Year 6 Allen

Welcome to Year 6 Allen

Wow! What a busy start to the year it has been! We have already started to work on becoming more independent learners and also had to apply for positions of Head boy and girl, Prefects and Head of our new houses, our head boy is Jack Hooley and our head girl is Mia Whittaker.

We are working really hard in class to improve our reading for pleasure and our reading at home, by reading at home with an adult every night, we are able to record it on our reading charts and then possibly win some rewards.

Handwriting and presentation:

Handwriting is a focus for us in year 6, as they are assessed on this throughout the year. By Year 6, your child should have developed their own handwriting style. They will be expected to write legibly and fluently, in accordance with the Academy’s handwriting policy. Also, if they want to achieve a level of greater depth in their writing, they need to have a cursive and legible style. They might still need reminding of certain rules such as – never join capital letters to the following letter!

Reading Comprehension

• Children in Year 6 are encouraged to read a wide range of texts and to discuss a wide variety of narrative, non-fiction texts, poetry, plays and textbooks in order to understand that texts are structured in different ways and written for different purposes. They will have an opportunity to read books from an assortment of authors, classic stories and plays and poems.
• Each term, we have a class author and we read many of their books.
• We learn new reading strategies to decode and understand extracts from texts and how to answer questions on it. We also do independent comprehension work and look at what we have done well and what we can do to improve next time.
• They will complete book reviews, giving reasons for their opinions and making comparisons with other texts.
• Children will be reminded to check their reading makes sense, discussing their understanding of the meaning of certain vocabulary as they read. They might also be encouraged to ask questions about the text to further develop their understanding of what is going on and draw inference about character actions, speech or motives, providing evidence. Inference involves using the clues in the story or picture to make a good guess. It involves figuring something out which isn’t fully explained and draws on a child’s existing knowledge of the world.
• They will also be encouraged to make predictions based on what they’ve already read, summarise key points to show good comprehension and look out for interesting phrases that authors use.
• Don’t forget to read at home every night. If you read regularly with an adult then you will be able to take part in our class competition to see who has read the most over the half term.

• Please make sure they are recording the number of pages that they have read and are writing something about that section, in their reading journals. Allow your child access to a dictionary so that they can check the meaning of words which they cannot work out themselves (there are free ones online).

Autumn Term

English

In the first half term, we focused our English learning around the story of Wolves in the Walls.  It was great and quite scary too! As well as reading it and writing our own version, we also created our own fantasy creatures and wrote non-chronological reports about them. We worked really hard to improve our presentation too.

In the second half term we focused on the story The Dragon Machine and we have used this story to practice writing new character and setting descriptions and also improve our sentences by looking at subordinate clauses and relative embedded clauses. The whole class was really excited to write their own versions of the story and we had a range of alternative versions from Tiegan’s Pegasus Machine to Mia’s Rataclysim.

Mathematics

Now we are in Year 6, we know how it is important to know all of our number facts instantly! By now, we should all know our times tables facts. Please spend 10 minute every night recalling multiplication facts.  Any practice we can get counting money, telling the time and working out time differences would be great for our Maths skills. In class, we have been trying really hard to get better at our reasoning skills.  Looking through our books, you can see that now we are much more able to use sentence starters to help us explain what we think in Maths.

Topic

Our topic this term has been changes and we have been looking at the life cycles of different animals and comparing the life cycles of mammals to the life cycles of amphibians, insects and birds. In teams the children planned and carried out an investigation to find out the conditions needed for germination of a seed, the children made their own predictions and used their results to see if their prediction was correct.

Residential

This term some of the year 6 children went on the residential to Cholmondeley Castle for two nights and three days. We did lots of exciting things including a competition to make the best shelter out of a waterproof sheet, sticks, rocks and anything else we could find, it was great fun! The children were given the chance to sleep in the shelters they had made; none of the children chose to do this as there was lots of rain. At our camp we had our chef who made us lots of yummy food and hot chocolate to warm us up. We learnt how to scale a fish and some of the children even attempted to eat the fish eyeball- Luke even swallowed it! We made our own pizzas and got to choose which toppings we wanted on it and then we cooked it on a pizza oven and they were delicious! Each night we ate our tea around the campfire and sang lots of songs and played games before we went to bed. The children were also convinced that they had manged to find a ‘wifi tree’ in the middle of our camp!

Spring Term

English

We have looked at the narrative The Lost Happy Endings by Carol-Ann Duffy.  We have used this book to help us write a narrative from a familiar setting. We planned to change the conclusion of the story when we wrote our own endings and we were all very proud of the results. We wrote diary entries to show how we can empathise with a character and used modifying adjectives, adverbs and prepositions to improve our writing. We also looked at using dialogue in our stories for effect and we worked really hard to embed these into the rest of the story.

Maths

In Maths we have been developing our understanding of fractions, decimals and percentages and also how to get better at reasoning. We have been practicing adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions as well as fluency questions we have been practicing solving word problems and picking out key information.

Topic

Our Science topic for this term has been Evolution and Inheritance, the children have been identifying characteristics that have been passed on from parents to offspring. They have been discussing characteristics that they think they have inherited and who they think they have inherited these from. We looked at how living things have changed over time and that we can use fossils to find out information about things from millions of years ago. As well as adaptations in humans we also looked at how plants and animals have adapted to suit their habitat and how adaptions can lead to evolution. The children really enjoyed looking at each other’s pictures and seeing how they have changed from when they were a baby.

World Book Day

Year 6 looked at the book You Must Bring a Hat by Simon Philiip, the book is about a party where you must wear a hat to be allowed in. So the children wore their own party clothes and a hat to school for world book day. They created their own invitation to a party and changed the item that was needed to be allowed into the party, they used superlatives to make their invitations more exciting.

100% Attendance

Attendance is very important in every year group but especially Year 6 as we are learning new things to help us with our SATs every day. To celebrate, the children who had 100% attendance went on a trip to Boggart Hole Clough to have a go at Simply Cycling. Whilst they were there they got the chance to ride lots of different types of bikes including lying down bikes, three wheel bikes and some children even got to ride in the basket whilst Miss Bewley rode them around the track!

Summer Term

SAT’s

In our Reading, English and Maths lessons, we have been doing lots of revising for our SAT’s exams. The children have all given 100% effort and we are all incredibly proud of each of our students and well done to all!

Year 6 SATs Timetable:

Topic

Our topic for the summer term is World War II and we are going to be looking at the book The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas as part of a transition programme with the local high school. We have started looking at evacuees and the children have put themselves in an evacuee’s position and written what they would take with them if they were to be evacuated and why they would take these belongings. We are looking forward to carrying on with this topic for the rest of the term and we have some exciting trips planned to give the children some wonderful experiences.

Exciting News!

Some of the children from our academy were shortlisted to go to a Regional Awards Ceremony in Sheffield, there were different categories: Times Tables Rockstars, Short Story Award and an Artist Award. Lee Shelley from Year 6 Boyle won the Short Story Award and Blessing Rashidi from Year 6 Boyle won the Times Table Rockstars competition. All of us are so proud of their amazing achievement.

Class Staff

Julie Smith Teaching Assistant

Julie Smith Teaching Assistant

Sharon Croke Teacher

Sharon Croke Teacher

My name is Sharon Croke and I live with my husband Richard and our son Jack. I was born in a little village in County Wexford in Ireland.

I moved to London when I was eleven years old with my parents and siblings. I attended secondary school in London and went to University there too.

I moved to Manchester when I qualified as a teacher in 1999. I have worked in the academy for the last seventeen years. I have taught in Reception, Year one, Year two, Year three and Year Six. I have been the Vice Principal for the last four years and my responsibilities include KS2 lead, maths lead, assessment and curriculum lead.

I am very passionate about teaching and I believe that all children can achieve and reach to their full potential.  I love working in Blackley and I think our children here at Blackley Academy are amazing.