This term year 6 are reading The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. The children are loving the supernatural elements and trying to predict what will happen to Nobody Owens.

Neil Gaiman is an English author of author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and a screenwriter. Please be aware that not all of his books are appropriate for children, if you are unsure about any titles, please come and ask. 

If you are looking for more books to keep your child excited by reading please follow this link.

For the first part of term one, Sycamore Class are going to be learning about how to write journalistically. We will be learning about how to use correct language, the difference between direct and reported speech, how to use exaggerated language and how to interview members of the public. We will then write our own newspaper report using all that we have learned.

For the second part of the term, we will be learning about the story of Macbeth, doing some drama around it, writing scripts and creating characters.

gps

In spellings we are using the Read Write Inc spelling scheme. The children will bring home some words in their homework diaries which I will also publish on Seesaw. Please practise these with your child and add suffixes/prefixes as needed.

In GPS we will be learning about different sentence clauses and active and passive voice. We will also be learning about bullet points and colons/semi-colons. Our homework will be mostly based on these topics.

In year 6, we are mainly following the White Rose order of topics, which allows the children to build on their previous learning in small steps.

We are currently learning about Place Value. This includes using larger numbers up to 10,000,000; multiplying and dividing numbers by 10, 100 and 1,000; rounding; and using negative numbers.

Once we have completed this unit, we will be moving on to Four Operations which includes many of the skills the children will use in later life: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. We will be learning how to do this with increasingly large numbers, using formal written methods (including long division) and  beginning to think about the early stages of algebra.

Homework will be based on skills we have been learning that week in school. If you feel your child needs more practice, please go to IXL or TT Rockstars and enter their login (found in their homework diary)

This term, we will be learning about classification. We have talked about the different characteristics that plants and animals have, how Carl Linnaeus created a classification system for them and how they could be grouped by these characteristics. We have begun to design our own creatures that we are classifying.

Later on this term, we will be learning about micro0organisms and how they can help us in our everyday lives. 

Brush up on you knowledge and complete a quiz here!Quiz

Is my route to school safe?

This is the big question we are focussing on this term. The children were all adamant that their routes were safe so we will be researching further. We want to check how we can improve the safety, precautions we can take when travelling and what we need to do to prepare for secondary school.

We will use a variety of geographical skills: map work; including plotting and following routes and learning 6 figure grid references; fieldwork in the local area; and learning the differences between physical and human geography.