Welcome to Year 6
Year 6 is an exciting and busy time for your child!
Over the course of the year we prepare your child for the SATs (Statutory Assessment Tests) in May. Fundamentally our aim is to prepare your child for secondary education. We want your child to be as prepared as they can be for their next stage of education - both academically and socially and emotionally.
Year 6 have two classes:
| 6B - Mr Berry zberry@gpa.education |
| 6S - Mr Saunders jsaunders@gpa.education |
Throughout the year, the children extend their knowledge and understanding in a range of curriculum areas, building on their knowledge from Year 5. The children are taught by specialist teachers for Spanish, Music and PE, meaning that children get the best possible education across the curriculum.
The School Day
The school day in Year 6 for the academic year 2023/2024:
| 8:50am | Gates open and children are welcomed into school-they have an early morning activity to complete whilst registration and dinner choices take place. |
|---|---|
| 9:00am |
Morning lessons begin. Spanish, Music and PE are taught by specialist teachers. Year 6 children have PE on Tuesday and Thursday and can arrive to school in their PE uniform. |
| 10:00am | Maths |
| 11:00am | Morning breaktime - bagels are available for pupils as a breaktime snack. |
| 11:15am | English |
| 12:45pm | Lunch |
| 1:30pm | Curriculum lessons |
| 3:00pm | Class story - we read a class text together to share our love of reading. |
| 3:15pm | Children are finished for the school day. Children will leave at the end of the day with their reading books, reading record and lots of new knowledge they have learnt throughout the day. Please ask your child what they have learnt today. |
As designated home-learning, children are expected to set time aside after school to read at least 20 minutes a day is encouraged. Further to this, children will receive guided reading home-learning, usually in the form of a section of text (variety of genres) and accompanying questions. Children will also receive some maths learning to be completed in a set time given by the class teacher.
Parents/carers: to support the children with their home-learning we ask that your child shares their reading with you, by asking two or three questions about what they have read their understanding will be deepened. Whilst it is important that the children feel supported with their home-learning, they must answer their arithmetic and guided reading questions independently as this will enable the teacher to know where there are gaps in their understanding.
Children have PE on a Tuesday and Thursday, they should have the appropriate kit for both indoor and outdoor PE. Children can arrive in their PE uniform and wear this for the remainder of the day.
Teachers are available in the main playground at the end of the school day, if you have any questions or wish to arrange a mutually convenient time, please see your child's teacher at the end of this day. Alternatively, you can speak to Mrs Mallott kmallott@gpa.education or another member of the leadership team.
Curriculum
Reading, Writing and Maths
Reading
The following criteria outlines what children should be able to achieve by end of year 6:
- Apply their growing knowledge of root words, prefixes and suffixes to read aloud and to understand the meaning of new words that they meet
- Continue to read and recommend an increasingly wide range of fiction (including myths, legends and traditional stories, modern fiction, fiction from our literary heritage), poetry, plays, non-fiction and reference books or textbooks
- Identify and discuss themes and make comparisons within and across books, distinguishing between statements of fact and opinion
- Check that the book makes sense to them, discussing their understanding and exploring the meaning of words in context and asking questions to improve their understanding
- Draw inferences such as inferring characters' feelings, thoughts and motives from their actions, justify their inferences with evidence and predict what might happen from details stated and implied
- Consider the impact on the reader of language, structure and presentation and the author’s use of language, including figurative language
- Retrieve, record and present information from non-fiction
Writing
The following criteria outlines what children should be able to achieve by the end of Year 6:
- Spell some words with ‘silent’ letters, distinguish between homophones and other words which are often confused and use dictionaries to check the spelling and meaning of words
- Identify the audience for and purpose of a piece of writing, selecting the appropriate form and using other similar writing as models for their own, selecting appropriate grammar and vocabulary and understanding how such choices can change and enhance meaning
- In narratives, describe settings, characters and atmosphere and integrate dialogue to convey character and advance the action
- Use a wide range of devices to build cohesion within and across paragraphs or other organisational and presentational devices to structure text and to guide the reader
- Ensure the consistent and correct use of tense throughout a piece of writing as well as subject and verb agreement when using singular and plural, distinguishing between the language of speech and writing
- Using expanded noun phrases to convey complicated information concisely, modal verbs or adverbs to indicate degrees of possibility and devices to build cohesion, including adverbials of time, place and number
- Recognise vocabulary and structures that are appropriate for formal speech and writing, including subjunctive forms, passive verbs to affect the presentation of information in a sentence and the perfect form of verbs to mark relationships of time and cause
- Use higher level punctuation such as ellipsis, commas to clarify meaning or avoid ambiguity in writing, brackets, dashes or commas to indicate parenthesis, hyphens to avoid ambiguity and semicolons, colons or dashes to mark boundaries between independent clauses
The criteria that writing is assessed against in year 6
Maths
The following criteria outlines what children should be able to achieve by the end of Year 6:
- Use negative numbers in context, and calculate intervals across zero
- Divide numbers up to four digits by two-digit whole numbers using the formal written method of long division, and interpret remainders as whole number remainders, fractions, or by rounding, as appropriate for the context, use written methods in cases where the answer has up to two decimal places
- Use their knowledge of the order of operations to carry out calculations involving the four operations
- Use common factors to simplify fractions, compare and order fractions, including fractions >1, add and subtract fractions with different denominators and mixed numbers, multiply simple pairs of proper fractions, writing answer in simplest form, divide fractions by whole numbers, associate a fraction with division and calculate decimal fraction equivalents
- Multiply one-digit number with up to two decimal places by whole numbers
- Solve problems involving the calculation of percentages and the use of percentages for comparison
- Recall and use equivalences between simple fractions, decimals and percentages
- Solve problems involving the relative sizes of two quantities where missing values can be found by using integer multiplication and division facts
- Solve problems involving similar shapes where the scale factor is known or can be found
- Solve problems involving unequal sharing and grouping using knowledge of fractions and multiples
- Use simple formulae, express missing number problems algebraically
- Generate and describe linear number sequences
- Use, read, write and convert between standard units, converting measurements of length, mass, volume and time from a smaller unit of measure to a larger unit, and vice versa, using decimal notation to up to three decimal places
- Convert between miles and kilometres
- Calculate the area of parallelograms and triangles
- Calculate, estimate and compare volume of cubes and cuboids using standard units
- Illustrate and name parts of circles, including radius, diameter and circumference and know that the diameter is twice the radius
- Find unknown angles in triangles, quadrilaterals, and regular polygons, recognise angles where they meet at a point, are on a straight line, or are vertically opposite, and find missing angles
- Describe positions on the full coordinate grid (all four quadrants), draw and translate simple shapes on the coordinate plane, and reflect them in the axes;
- Interpret and construct pie charts and line graphs, calculate and interpret the mean as an average
Parents/carers: If you wish to discuss any of these areas of learning with your child’s teacher, there are three scheduled parent consultations throughout the year and teachers are happy to make appointments before or after school to meet with you. In addition to this, Mr Kevin Dobbs is on the gate every Monday morning and Miss Libby Porter is on the gate every Wednesday morning, if you wish to have an informal chat about your child.
The school uses the Cornerstones curriculum scheme which has the aim of providing, “A broad and balanced, knowledge and skills based curriculum with a creative edge.” Year 6 access schemes called Gallery Rebels, which looks at art as an act of rebellion; ID, looking at what makes them who they are; Hola Mexico, which explores the country of Mexico. Each of which covers the core and foundation subjects.
Tests and Examinations
As a culmination of their primary education, the children will sit their SATs (Statutory Assessment Tests) during the week beginning 13th May 2024. To prepare the children for their SATs week they will have four mock SATs weeks, two in the Autumn term and two in the Spring term.