We are continuing to take every opportunity to remind the children about good personal hygiene and we are encouraging the children to wash their hands at various key points during the school day.

Your child’s education is important and we want to ensure that packs of work/activities/links to websites are given to your child to complete if they are required to stay at home. Year 6 pupils have been given SATs workbooks to read through and complete in the event of school closure. As well as this, if your child has access to the internet please encourage them to be using educational websites.

Useful websites for children to visit:

https://www.mathplayground.com/alienangles.html (Alien angles)

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button (Hit the button)

https://mathsframe.co.uk/en/resources/category/22/most-popular

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/subjects/z826n39

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/english-games/7-11-years/spelling-and-grammar

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zhrrd2p

As well as these amazing websites, the children have been given their own username and password for ‘times tables rockstars’.

They can play against their friends on the multi-player games and there are league tables for them to see their progress.

https://ttrockstars.com/

Useful websites for parents to visit:

www.twinkl.co.uk/offer

Twinkl are offering the teachers and parents of children in schools which are closed, or facing closure, free access to all Twinkl resources for a period of one month in the first instance.

Please continue to use the up to date information that is provided by the following websites regarding the current COVID-19 situation. These official sites are important public websites so you can get the most up to date news, information and guidance to address any concerns you may have.

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/ https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/public-health-england https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/coronavirus-covid-19-ukgovernment-response

Welcome to Year 6S!

What a wonderful start to year 6 we have had! I am so impressed with Class 6S’s enthusiasm to learn. They have shown consistent determination, interest and they have welcomed the challenges that they have been faced with at the beginning of year 6. I am so excited to get stuck into our work this year but for the time being, the following is what we have been learning and what we shall continue to build upon for the rest of this term:

Year 6 is an extremely important year as we prepare for the children to become independent and reflective learners. As well as enjoying a broad and balanced curriculum, the children work incredibly hard and take on many extra responsibilities. All children in Year 6 are considered role models for the rest of the school and make a valuable contribution to the wider school community. 

For all year 6 pupils, school is open from 8.30am if they wish to complete any additional work or simply settle into the morning by reading their favourite book. Well done to the children who are already taking full advantage of this!

Maths

During our first term back, we got stuck into developing basic maths skills in the way of number and place value. Not only have we built upon this we have also spent a considerable amount of time consolidating the children’s understanding of time. For those children who were confident, these skills were then utilised to solve time problems. It is important that the children continue to practise telling the time, interchangeably between analogue and digital clocks, in everyday, real life contexts. Please continually question your child about the time on a daily basis in order to embed these learnt skills.

From telling the time, year 6 have been learning to complete and extend number sentences. Again this has drawn upon their existing and growing knowledge of positive and negative integers and decimal numbers.

Our next area of learning in numeracy will move on to the rounding of numbers and then on to fractions.

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

• Times tables up to 12 x 12;
• 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;
• Explaining and reasoning.

Where possible, please encourage your children to practise these skills daily at home too. It is extremely important that your child knows their timetables and can recall them all within three seconds.

English

During the first term the children completed some amazing pieces of writing. They used our class novel ‘Letters from the lighthouse’ as a prompt and wrote their own story based in WWII time. Their imagination flourished as they put pen to paper and described the scenes that they saw. As our focus in History is WWII and looking at evacuees, we thought we could transfer this knowledge to our English writing. Their next piece of work they wrote a letter ‘back home’ as they had been evacuated due to the war. The emotion that they managed to convey in this letter was truly spectacular. As well as this they have also completed a descriptive piece of writing of a beautiful beach scene as they strolled along it.

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.

I am incredibly excited to see what the children think of this thrilling book... the book that brought their teacher 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.

PSHE

During PSHE we have discussed internet safety and what to do if the children feel unsafe whilst online. With technology growing more and more, it is important to ensure the children’s safety whilst online. The children now have a deeper understanding of what to do if they feel uncomfortable online.  It is important that you know what websites the children are visiting, and that their security and privacy settings are high.

If you would like to know more about this, please speak to the class teachers.

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 to come to school in), a white t-shirt and pumps or trainers. They will be working with our sports coach during the Autumn term to improve their games skills. These skills will be tailored to meet the ongoing competition calendar. Your child may therefore be asked to represent the school in various competitions throughout the year, both within and after school time.

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.

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 and they do not need to read for hours at a time! Ten minutes every night is fine 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 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 fulfil 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 Miss Lomas, Mr Stenton, Miss Chronnell, Miss Abbott, Miss Kendall and Miss Downie, so that their learning is tailored to their ability.