas". This was our inspiration for our scary self portraits also. Check out our hair raising selfies!
On World Mental Health day, we Zoomed into a webinar hosted by Scholastic with the author Ian Eagleton who wrote the book "The Boy who Cried Ghost". Ian has OCD and wrote his book about a character who also has OCD. We learned about how this neurodiverse character encountered difficulties in his life and how he overcame them also. Ian also taught us some spooky sign language in time for Halloween!
November 2024
November may have brought some dark and dreary weather but we have been keeping things bright and fun in 6th Class. We are exploring Painting in Art lessons, experimenting with different ways of adding colour. Watercolour has been a favourite medium in our class this month. Check out our colourful paint brush art! We also created some optical illusion art this month which meant we learned how to shade using various mediums also.
In Maths, we have finished a two week block of studying long division. In our class, we use the letters DMSBR (Does McDonalds Serve Burgers Raw) to remind us of the steps used in long division. We are now moving onto Lines and Angles, where we started by measuring the angles in our first names. We have also started working on an integrated Maths and History project where we have been looking at data from WWII and using this to create online graphs. This will be beneficial for project work both this year and next when we make the move to secondary school. Take a look at the graphs we created.
We held a History exhibition in our classroom to showcase our projects on the Lusitania and invited other classes to come and take a trip back in time. Our class built models, created Lego reconstructions, wrote diaries and even recorded audio files as newspaper reporters from the past. The imagination and creativity in our classroom is outstanding!
In our Learn Together and SPHE lessons, we have looked at neurodivergent learners and how people with ADHD and Dyslexia process the world around them. We have read two of the newest additions to the school library as a way to open up these discussions. These are a great book series that we would highly recommend.
We are counting down the days to our Winter Concert performance in 6th Class and can't wait to see what other classes do to showcase their talents and revisit our values from the year.
December 2024
The class took a trip today to the IFI to see Roddy Doyle’s A Greyhound of a Girl. Roddy Doyle came out after the showing to answer some audience questions for the students- was amazing!
January 2025
6th Class have been learning about civil rights campaigners this month, including Martin Luther King and Gandhi. We have discussed achievements in their lives, their speeches, peaceful protests and the effect their campaigns had on the world around them. We used Scratch coding to retell the story of Gandhi through animation and explored Martin Luther King’s words in our Art lessons.