Year 6

The Year 6 Team

Year 6 Teacher: Mr Gould

Teaching Assistant: Mrs Blackledge 

Maths Tutor: Mr McNeil

If you have any queries or need any assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us. You can leave messages for us at the school office, talk to us at home time and you can also write in your child’s planner.

To help your child be organised we provide the following information.

PE Kits: PE will be on a Thursday.
 
PE kits should be sent to school as soon as possible and we will send them home to be washed at half term. Kits and pumps should be named. Details of all kit and uniform required is found in the planner.
 
Reading: Year 6 children are expected to read independently every night and they are able to sign their own planners. It is helpful if you can initial to confirm that the reading is actually taking place. You can also log any concerns that you may have.
 
Planners are required in school every day. In the planner there are several sections that must be read and completed by parents/carers concerning short walks and excursions as well as internet usage and E-safety. It is important that that you complete these sections as soon as possible and encourage your child to look at the sections they can complete.
 
Outdoor Coat: Please ensure your child has a warm and preferably waterproof coat to wear at break and lunchtimes.
 
Book bags: Space in lockers is limited so we store book bags in the classroom; it would be helpful if children could use the school book bags and not large rucksacks or bags.
 
Snack: Children can purchase a healthy snack every day, it costs 60p for two items and it would be REALLY helpful if your child could bring the correct change.
 
Lunch: Lunch will cost £2.60 per day and should be paid for online via parent pay, the menu is published on the website.
 
Homework will be given out on a Friday to be completed and returned by the following Wednesday. Your child will be expected to complete Maths, Handwriting (Retrieval) and Grammar homework in addition to learning spellings, times tables and reading every week. Children will be expected to complete 2 lessons of Reading Plus at home each week and this will be monitored by the class teacher.

In Year 6, there will be a large focus on learning the Key Year 5/6 words. The children will be expected to know how to spell them and use them as frequently as possible in their independent writing. The key words that the children are expected to know are attached at the bottom of the page along with those needed for Year 3/4.
The children will also need to know and understand certain grammatical terms for their SATS SPAG test, which is found in the SPAG Test Prep document below. Knowledge of the grammatical terms and their definitions will certainly improve their independent writing and this document will be very useful when revising for SPAG after Christmas.
 
Reading: In class, we will be reading a text as a whole class each half term and your child will be given the opportunity to access a high quality, challenging text, dissecting this, along with the class teacher, using a range of reading skills. The children will also have one small group reading lesson each week that will be delivered by our specialist tutor. 
Your child will be given a challenging personal reading book selected by the teacher which will be changed regularly. There is a selection of Must Read Year 6 books - during the year, your child should have read 15 of these at home. Parents will be expected to sign diaries every night to confirm that reading has taken place. Children will also be expected to complete 2 reading lessons of Reading Plus each week at home, as part of their reading homework.
Your child will also have a love of reading non-fiction book in their book bag, which will be changed regularly. We need to encourage the children to recognise that they read for different purposes: children will therefore also have a Love of Reading fiction book in their book bag, which can be collected from the Book Donation Station (in school), the Genre Section (in school) or it can a book that your child personally owns or has borrowed from a local library. To support your child at home when they are reading, children will also have a bookmark in their book bags with key questions that parents could ask to generate discussion and check understanding. 

Please see our Reading Journey to find the books covered during Whole Class Shared Reading and if you wish to see the Must Read books covered in each year group.
 
Maths: Children entering Year 6 should know their times tables and have instant recall. We will be working on this to ensure that problem-solving skills are not restricted by lack of basic knowledge. 
 
Writing: Your child will be writing for lots of different purposes and we will be looking at different styles of writing. During the year we will be introducing more punctuation to develop and improve writing and practising our grammar. We will encourage the children to widen their vocabulary and investigate the meanings and origins of words. We teach contextual grammar as much as possible to ensure that grammar knowledge is retained and become sticky. We also use this method to significantly enhance outcomes in extended writing with grammar knowledge being applied more proficiently. Please see our Whole School Grammar Writing Journey to see the writing opportunities that will be covered.

For independent writing, the children will be expected to include all writing elements found in the writing assessment framework to achieve age related/ above age related expectations by the beginning of June 2023; these documents are attached at the bottom of this page.
The children will be expected to use a large variety of sentence styles in their independent writing. A really useful list of these sentence styles with examples is attached in a document at the bottom of the page and parents/carers can help children practise using these at home.

Topics: All the subjects we will study this year are detailed in the long term planning documents which are available to view below.

SATs: To help aid revision for SATs attached at the bottom are 3 documents - Reading, SPAG and Maths revision; these documents will be really useful for your children throughout the year, should you wish to give them extra support. A document with a list of useful websites for SATS revision can be found at the bottom of the page.
Transition: Early in the Autumn term, we will be visited by High Schools in the immediate area and there will be open days and evenings available to you at these High Schools to help you make an informed decision of where would be best for your child’s next step on their educational journey.  All of the information regarding the selection of schools will be sent to you and we will be able to offer some support during the process.

We hope that you will find this information helpful.  If you require any further information please contact us via the office or your child’s planner.