We hope that you had a lovely Christmas break. May we take this opportunity to thank you for the cards and presents that were gifted to us. It was very kind of you all and we are very grateful. As always, we enjoy working with our Year 6 pupils and feel sure that they will continue to progress in 2026. Welcome to the spring term where we look forward to the continuing partnerships between home and school.

Reading

Our goal is to create confident, fluent, independent readers. At Latchmere, we prioritise reading and have carefully chosen a variety of texts which your child will study this term. To develop fluency, we use a number of strategies such as choral reading (whole class read together) and echo reading (the teacher models the reading and the class echo back). We also have the Latchmere Reading skills. These are based on comprehension skills such as retrieval, inference, summarising, making links, prediction and vocabulary.

In Year 6, we will be studying ‘Friend or Foe’ by Michael Morpurgo and using a range of non-fiction texts to support the British Empire and World War 2 topics.

There is also a fantastic range of fiction texts linking to our World War II topic.  Recommendations are in the ‘Year 6 Recommended Reading list’ which can be found on the school website. Reading books and reading records should be brought to school every day. As discussed in lessons, your child should maintain a regular reading habit at home and complete at least two in-depth entries per week.

Maths

Our curriculum is based on the White Rose Maths programme. This research-based initiative ensures that the skills and concepts children taught are fully embedded before moving on. The children are taught strategies such as bar modelling and have plenty of opportunities to use manipulatives such as counters and dienes all the way through the school.

This term, we will be focusing on ratio, algebra, decimals, fractions and percentages, area and perimeter and statistics.

Children should also use the Times Tables Rockstars programme to increase their quick recall of multiplication and related division facts.

Curriculum Highlights

In the spring term, our main topics are the British Empire and World War II. We will consider the key characteristics of the British Empire, looking at a timeline and key concepts. We will consider the impact of British imperialism on India and the wider world, considering the role of Mahatma Gandhi. We then consider the decline of the British Empire and its legacy on present-day Britain.

During the WW2 topic, we will explore reasons for the outbreak of the war from different perspectives and consider the reasons for, implications and repercussions of conflict in general. As well as learning how the normal environment of children’s lives changed during the war, especially due to evacuation, we will also be looking at how World War II affected people locally and globally.

In science, our topics are electricity and working scientifically: we will conduct experiments by varying components within different circuits and learn about renewable energy sources.

For more information about the spring term learning, please refer to the ‘Overviews and Programmes of Study’ on the website.

Lastly, we wish all of you and your children well during this final year at Latchmere.

Thank you in advance for all of your support.

Thank you in advance for all of your support in the year ahead,

The year six team

Mr Cooper          Mrs Ko                  Mrs Grima           Mr Lamb              Miss Regan