WELCOME TO YEAR 6

Each week we will be keeping you up to date with a "Wow of the Week". In addition to this, please read our half termly curriculum map to find out what will be happening in Year 6.

Important information

PE - Monday and Wednesday: Please come to school in your PE kit on these days. 

Reading Books -  Each child in year 6 has a book-band book and a book from our class library, with one book staying in school and one going home. In year 6, we encourage the children to be responsible for changing their books when they need to. The children have also been set a target of achieving 4 reads in their reading record each week. 

Spellings - New spellings given every Friday. On a Friday morning, we will have our weekly spelling lesson, in which we will focus on learning our new words for the week ahead. At the start of this lesson, we will also have our weekly spelling test focusing on the previous week's words. Please see our spelling page where you can easily access the spellings every week. 

 

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Autumn 1

Week 6:

This week in Year 6, we have been really focusing on division in maths. Over the past few lessons, we have used short division, long division, dividing using factors and mental strategies to solve calculations and problems. The children have really impressed me with their ability to select the most efficient strategy to solve a particular question and with their resilience to really keep going when learning the complex method of long division. We have also been learning how to use parenthesis and semi-colons to add chatty asides into diary entries, which we will be writing next week about the day a fire destroys the camp site in The Explorer. This week, we had a go at writing from the perspective of one of the other characters from the story. 

Other highlights include creating our own version of 'The Scream' by Edvard Munch by using a combination of our photography and pastel skills. We have also really enjoyed creating our own websites in computing lessons. 

Finally, Friday was wear yellow day in school, a day focused on positivity and to raise awareness about young people's mental health. All of year 6 got involved with a few costumes in particular really catching the eye! 

Week 5:

In year 6 this week, we had a special visitor on Thursday afternoon to help us with our learning in our Sikhism unit in RE. Mr Singh came in and taught us about the values he holds as a Sikh, the teachings of Guru Nanak and the symbolism within his faith. He brought in lots of artifacts to show us and even played us a song on his Sarod (which some of us even got to try for ourselves). 

Other highlights include working extremely hard on learning how to solve division problems using factors and introducing long division. In our hockey unit in PE, we enjoyed starting to play small-sided games, putting our dribbling and passing skills into practice in game sitiuations. On Friday afternoon, we conducted an investigation into how shadows change as they move further from a light source. 

We also enjoyed a first meet up of the year with our year 6 buddies. We did some reading and played some getting to know you games which were enjoyed by all.

Week 4:

This week in Year 6, we have been working hard in maths, practicing different strategies for multiplication such as long multiplication, using known facts and multiplying using factors. In English lessons, Year 6 have put a tremendous amount of effort into creating their own 3rd Person narratives about the plane crash in our class novel 'The Explorer'. They have used skills such as parenthesis, prepositional phrases and direct speech brilliantly in their writing to create lost of description, action and suspense, along with taking great pride and care in their presentation and handwriting, which you can see in some of the photos below. Another highlight was our art lesson on Thursday afternoon in which we were set the task of using our photography skills to create a piece of album artwork. After taking inspiration from some very famous examples, we had a go ourselves and had lots of fun being creative with our ideas and using the skills we learned last week to edit the light and dark within our photos. We also ended the week with a practical science lesson in which we explored reflection further by making our own periscopes and testing them by playing various games such as 'who is hiding?' and 'who has swapped seats?' using our periscopes to see over high objects (the comfy chair placed on the table). 

Week 3:

Week 3's highlights includes year 6 producing some fantastic writing. We have been focusing on using the skills, parenthesis and using direct speech to enhance the action and have been writing about the build-up to the plane crash in The Explorer. Next week, we are going to be writing our own version of the crash for our hot write. We have also done some practical science by exploring and measuring how reflective a range of different materials are using light catchers. In our Geography lesson, we learned about how and why the world's population has increased so much in the past 500 years. 

But perhaps the highlight of the week for many of us was the chance to draw our school building as part of our school heritage celebrations. There are some absolutely fantastic examples included in the sideshow below. 

Week 2:

This week, year 6 have continued consolidating their place value knowledge, focusing on rounding, multiplying and dividing by powers of 10 and negative numbers. In English lessons, we have been exploring how to use parenthesis to describe the characters in our narratives based on The Explorer and how to use prepositional phrases to show where and when within our sentences. 

We have also started our first Science unit of the year, which focusses on Light. This week, we learned that light always travels in straight lines and how we see objects. On Friday afternoon, we also created some fantastic photography artwork. Year 6 had to create a piece of quadrant art consisting of four photos of different pieces of fruit. They were challenged to explore creating contrast with their colours and use a range of filters and editing tools to add light and dark into their pictures. Take a look at some of the fantastic examples below. 

Week 1:

Our new Year 6s have made a super start to the new year and have settled in very quickly after the summer break. We started our first day with a few team-building challenges which focused specifically on communication and listening to one another. One of these challenges involved creating a tower out of spaghetti and marshmallows ; some were more successful than others, but each group impressed me with their efforts! We have also used this week to recap important school values such as our British Values, Protected Characteristics and Zones of Regulation, focusing on how we can implement them within our classroom this year. 

We have enjoyed the start to our new class novel 'The Explorer' by Katherine Rundell and have started a sequence of writing in which we will be creating narratives based on the plane crash in the first chapter. This week, we have specifically focused on the SPAG skill – prepositional phrases. In our Maths lessons, we have focused on place value, introducing reading, writing and interpreting numbers up to 10,000,000. We have also enjoyed the start to our new art unit which focusses on photography. In our first lesson, we were tasked with creating a cityscape from pictures from a department store catalogue- there are some fantastic examples below.