Class teachers - Miss Matthews, Mrs Taylor Jones and Miss James

• September - Respect and Responsibility 

• October - Compassion and Hope 

• November -  Friendship and Forgiveness 

• December - Understanding and Patience

This year we will be continuing to follow our Literary curriculum. This curriculum consists of whole-class reading and Literacy Leaves.

In Literacy sessions, we will begin the year reading Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.  The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images. A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope.  Pupils will be writing: letters, lists of rules, character descriptions, diary entries, short play scripts, short reports and settlement guides; their main outcome will be retelling a longer story built around a man’s journey to another country.  Our cross-curricular links will develop knowledge and understanding of settlements in relation to human geography and worldwide economic activity. 

Our first Whole Class Reading book is Fly me home By Polly Ho Yen. Leelu feels lost and alone after finding herself in a new city which is grey, dirty, noisy and cold, a world away from the place she calls ‘home’.  Living in a dilapidated flat in a forgotten city and feeling like an outsider at school, Leelu wishes she could fly the thousands of miles back home to where her dad has had to stay behind. Pupils will be developing their retrieval, inference and discussion-based skills. 

Our initial texts link with Justice and Freedom and allow pupils to make links and transfer knowledge and opinions.  We will share the next text with the pupils later in the term (we don’t want to give them away just yet). 

For Welsh this year, we will deliver Welsh Literacy lessons every Friday. We will also be doing daily Helpwr Heddiw sessions. We plan to focus on providing the children with many opportunities to deepen their knowledge and confidence when using Welsh in and out of the classroom. We will be revisiting simple sentence patterns and extending our knowledge of the use of present, past and future tenses. Children will talk and write in Welsh using increasingly sophisticated language and will be encouraged to extend their sentences using achos, ond and weithiau. The children will have access to Welsh reading books on Google Classroom that they can access at home or in school.  

Reading for pleasure is very important, and we expect pupils to bring a book into school with them every day.  All children have access to the school library, whereby we will support them in making an age-appropriate choice.  Children are welcome to bring in books from home as well. Pupils will take part in 1:1 or group reading during independent reading sessions and will be reviewing their book upon completion before changing. 

We will begin the Autumn term by revisiting a range of skills within the number system (place value, addition and subtraction, multiplication and division) using a combination of oral, written and practical methods.  Pupils will be identifying common factors between numbers, rounding whole numbers to 10,000, decimal to nearest whole value as well as solving problems using reasoning skills.  Pupils will be developing their mastery of maths through using equipment and sentence stems to deepen their understanding and build on their ability to recall facts more easily.  An example of a sentence stem for place value is:_____ is equal to _____ (1200 is equal to 1 thousand and 2 hundreds or 1200 is equal to 10 hundred and 20 tens).  This allows pupils to identify number equivalence, digit value and improves their addition and subtraction skills using regrouping. 

During the second half of the term, pupils will use their number system knowledge to develop multiplication and division skills, calculating through practical activities and varying contexts: area and perimeter, and fractions. 

All pupils are encouraged to practice their times tables at home to support their learning.  Times tables are central to mathematics and the ability to recall tables will assist pupils with more challenging mathematical problems.

A lot of what we do in Year 6 is geared towards supporting our learners to be ready for Year 7 and beyond. Year 6 will be learning about setting personal physical and emotional goals and targets that are relevant to them. We will also be learning how we can monitor, review and adapt our behaviour in order to support our targets. 

We will be continuing to explore the importance of a balanced diet and nutrition and the impact that our choices can have on our physical health and well-being. We will also be planning nutritious meals so that we can surprise and treat our families at home! We will be working hard to help each other develop self-awareness and self-regulate emotions in a healthy way, recognising the benefits of doing so. We have a fantastic team this year in Year 6. 

We understand that this is an important year for everyone involved in this learning journey and we are always here to listen, support and offer advice where possible.  Knowing that our learners can communicate their needs and feelings and be able to ask for help from trusted adults will be the key to a successful year.

Year 6 will be exploring the concept of Human Kind which seeks to engage learners how human identity and diversity have been formed. We will study what makes us human biologically and the diversity that comes from it. We will learn about the different communities and societies that humans have created based on their identity. We celebrate the richness of the diverse cultures that flow from our different identities. 

Year 6 will investigate the concept of Human Kind by looking at how justice and freedom is reflected through culture, religion, history and in the modern world. We will be encouraging our learners to become activists who are passionate and speak-up for what they believe in. Our end of term ' Peaceful Protest Rally' will enable them to showcase the skills that they have learnt over the coming weeks.  

Children must remember to bring in a water bottle each day and weather-appropriate clothing, we aim to go outside each day therefore coats are essential is forecast wet weather. 

Health and Well-being sessions will take place on a Tuesday this year. Children will be expected to wear their P.E kit to school on Tuesdays. 

Friday afternoons, Year 6 will be taking part in physical activities at the Recreation Centre for Enrichment.  All pupils are able to wear PE kit to school on a Friday.

We have a number of children in school with a nut allergy.  We strive to be a nut-free school so please do not send in nut products in packed lunches such as nutella.

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To contact your child's teacher please drop us an email via ask@oldcastleprimary.co.uk or call us 01656 815790.  

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