Welcome to Year 6!

The year 6 teachers are Miss Whitehead and Miss Coyne

Autumn Term 1

English

This term, our first writing unit is based around the book 'Windrush Child' by Benjamin Zephaniah.

 In this unit, we will:

• Examine a range of historical evidence relating to HMS Empire Windrush’s arrival in the UK and consider the motives of those on board.
• Write an airmail letter from Leonard to his father
• Explore the character’s emotions in a diary entry
• Write a set of advice for new arrivals in the UK
• Examine and perform the poem Windrush Child by John Agard before writing our own version
• Write a persuasive pitch to the local council to erect a new monument dedicated to the Windrush Generation 

Our second unit will be based on the book 'The Arrival'.

In this unit, we will:

• Explore the issue of immigration and the reasons why people have to flee countries and seek asylum
• Explore characters, emotions, different points of view and the challenges faced by the main character and some of the other characters that have made their way to the new land
• Write a diary from the little girl's perspective
• Write short scripts for scenes and narrative passages to describe what is happening at certain points in the book.
• Write our own narrative describing events in 'The Arrival'

Maths

This term, our children will be learning about place value (the value of numbers up to 10,000,000; reading, writing in words, ordering and comparing numbers up to ten million; rounding to any degree of accuracy; number lines; negative numbers) and the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, factors and multiples and BODMAS).

Below is a document to support teaching of the mathematical skills we learn in class at home with your child for Autumn Term:

Reading

Each week, our children will access four whole-class reading lessons a week. Each week, three lessons will be based on a topic involving a range of quality extracts of both fiction and non-fiction. The fourth lesson will be skill-focused around one of our Y6 reading skills e.g. summarising, inference, retrieval.

Our topics for this half-term are:

• Ibtihaj Muhammad - Author Focus
• Light - Science Focus
• Middle Eastern - History Focus
• Notable People
• Novels
• Picture Books
• Population

Science

This term our science topic is all about light.

We learnt that light travels in straight lines.

We built periscopes to help us understand reflection and the angles of incidence.

Did you know that light bends when it travels between air and water or glass? We found out about refraction by completing two investigations.

Geography

We learnt all about the physical features of Baghdad.

We also learnt about the human features of ancient Baghdad. 

History

Our history topic is the Early Islamic Civilisation. First, we looked at the important events that happened between 570AD and 1258AD. We compared them with events happening in Britain at that time.

The Silk Road was a major trade route which Baghdad was the centre of in the Middle Ages. We mapped where some items came from and researched what else travelled down the Silk Road.