We hope you had a good summer and that your child will settle quickly and happily into Year 6. We
look forward to working with you and your child throughout the year.
Year 6 offers a combination of excitement and challenge. In common with all other year groups, we aim to provide a broad, balanced curriculum preparing the children for their future education in secondary school. Additionally, we encourage children to reflect in greater depth about themselves both as learners and as members of society. Being the oldest children at Latchmere, we are looking to these pupils to set a good example to the rest of the school. Year 6 children act as monitors, giving them status coupled with responsibility.
As you may be aware, we closely monitor the attendance of pupils at our school as there is clear evidence which shows the correlation between attainment and attendance and pupil well-being.
We believe working with families is very important, therefore when a child’s attendance falls below 96% we intervene quickly to work with parents to identify any barriers to regular school attendance and identify how we can support further.
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 Floodland by Marcus Sedgwick and Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare as well as a range of different text types and sources, both fiction and non-fiction.
Homework
Reading books and reading journals should be brought to school every day, as well as the correct equipment (list provided below). In the meantime, we hope that your child will maintain a regular reading habit at home and complete at least two in-depth entries per week. This has already been
discussed during lessons.
For the first half term, there will be a ‘soft’ start to homework with either English or maths set each week. After the autumn half term, there will be one piece of English and one piece of maths every week. Children have maths homework set on Fridays to be given in on the following Tuesday. There is also a piece of written English homework set on Wednesdays to be given in by Monday.
The nature and content of this will vary according to the particular focus of work being undertaken. Over the year, aspects of grammar, vocabulary, comprehension and writing for different purposes and audiences will all be covered.
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 place value, the four number operations and fractions, decimals and percentages.
Children should also use the TimesTables Rockstars program to increase their quick recall of multiplication and related division facts.
Curriculum Highlights
This term, we will be learning about Richmond Park, the circulatory system, Shakespeare, the Maya and light and shadows. You can find out more information about the autumn term learning by looking at the overviews and programmes of study on the website.
P.E
We would like the children to come to school wearing suitable PE kit on the day that they have PE as it allows more time for each lesson.
Year 6 children should come to school in PE kit as follows:
Curie and Edison Mondays and Thursdays
Da Vinci and Franklin Mondays and Tuesdays
Monday lessons will be outdoors; Tuesday/Thursday lessons will be indoors.
Please ensure that the school sweatshirt is worn and when it gets colder, your child may come in black, grey or dark blue tracksuit trousers or leggings. In winter months, we are happy for the children to also wear gloves, hats and coats in the lessons to stay warm and fully participate. Your child will still be able to take part in the PE lessons if they forget to wear PE kit; however, they will not be allowed to borrow kit from the main school office as they would previously have done.
As always, thank you for your support.
We wish all of you and your children well during this final term at Latchmere.
The year six team
Mr Cooper Mrs Ko Mrs Grima Mr Lamb Mrs Board