In the mornings, Year 6 study English and Maths in Southdown classroom with Mrs Smith. In the afternoon, they join Mrs Keys and Year 5 in Woodlands to cover the rest of the curriculum.

In Year 6, children are encouraged to reading a wide range of both fiction and non-fiction books from different cultures, times and authors.  Children are encouraged to select books to read for pleasure and expand on genres and authors that they have previously enjoyed. Every week, we discuss what we are reading in our Friday morning "book club".  In 2023-24, the 14 children in Year 6 read over 80,000 pages between them - in 2024-25, we are aiming to beat that!

Homework

In Year 6, short homework tasks are set four times a week (Monday - Thursday).

In Autumn Term, the majority of homework set is Maths based and is designed to support individual children in their fluency. As the year progresses, homework tasks will also include grammar work.

Children are asked to spend no more than 10 minutes each evening on their homework task. The majority of children will be able to complete the work given in this time but if they cannot, they are encouraged to stop. The "little and often" homework model is designed to reduce cognitive load and encourage arithmetic methods and other information to be stored in long term memory. If  homework is taking longer than this, then the child should bring in what they have done and we will look at it together at school - this is an encouraged and expected part of the learning process.

As already mentioned, reading is really important. Children are asked to read a minimum of 25 pages a week and record this in their diaries. Sharing reading with an adult is a really valuable experience and you should aim to do this twice a week - this may be the child reading to an adult, an adult reading to the child, reading together or simply discussing the book that your child is reading. 

Autumn Term

English

The first half term we will be focusing on classic literature; introducing some of Shakespeare's most popular plays  and exploring one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes short stories. Along with the famous detective, we will try and solve "The Case of the Sussex Vampire".

Much of our written work is linked to our class texts and their authors. We will be completing fiction and non-fiction writing with a focus on adapting our language to suit the purpose and audience for our writing. With all of our writing this term, there will be a focus on improving the accuracy and flow of our work, editing and developing it so that language and tone suit the reader and the purpose of the text. 

SPAG this term:

Spelling - homophones, suffixes and prefixes.

Punctuation - colons and semi-colons

Grammar - Parts of speech and sentence structure.

Maths

During the first term, we aim to cover all of the Arithmetic aspects of the mathematics curriculum: place value, the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), fractions, decimals and percentages. 

We use the mastery model in teaching maths and use White Rose as the basis for our planning. All children work with apparatus, pictorial representations and maths problems at different times. Solving maths problems using our knowledge is an important part of our lessons and this term. During November, we take part in "Barvember" and there is a focus on tackling written maths problems using Bar Models.