Hello year 6 and families! We hope you are all well. Parents, you may have seen that a list of useful resources has been added to the school website to help you with some activities to help your child with their learning at home. Below you will find some more activities specific to Year 6 that will help continue some of the things we have been doing in class.

Read, read, read, read and read! I know I don’t need to tell most of you to do this but what an opportunity to have some uninterrupted reading. There are some websites that are offering free downloads of books https://www.researchify.co.uk/audiobooks.html and Amazon Audible are allowing you to download audio books for free www.stories.audible.com

Read for pleasure but you could also discuss the books using the 5 PS:

Patterns and Connections (what patterns do you see within this book or between this and other books)

Point of View (what is your opinion on the book/ the story/ the characters etc)

Puzzles (is there anything that you find confusing?)

Picture (what is the bigger picture of this book e.g. the moral of the story?)

Prediction (what do you think might happen in this story/ to the main character?)

You could even hold your own ‘book talk’ session with people at home.

If you have younger brothers and sisters, you could read to them or listen to them read.

Don’t forget – reading doesn’t just have to be stories. You could read recipes whilst doing some cooking at home, you could read an information book/website to research more about a certain topic (this will link in nicely with some of the other topic areas I’ll speak about later) or you could read poems and jokes.

If your parents have Twitter, they could share your book recommendations on the school Twitter page for everyone to see.

The more you read, the more ideas you’ll have to write about. You could do your own writing invention tasks:

e.g. write a newspaper report about an event that occurred in your favourite book

write an information text about an object in your house

write a spine poem about an interesting object/ picture/ photograph

write a story ( you could even draw a map of your setting like we did in class)

create your own theme park and write a persuasive text to try to get people to visit

write a letter to me or to one of your classmates.

Here’s some writing we could all do together… Every weekday morning from 9:30am, Pie Corbett (yes Pie Corbett himself!!) and some of his friends are presenting a radio show all about ideas for writing. You can listen live and share your ideas with everyone else who is listening (they give instructions on the page) or you can listen again later in the day. I will listen and join in on the mornings I’m not in school and we might be able to spot each other’s writing! www.radioblogging.net

We’ve added some information about spelling to the school website for your parents to see. It includes the spelling lists that we use in class.

Fluency

Continue to practise your times table facts including Roman numerals/ squares and cubes/ scaling.

You could time yourself to try to get faster at answering questions e.g. if practising scaling

Pick the times table you feel least confident with (e.g. 7s)

Write a fact from that times table (e.g. 3 x 7 = 21)

Now scale it up e.g. 3 x 7 = 21 30 x 7 = 210 300 x 7 = 2100 3 x 70 = 210 3 x 700 = 2100

Now scale it down e.g. 3 x 7 = 21 0.3 x 7 = 2.1 0.03 x 7 = 0.21 etc

Time yourself to see if you can get quicker at recording the facts.

You should be able to access Times Table Rockstars for the duration of the school closure using the password in your reading record. I will be setting you some tasks and targets in the coming days. Remember you can access this through the website https://ttrockstars.com/  or download the app.

Continue working on your Doodle Maths activities. I will be sending you some added extras shortly. Again remember you can get to this through the website https://www.doodlemaths.com/  or through the app.

You can also find lots of problem solving activities on the NRich website https://nrich.maths.org/14536  which we used in class a few weeks ago.

Our next planned topic in science is Evolution and Inheritance

In this topic we would learn to:

§ recognise that living things have changed over time and that fossils provide information about living things that inhabited the Earth millions of years ago

§ recognise that living things produce offspring of the same kind, but normally offspring vary and are not identical to their parents

§ identify how animals and plants are adapted to suit their environment in different ways and that adaptation may lead to evolution.

STEM science has free resources that families can use at home: https://www.stem.org.uk/home-learning/family-activities - The ‘Animal Adaptations’ resource would link in well with our next planned topic.

We are coming to the end of our WW2 topic so this would be an excellent time to consolidate all of your learning and link in with some writing activities.

You could:

Write a newspaper report about an event in WW2

Write a story set in the blitz

Write a diary entry in role as an evacuee

Write an information text about a specific aspect about WW2

Write a quiz about WW2 and test your family.

Write a recount of our trip to Cannock Chase Museum.

You could find out some more information about LS Lowry as you did on your art day and try creating some more artwork in the style of the artist.

You can find out some more information here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/clips/zr4wmp3  https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/l-s-lowry-1533 

Also don’t forget to look at the ‘Useful websites and apps’ page for ideas for

We hope this is useful for you and your families to give ideas of some of the things you could be doing to continue your learning.

We will be in touch with more ideas soon and to see you’re all getting on.

Look after yourselves and your families– we miss you very much!

Miss Ball, Mrs Warren and Miss Ware.