Class Six: Year 6

Welcome to Y6

Dear Parents,

I hope you have had a relaxing and enjoyable summer.

The children have settled well into Y6 and thoroughly enjoyed the first of this year’s events in the form of the RiverLAB project with the Tees Rivers Trust. They learnt a lot about sorting freshwater invertebrates and using keys to identify them as well as producing some lovely artwork; printing tea-towels to show the lifecycles of some of the creatures they found. This made a great start to our topic this half term ‘Rivers’, which will now take on a more geographical focus.

In English, the children will be working on poetry, modern retellings of narrative stories and non-chronological report writing. The children will continue to be given weekly spellings on a Monday to be tested on a Friday. The children’s reading books will be checked on a regular basis and they will receive a number of reading raffle tickets related to how much they have read. In order to receive raffle tickets, the children need to ensure that their reading records have been signed by an adult, although they should be recording their reading themselves. It is very important that children continue to read regularly at home during Y6 and your help with this is very much appreciated.

Mathematics this half term will initially focus on addition, subtraction, multiplication and division before moving on to work on fractions. The children will continue to practise times tables on a regular basis, going up to x12 and they should learn these alongside their corresponding division facts. They should also work on memorising square and cubed numbers for these tables.

In Science during the first half term we will be working on extending children’s knowledge and understanding of plants, in-particular seed dispersal, plant nutrition and identification using keys.

ICT will involve developing the children’s skills in using multi-media to present their learning related to topic work and working with Scratch to program. Art this term will be on landscapes with children developing their drawing skills and learning about the work of Lowry and other landscape artists.

In RE the children will be learning about what it means to be a Muslim. The children will continue to develop their knowledge of French, working on language related to the topic ‘Les Portraits’. In PSHCE we will be looking at gaining independence and taking on responsibility and new challenges. In connection with this we will be attending the 'Crucial Crew' event in October - details to follow shortly.

We will continue to have two P.E sessions per week, on a Monday and Wednesday afternoon. For these sessions the children will need a suitable indoor and outdoor kit (consisting of dark coloured/ red shorts/ trousers, white/ red plain t-shirt, jumper, plimsolls and or trainers). This should be in school on a Monday and stay until Friday as sometimes PE sessions may change day.

Homework will continue be given out on a Friday each week. This will usually consist of two activities both of which will either link with work being carried out in class or to revision re-vision of previous learning. Homework should be back into school on a Monday. We appreciate your support in ensuring that these tasks are carried out to further the children’s learning. If there are any issues with homework in a particular week please could you get in touch with me directly and more time will be provided.

We look forward to a happy and busy term. Please feel free to contact me if you have any queries or concerns. Yours sincerely

 Mr A Shackles