Cranborne Primary School

English:

Beginning the Spring term, children will explore and journey through the imaginary world by studying The Spiderwick Chronicles: A Field Guide. This is a beautifully presented non-fiction text based on make-believe creatures that enthral and hook the children from the very start. Using this text, we teach the children to use the passive voice, hyphenated-words and descriptive vocabulary that they will use to write their own  exciting non-chronological report. This is a brilliant opportunity for children to write formally using their creativity. 

Following this, the children will read and follow the gripping adventure of Kensuke's Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo. Washed up on an island in the Pacific, Michael struggles to survive on his own. With no food and no water, he curls up to die. When he wakes, there is a plate beside him - he is not alone. Using this as the stimulus, the children we write both a discussion and explanation text. As writing is a school priority for the year, we will continue to focus on the children's understanding of clauses in order to vary their sentence structure. It is important that the children have this knowledge in order to use more complex sentences (relative clauses, parenthesis, adverbials) and punctuation (semi-colons, colons, dashes, hyphens). English homework sent home will be skills based and a recap of what the children have learnt that week. 

In the second half of Spring term, the children will develop their historical knowledge reading Rose Blanche by Ian McEwan together as a class. The book follows a period of time in a young German girl's life as she discovers realities of war. It is a moving story told through carefully thought out description and emotive illustrations. At the end of the unit, children will publish their own newspaper reports, using language and grammatical structures that are appropriate (parenthesis, reported speech) as well as a narrative piece. 

Reading:

Children will engage with and learn from high quality core texts throughout our English sequences. The children are continuously exposed to ambitious vocabulary and we teach them strategies to understand  unfamiliar words and phrases. Throughout the first phase of the writing sequence, the children will also develop their ability to retrieve and infer information and summarise parts of texts.

In addition to this, each morning the children will be taught how to answer specific questions including those that require evidence to support their answer.  This is in preparation for the SATS and we use various extracts from past papers to achieve this. For homework each week, children will be given an extract to read and questions to answer relating to the text. We will go through this as a class as part of our Wednesday morning reading session so please ensure your child completes this on time.

Whilst your child may be confident with word reading, please do try to hear them read aloud. If you can, encourage them to discuss their reading with you by giving their opinion on a character or summarising what has happened. We will check the children's reading records weekly and hear them read in class. 

When reading with your child at home, you may want to use some of the following question stems: 

• Find a word that shows/means/tells you that...
• Give one piece of evidence that shows...
• What does …. suggest about …..?
• How does …… seem …..? 
• Which word is closes in meaning to ….?
• What impression do you get of....?
• How do you know that...?

Spelling:

Spelling rules and patterns will be taught weekly during specific spelling lessons and revisited throughout the week. The children will also be given spelling words to learn at home that are taken from the Year 5/6 Statutory Spelling list. You can find these words as a document uploaded on the right hand side of this page. We will choose words from this list that are related to our core text, and therefore expect the children to use these in their writing. 

Maths:

In Maths, we follow the Herts Essentials Scheme for learning. During Spring term, we will continue to consolidate key arithmetic skills. Please continue to use the links on our class page to practise these. In our lessons, we will explore the order of operations (BIDMAS), calculate perimeter, area and angles. We will reflect and translate shapes and divide fractions by whole numbers. In the latter half of the term, we will look at ratio and proportion, statistics and algebra.

We use a mastery approach in mathematics, so the children will prove their ideas in different ways including images, bar models and representations.

Each morning, the children will complete early work. This involves the children answering arithmetic questions to help develop their mental fluency. You can help at home by asking your child arithmetic style questions such as: 

• What number is 100 times greater than ...? 
• Divide 400 by 8
• Subtract 70 from one million 
• What is one tenth of 6.5km? 
• Find the difference between .... and .....?
• Write one fifth as a percentage
• What number is 10 times less than ...?  
• Find 3/4 of 750
• Round 342.45 to the nearest tenth

Science:

This term in Science, we will look at Living Things and their Habitats. Here, children will learn to describe how living things are classified into broad groups according to common observable characteristics and based on similarities and differences, including micro-organisms, plants and animals. They will be taught to give reasons for classifying plants and animals based on specific characteristics and make their own classification charts . Children will explore the work of Linnaeus to help us describe how living things are classified and look at microorganisms and how they can be harmful or helpful. 

Geography:

In the first part of the Spring term, children will continue to learn about the world that we live in. We will recap prior knowledge using maps, atlases, globes as well as computer mapping to locate countries. Our focus for this unit of work, will be on volcanoes and earthquakes, looking at where and how they occur in the world. Children will create their own maps and identify patterns (such as land use, climate zones, populations densities, height of land). They will describe key aspects of physical geography, including: climate zones, biomes an vegetation belts. 

History:

After half term, we will move onto our History topic surrounding the Battle of Britain and World War II. This is an incredibly interesting yet mature topic and all lessons and conversations will be age-appropriate. The children will learn about a period of change in history, contrasting the past with their present. They will seek out and analyse a wide range of evidence in order to justify or refute claims about the past. They will begin to understand the concept of propaganda and think about how historians must understand the social context of evidence studied.

PSHE:

During the first half of Spring Term, we will look at 'Dreams and Goals'. We will look at how we can further develop a positive attitude and stay motivated when faced with a challenge. In the second half of the term, our topic is 'Healthy Me'. This explores a healthy balance of lifestyle, diet and friendships. 

PE:

Our PE Days will be on Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. We would like the children to wear their PE kits to school on these days. 

Year 6 Teacher Assessment Framework for Writing

Year 5/6 Statutory Spellings

Useful resources:

The websites listed below may be useful in supporting your learning this year:

• General curriculum - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize 
• General maths - https://classroom.thenational.academy/subjects-by-key-stage/key-stage-2/subjects/maths
• Apostrophes for possession - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zdsthbk 
• Relative and subordinate clauses - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zsv6qfr 
• Semi-colons, dashes and colons - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/z92fhcw 
• Simple, compound and complex sentences - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/z4m8r2p 
• Direct and reported speech - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zm63c7h  
• Ratio - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zqsjcmn         https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zffq4xs 
• Multiplying fractions - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/z76j2sg 
• Dividing fractions - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zhw8wty
• Order of operations - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zb48d6f 
• Equations - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zkkts4j
• Arithmetic  - https://mathsbot.com/primary/ks2?fbclid=IwAR2YU1xeSMGi-ZNaLXeBdpamI6FLBB9bq3wOY0mkenrc5NEJIXlV2Vl1nPU 

REMOTE LEARNING

If you are unable to come to school, but are well enough to continue learning, please use some of the resources above. You may also wish to;

• Write a poem about the snow, using figurative language such as personification, similes and metaphors
• Use a picture and annotate with adjectives, expanded noun phrases and relative clauses
• Visit www.myminimaths.co.uk and complete one of the arithmetic papers - you will find the answers for the paper on  there too. Check to see if you beat your previous score 
• Log in to Times Table Rockstars to improve your speed of multiplication recall, Purple Mash to complete a comprehension and Mathletics to revise topics we have learnt recently (area, adding and subtracting fractions, multiplying fractions, long division) 
• Follow this link  https://www.literacyshed.com/the-images-shed.html to inspire creativity, writing a short story/recount about one of the images. There are questions to prompt your thinking.