Class teachers - Miss Matthews and Miss Vaughan

• September - Respect and Responsibility 

• October - Compassion and Hope 

• November -  Friendship and Forgiveness 

• December - Understanding and Patience

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.

Children will participate in Guided Reading sessions, designed to work alongside the texts within the Literacy Curriculum by providing opportunities to practice spelling, reading, comprehension and engage in group discussions. Our first book, 'Politics for Beginners', will allow pupils to articulate their own opinions about politics. They will learn about political ideologies and parties, civil societies and levels of governance - local, national and international.

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). 

We will deliver 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 about places they want to go in Welsh using increasingly sophisticated language and will be encouraged to extend their sentences using achos, ond and weithiau. 

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, where we will help them make 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. 

Pupils will participate in enrichment sessions every week, where pupils will have opportunities to choose the activity they would like to engage with. Health and Well-being theory lessons will explore identity, the human body, and relationships. 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. 

 Year 6 will be exploring Voices for Change: Justice and Freedom, looking specifically at human rights, colonialism and the British Empire, and how these have impacted Wales and beyond. Throughout this unit, pupils will use a range of research techniques, developing their understanding of the reliability of sources. Pupils will explore the importance of democracy, diversity and inclusion and how this is the foundation of their future. Understanding the difference between fact and fiction will encourage pupils to form opinions relevant to justice, contributing to their responsibility to bring about social change. 

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 if forecasted wet weather. 

Enrichment will take place on a Friday. Pupils should wear their P.E kit every 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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