Author Visit: Nat Harrison

A few days ago, most of Upper School, including Year 6, were lucky enough to have Nat Harrison visit our school. She is the author of The Girl Who Raced the World. Nat gave us a very inspiring talk about her journey to becoming an author — what has challenged her and what has motivated her along the way. She also shared some great advice on what we need in order to become authors ourselves or to improve our writing skills.

Nat read us a short extract from her thrilling adventure story. We didn’t hear much of it, but what we did hear was a privilege — and we all thoroughly enjoyed it. From that small part alone, we could tell she is a brilliant author, and we’re sure her tips will help us in our own writing.

We learnt so much from Nat Harrison’s visit and will take a lot away from it. Coten End was very lucky to have such a special guest come to our school. Everyone in the assembly took something valuable from her talk, and we are extremely grateful that she gave up her time to share her experiences with us. We’re so glad Nat Harrison came to visit!

By Genevieve, 6MC

Music based on West Side Story 
 

During the last few weeks of this half term, Year 6 has been exploring a new element in music.

We listened to The Tonight Quintet, a song from West Side Story (which is based on Romeo and Juliet, a play written by Shakespeare), as well as Mambo, another exciting piece from the same musical. While we listened, we noted down our thoughts about the music and learned new vocabulary such as Adagio (slow) and Allegro (fast). We also learned that Staccato means bouncy and Legato means smooth.

As a year group, we haven’t just been focusing on West Side Story- we’ve also been learning about musical notation. We discovered lots of different notes, including crotchets, minims, quavers, pairs of quavers, semiquavers, semibreves, crotchet rests, and quaver rests. Each of these notes has a different value, and musical bars add up to four beats.

In groups, we created our own short pieces of music by drawing notes into eight-bar sequences. Once we felt confident with our compositions, we had the chance to perform them to the class using musical instruments or even our voices to represent the notes!

It’s been a fun and creative way to explore rhythm, pitch, and performance in music.

By Aanya

Tag Rugby 
 

We are currently learning to play Tag Rugby, and it’s been really fun! If a player pulls your tag while you’re running with the ball, you have to hand the ball over to the other team so they can start their turn.

We’ve now started playing proper matches, where you score one point by placing the ball on the line. In our lessons, we’ve been focusing on intercepting, passing, and kicking. Intercepting means that when a player tries to pass the ball to a teammate, an opponent can block or catch the pass. You’re not allowed to kick the ball into a goal — you can only kick it to pass to another player.

Tag Rugby has been great to learn, and we’d definitely recommend trying it out in your front or back garden!

By Angad

Science: Does Light Travel in a Straight Line 
 

In science, Year 6 has been learning all about light and how it travels. To investigate this, we carried out an experiment to prove that light travels in a straight line.

We worked in groups and used pieces of card with small holes in them, a torch, and a darkened classroom to test our ideas. When we lined up all the holes perfectly, the light was able to shine straight through — but when we moved one of the cards, the light couldn’t pass. This helped us see that light can only travel in a straight line.

It was really interesting to see science in action and to test our predictions. Everyone enjoyed working together and discovering more about how light behaves!

This week, Year 6 has been busy preparing for our upcoming adventures to Arete and at Coten End Camp! We talked about what to expect during the trip and discussed the importance of showing our Coten End school values — collaboration, kindness, curiosity, courage, determination and responsibility — throughout the week. We also shared any worries we had and asked lots of questions to help us feel ready and confident. Now, we’re all looking forward to an exciting week ahead and hope everyone enjoys a restful weekend before the fun begins!