What another excellent week we have had in year 6.

In English, the children wrote narratives with the purpose to entertain the reader. They got into the role of Olive from 'Letters from the Lighthouse'. They retold the chapter in the book and their final pieces were fantastic. They tried really hard to include all the success criteria to ensure their work was the best it could be. Take a look at some of the brilliant examples below.

Maths this week tested the children's understanding of percentages. They started with finding out 10% and 1% of numbers and used these rules to help them find harder amounts such as 34% of 120 and 19% of 30. Once they tackled the basics of percentages, they then used this knowledge to help them solve real life examples - a life skill which they will need for the rest of their lives.

Year 6 have also been busy in their Art lesson, creating tone and shade using stippling, hatching and cross hatshcing techniques. They then used the techniques that they learnt in their own detailed pictures.

A huge well done! We would also like to take the time to say a huge well done to Sameer, Aria, Jasper and Aargan who competed in the first heat of the Top of the Forms General Knowledge completion. They worked extrmpextremly hard and their team work skills were commendable. They successfully beat Nonsuch Primary and are through to the next round. Good luck guys!

Useful tips on how to perpare your child for SATs

Follow the useful tips on how to prepare for the tests at home and improve your child’s confidence before the exams.

Practice Mental Maths

The ability to do sums in your head is an important skill for your child to have in the Year 6 SATs tests. The best way to improve your child’s mental maths ability is to encourage practice – and lots of it.

There are a number of ways you can integrate mental maths practice into everyday situations, such as asking your child to double-check till receipts from shopping trips, counting change, and being the ‘scorer’ during a game of Scrabble. The more exposure your child has to situations that require them to ‘work out’ mathematical answers without a calculator, the more likely they’ll be to produce correct answers in their Year 6 SATs.

Improve Reading Comprehension

As part of your child’s Year 6 SATs exam, they need to demonstrate their ability in reading comprehension. To help your child prepare for this element of the exam, encourage them to read a range of different texts written in different styles. Take the time to discuss the texts together, focusing on the characters and the structure of the texts as much as possible. Asking questions about what your child is reading and discussing it together is beneficial for improving their reading comprehension skills. The more time your child invests in reading, the quicker their comprehension, vocabulary and decoding of words will improve.

Take Fractions Further

Previous SATs results at Year 6 level show that children tend to struggle with multi-step questions, particularly fractions, when they are combined with addition, subtraction, division or multiplication. As part of your child’s Year 6 SATs preparation, try to focus on working through questions that involve multiple steps. Begin by ensuring that they have a good understanding of fractions as a concept on its own, then aim to introduce questions that require additional mathematical knowledge.

Read Between the Lines

To improve your child’s overall reading and comprehension skills, encourage them to focus on inference and deduction questions. Inference questions ask students to read between the lines of a text, and deduction questions ask them to read beyond the text. These are two vital skills that your child will need to master for their Year 6 SATs.

Here are some sample SATs questions that make use of inference and deduction:

Inference:

…like a toy sitting on a glass table.

What does this description suggest about the boat?

Impression:

Gaby thinks she makes two mistakes while trying to rescue the cat.

What is the first mistake that Gaby makes while trying to rescue the cat?

If your child is preparing for their SATs in Year 6, using a combination of the techniques above will do wonders for improving their overall confidence and stamina on exam day. Practice makes perfect, so be sure to use our SATs resources to ensure that your child is fully prepared.