Year 6

Year 6

Welcome to the Year 6. My name is Mrs Pearson and I have been a teacher at Dame Dorothy for many years. I have worked in Year 6 for most of my time here and I love it. Mrs Elliott works with me and keeps me on my toes. Together it is our mission to offer the very best education for the children in our class.

We start the day running with our daily maths meeting. We use the time to review, revise and practise. The maths meeting is a mixture of counting practise and fact recall (multiplication, division, number bonds etc)

We also practise our calculation skills. We might be adding 5 single digit numbers mentally using our various calculation strategies. We might be practising multiplying or dividing by 10, 100 or 1,000. We calculate fractions and percentages and lots of other basic number skills.

We also complete a bit of problem solving during this time.

Our daily maths meeting gets us ready for a day of learning!

Our daily homework reflects the maths that we have completed during our daily maths meeting.

Literacy is our next lesson. This term we are reading a book called ‘Street Child’ by Berlie Doherty It’s a great story and we will be completing lots of reading comprehension activities linked to it. Have you come across the reading VIPERS? Each letter represents an important reading skill that our children need to master:

V = VOCABULARY

I = INFERENCE

P = PREDICTION

E = EXPLANATION

R = RETRIEVAL

S = SUMMARISING

This is how we design and write our reading comprehension questions.

We will also be linking some of our writing activities to the story.

Please encourage your child to read every day. It is such an important life skill and is essential to their future success.

We love our numeracy lessons in Year 6. We follow the White Rose maths program in our school. We adopt a mastery approach to the learning of maths. We encourage our children to talk about their work and explain how they reached their answers. Mastery in maths focuses upon fluency, problem solving and reasoning. We also encourage our children to represent their work in different ways. This could be a combination of drawings, using concrete apparatus and abstract representations.

This term we are covering ratio, algebra, fractions, decimals and percentages. We’ve got a lot of revisiting previous learning and a lot of new learning to tackle.

We are starting our topic work off this term with a topic linked to Scott of the Antarctic. We will be learning all about Captain Scott’s attempt to be the first to the South Pole. We will be using his very own diary entries to gather first hand information about the expedition. We will work out why his attempt failed. We will also learn about Shackleton and his expedition to the Antarctic.

Our science topic for this term is all about the heart and the circulatory system. We will learn about double circulation through the heart, the function of the valves, arteries and veins. We will also learn about how to keep your heart healthy so be prepared for some lifestyle changes!

PE lessons are on a Wednesday afternoon. Please make sure your child comes to school with the correct kit and can remove any earrings and/or jewellery they may be wearing. We will be playing tennis for the first half term and athletics for the second half term via expert teaching from our PE coaches. Please note, it is essential that your children have suitable footwear for PE sessions. Trainers must be worn. We will be swimming on a Monday afternoon in the final half term before the summer.

Y6 have bi-weekly music lessons. They are taught a wider range of musical terms and are expected to use them when talking about music that they listen to. They continue to learn the ukulele and learn more chords which will enable them to play along with a range of songs. When composing the children in Y6 are going to learn to use notes from the Chromatic Scale to create haunting melodies. They also begin to understand how chords and discords are formed. They take part in weekly singing sessions and are encouraged to sing solo and lead groups when singing in harmony.

Please email me at teacher@damedorothy.org.uk if you have any queries or concerns: I’m happy to help!

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