Farewell Year 6!

What a year we have had! Our Year 6 pupils have done St Thomas of Canterbury Primary School proud and we wish them the best of luck for the future. 

Congratulations to our winners for the Maths, English and Headteacher Awards 

Water Sports Trip 

Volunteer work: cleaning up our local area

Year 6’s Fundraising Funfair

Our Year 6 pupils decided on activities in groups and independently planned and resourced it. They promoted what they were doing through posters, spoke to classes and asked pupils to bring money in to partake in their charity fundraising funfair on 28^th June for the afternoon.

Activities included playing dodgeball; throwing wet sponges at the Year 6s; hit the target to win a prize; estimate the number or sweets in a jar; having a water gun competition; penalty shootout; and selling items such as homemade lemonade, cakes, second-hand books and board games.

A huge congratulations is in order as they raised over £500 for Age UK Salford!

Cultural Day in Year 6

We would like to say a huge thank you to our parents and children for the effort that they made cooking food; dressing up; preparing and delivering informative presentations; and donating money for charity, for cultural day. It was a huge success and we made over £80, just from the Year 6s alone.

In Design & Technology, we follow the process…

Explore à Design à Make à Evaluate

Our first topic was to make an authentic Woolton Pie. This was a popular dish during WW2, especially when food and meat was rationed, but vegetables were accessible or home-grown.

They weighed their ingredients, prepared and chopped the vegetables, rolled the pastry and cooked their dishes, before tasting and evaluating.

The children surprised themselves with how well they prepared and cooked their pies. They enjoyed them so much that they didn’t save much for their families; however many went home and made it again!

Our gift to the future communities of St. Thomas of Canterbury and Higher Broughton

On Friday 30th September 2022, the year 6 children each planted an acorn in the school garden. 

The English Oak (Quercus robur) support an astonishing 2300 species, of which 326 depend on it for survival; 716 lichens; 108 fungi; 1178 invertebrates; owls; bats butterflies.......

We planted not a, hopefully, single tree, but a community to be, a world in waiting.

In July, we will choose the strongest 5 saplings and plant them on the school field. These will be our gift to the future generations. They will have a named engraved plaque with the child's name and the date of planting. The other saplings will be planted in other locations in the countryside. 

The Year 6s represented the circulatory system, by following the same pattern of the blood vessels, which carry blood around our bodies.

One child acted as the heart in the middle and pumped the ‘blood’ around the body; another represented the lungs and another as the body. Other children acted as the blood, travelling around the body.

They became oxygenated blood when they reached the lungs (by holding the red card), and then de-oxygenated blood (by turning the card to blue) when they had made their way around the body.

Additional Work

We often get parents asking for additional homework; however when we give this out, we will use part of the lesson to go through it and correct any misconceptions.

We understand your keenness to get your children to do additional work, so below are some activities and websites they can do at home. This is obviously in addition to their reading every night. 

The Mark 10 Mission

This is an excellent website to help children pray.

https://www.themark10mission.co.uk/

The Oak Academy

This a website set up by the government to support children's learning. There are lessons on every subject and for every year group. The year 7 lessons are often challenging. 

https://classroom.thenational.academy/

The Maths Playground

This website has lots of enjoyable activities. A clear favourite is alien angles.

https://www.mathplayground.com/alienangles.html

BBC Bitesize

The below link has an array of subjects for every year group.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/levels/zbr9wmn

Google Earth

Google Earth is a brilliant geography resource and all year 6 children should be able to find their own homes using it

https://earth.google.com/

BBC Iplayer

This has some amazing documentaries. It is important that the children know about the world and their place in it. Anything by Sir David Attenborough is highly recommended.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer

Mathematics

Our first Maths topic in the Autumn Term is 'Number and Place Value' followed by Addition and Subtraction and then Multiplication and Division. 

The following skills and facts will be practised and daily to secure the children’s mathematical understanding:

• Times tables related facts e.g. 40 x 90   0.8 x 0.7 etc;
• Counting forwards and backwards in positive/negative numbers as well as decimal numbers from any given starting point;
• Formal written methods of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division;
• Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of fractions;
• Explaining and reasoning;
• Problem solving in each topic to ensure thorough understanding.

By Year 6, children should know all tables tables facts. Being able to recall them fluently is vital: they may struggle with the more complicated calculations, including fractions. Therefore, please ensure children are practising daily until they have reached 'Challenge 6 Gold' in school.

They can use 'Times Tables Rock Stars' (TTRS) for practise.

https://play.ttrockstars.com/auth/school 

Our Class Novel

With Year six's first topic being WWII, our class novel is ‘Letters from the Lighthouse’ by Emma Carroll. Set in February, 1941, twelve-year-old Olive Bradshaw and her little brother Cliff are subjected to months of bombing raids in London, finally resulting in them being evacuated to the Devon coast. The only person with two spare beds is Mr Ephraim, the local lighthouse keeper. But he’s not used to company and he certainly doesn’t want any evacuees.

Desperate to be helpful, Olive becomes his post-girl, carrying secret messages (as she likes to think of the letters) to the villagers. But Olive has a secret of her own. Her older sister Sukie went missing in an air raid, and she’s desperate to discover what happened to her. And then she finds a strange coded note which seems to link Sukie to Devon, and to something dark and impossibly dangerous.

We are incredibly excited to see what the children think of this thrilling book... the book that brought Mrs Jowers to tears...

We will use this story as a basis for our writing throughout the term, reading sections, paragraphs and chapters at a time. This will then allow the children to explore different text types and styles of writing. For example, they will write precise summaries, plot predictions, diary entries, emotive letters, character and setting descriptions, alternative chapters and endings.

Reading Comprehension

Children in Year 6 will be taught explicit skills to help them in their understanding of difficult texts, including top tips of how to answer questions to prepare them for their assessments in May.

They will be encouraged to read a wide range of stories, non-fiction texts, poetry, plays and textbooks in order to understand that texts are structured in different ways and written for different purposes.

Children will be reminded to check their reading makes sense, discussing their understanding of the meaning of certain vocabulary as they read. They might also be encouraged to ask questions about the text to further develop their understanding of what is going on and draw inference about character actions, speech or motives, providing evidence. Inference involves using the clues in the story or picture to make a good guess. It involves figuring something out which isn’t fully explained and draws on a child’s existing knowledge of the world. They may story map in order to follow the story or re-read sentences or sections.

They might also be encouraged to make predictions based on what they’ve already read, summarise key points to show good comprehension and look out for interesting phrases that authors uses.

Handwriting

Handwriting is a focus for us this term as they cannot be assessed as year 6 expected level without writing legibly and fluently, in accordance with the school’s handwriting policy. All children are now mature enough to be writing in pen, rather than pencil by this stage and should be expected to join consistently, excluding the break letters b, p, q, y, g, and f. They might still need reminding of certain rules such as: never joining capital letters to the following letter.

PE

As the children are now in year 6, they are allowed to come to school on a Friday in their PE kits, consisting of black shorts (they may wear tracksuit bottoms when it is cold), a white t-shirt and pumps or trainers. They will be working with our sports coach throughout the year to develop various skills in their games lessons. Some of these skills will be tailored to meet the on going competition calendar. Your child may therefore be asked to represent the school in various competitions throughout the year, both within and after school time.

What can you do to help your child in Year 6?

• Purchase a watch for your child so that they can read the time throughout the day;
• Ensure your child reads every night. They do not need to read to an adult (although this is always beneficial) and they do not need to read for hours at a time - unless they wish to of course! Ten to fifteen minutes every night is perfectly acceptable as long as they are reading and they have understood what they have read. Your child will have a focus for their reading diary so they know what they have to write (we are beginning with summaries).
• Allow your child access to a dictionary (including online) so that they can check the meaning of words which they cannot work out themselves.
• Expose them to different experiences and different places to extend their understanding of the world.
• Homework will be set as and when required to assist the children in their learning. Encourage them to complete homework on time. If your child is struggling with anything, they should ask a teacher for help - that is what we are here for!
• Most importantly, make sure they have plenty of sleep and early nights so that they are ready and able to learn.

It is important that in year 6, we support and encourage your child to allow them to fulfill their potential. It is also paramount to prepare and develop them so that they are ready for their move to high school. To ease this transition, your child will move between the two year 6 classes for the teaching of various different aspects of the curriculum and they will be taught by various adults including Mrs Jowers, Mr Stenton, Mrs Abbott, Miss Kendall, Mrs Sutton and Miss Downie in order for their learning to be tailored to their ability.