Mrs Inkson (Head of Year 6)

This term, Year 6 have been learning about how scientific and medical advances impact society and the environment. Last week, the pupils have been focusing on one particular line of inquiry, Global connections influence advances in medicine. This led the inquirers to finding out about the World Health Organisation (WHO) and how it works to advance medicine in the world.

This has given the pupils an excellent opportunity to further develop and practise their research skills, particularly focusing on note-taking. One of the hardest skills to learn is finding relevant information from non-fiction texts and websites and then putting it into your own words! The pupils have broken down the process of note-taking and writing up notes into smaller stages, practising each stage in groups and individually before moving onto the next stage.

To begin with everyone had to come up with questions they wanted to answer about the WHO – they came up with some great ones including: ‘How and why did the WHO begin?’, ‘What are the WHO’s goals?’ and ‘What has the WHO achieved so far?’

Before properly answering the questions, the pupils decided what they could use as sources of information – often Google is the go to! However, as a school we have so many more resources available to us.  Each group had a different question that they were responsible for answering, making sure they found their information from at least two different sources. Once we had feedback to the class, the pupils wrote up the notes from a different group in their own words.