WELCOME to Year 6

Year 6 Staff

Flamingos	Toucans
Class Teachers: Mrs McKeown, Mrs Knight, Learning Support: Mrs Broughton, Mrs Robbins, Mrs Etherington	Class Teachers: Mrs Talley, Mrs Armstrong Learning Support: Ms Piddington, Miss Knowles
Linked HLTA: Mrs Broughton, Mrs Piddington
Phase Leader: Mrs S Talley

Key Information

PE Days:

Now that our swimming lessons have finished, our PE days will be Monday PM (Indoors) and Wednesday PM (Outdoors). Children should come to school in PE kit on those days. Please ensure that your child is wearing a full PE kit (plain t-shirt, black leggings/skirt/shorts/jogging bottoms, white socks and plimsolls or trainers) in school each PE day. Long hair should be tied back and earrings must be removed or covered with tape for PE.

Library Day:

Tuesday

The children will be given an opportunity to visit our school library at least once a week, during which time they will be able to select a reading book of their choice. We will read daily in class and there will be opportunities for independent and paired reading throughout the day. If your child would like to take their library book home, please make sure it is brought back into school every day. The children also have access to our Bug Club library and can bring home physical copies of the texts or use the online portal to read a wide range of books online.

Class Celebration Assembly:

Wednesday

We will be hosting a class celebration assembly on a Wednesday where we encourage children to bring in any achievements from outside of school. The children will then get the opportunity to discuss their achievements and share them with the class.

Welcome To Year 6

Our topic this half term is: Ancient Greece

Our main topic this term will be linked to our history work on ancient Greece. As always, much of our reading and writing will be inspired by this topic and we are looking forward to our Greek day on Monday 20^th November. Your child should have brought home a letter about this before half term so if you have not received this, please speak to your child’s teacher.

Key dates for autumn 2 are as follows.

Wednesday 8^th November	UTC Electricity Workshop
Monday 13^th – Friday 17^th November	Anti-bullying week
Monday 20^th November	Greek Day workshop with Martin Newman
Wednesday 15^th November	School photographer

Core Curriculum

Maths

For the majority of this half term we will be focusing on fractions. This is a huge part of the Year 6 learning for maths and will cover all of the following steps:

Equivalent fractions and simplifying

Comparing and ordering fractions

Adding and subtracting simple fractions

Adding and subtracting any fractions

Adding and subtracting mixed numbers

Calculating fractions of amounts

Multi-step problems

We will then move on to learning about converting units of measure in the week before Christmas. We will also continue to give the children short arithmetic tasks to complete at the start of the school day. We have found that regular practice of these skills boosts children's confidence and improves their mental fluency. You can help by asking your child about these tasks and encouraging them to show you how they have been taught to solve them.

Much of the Year 6 curriculum - particularly the arithmetic - relies on children having a strong knowledge of their times tables; this is notably true of fractions which we will come on to in autumn 2. Please continue to support your child to become a 'Times Table Master' by encouraging them to use TTRockstars regularly. We know that many children will already have achieved this but it is important that they continue to practise their tables as these skills can become less secure without regular practice. Speed, fluency and accuracy are vital when applying times tables knowledge to other areas of the math curriculum.

English

Writing

This half term we will be using a beautiful text called Mythologica to inspire a variety of writing outcomes such as character and setting descriptions, non-chronological reports and narratives.

Reading

We will begin by reading Who Let the Gods Out by Maz Evans before looking at a range of non-fiction texts linked to our science topic on electricity.

We will use these texts to immerse the children into our new topic and will focus heavily on supporting the children to build their reading fluency and their stamina. We will continue to ensure that there is free-reading time and will be encouraging the children to read widely and often both in and outside of school.

Homework

Thank you so much to those of you who have been supporting your children to complete the home learning tasks that we set last term. It has been wonderful to see so many children (and parents) engaging with Google Classroom and we hope that this is now becoming easier for you all. We really enjoyed looking at the geography projects that children completed and have begun displaying these in the Year 6 shared area. It was clear that the children had put a lot of time and effort into these and we are looking forward to seeing what they create this half term.

As we have said before, part of our role in Year 6 is to prepare the children for their transition to secondary school where there will be much emphasis on the children being independent learners. Most secondary schools set home learning tasks via online platforms so in order to help the children with this, it is important that they begin to get to grips with using Google Classroom. If you have not yet returned the permission slip, we cannot give your child their login so please make sure you ask your child’s teacher if you require another copy of the letter that was sent out at the start of last half term.

This half term, we will continue to set the home learning via Google Classroom. The half term overview will be uploaded (along with any other resources the children will need) but you can access a copy of it here. Please remind your child that we cannot give out login information via Google Classroom. If they have misplaced their login for MyMaths, Bug Club or TTRS, they will need to ask their class teacher for it.

Once again, thank you for your support with the home learning. We will continue to reward the children for each task they complete and look forward to celebrating their achievements at the end of this half term.

Additional Guidance

For more information about the Year 6 National Curriculum, please follow the link.