Welcome to the first term of year 6. 

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

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 continue with Spelling Seeds, designed to work alongside the texts within the Literary Curriculum by providing opportunities to practice spelling rules and patterns.  We will focus on mnemonics and ways to remember spellings, homophones, and words with silent letters.  

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 texts 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 other 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 about their heroes 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.

During the autumn term, our focus will be Justice and Freedom. We will be looking at slavery,  how it caused a gap in society, and the pupils will debate whether they think slavery will still exsist in 50 years. During this focus, we will discuss the class system and how it formed inequality. We will look specifically at Caste systems and the Untouchables, which were formed in India and investigate the impact this has had on the history of class systems around the world. 

We will discuss Dr Thomas Barnardo and his impact on children’s welfare and education. We will be talking about racism and how change in beliefs and knowledge can reduce racism and injustice. As the term progresses, we will understand how black people have expressed discrimination through art form and the pupils will create their own art based on inspiration and knowledge from their learning.

Oldcastle Primary School are fortunate to have adopted ‘Thrive’ a therapeutic approach to help support children with their emotional and social development. Children will take part in group activities in class. 

During lesson time, we will develop our collaboration skills, working with other members of Year 6, and building resilience, perseverance and independence. At the end of each day, we have a check-in session; this allows pupils to speak freely about their day, ask questions, develop empathy skills towards one another and identify ways to move forward. 

All pupils will be able to use these skills during our Outdoor Learning activities with Mr Murdoch. 

School values over the term are managing change, perseverance and determination, respect and responsibility, friendship and forgiveness, compassion and hope. We discuss these every morning during our Morning Thoughts sessions, whereby pupils are encouraged to share their experiences, knowledge and opinions. We will also discuss Children's Rights and Human Rights following the UNCRC format.

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 Monday this year, focusing on theory (Week A) and physical PE (Week B). The pupils will be expected to wear their PE kit every other Monday on Week B.

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

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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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