Year 6

This half term, our class text is ‘The Explorer’ by Katherine Rundell. When their plane crashes into the Amazon Rainforest, Fred, Con, Max and Lila have no choice but to be explorers. To begin our topic, our children will be explorers too on a survival day in the Crescent Forest, building shelters, lighting fires, making bread and learning knife skills. In Geography, we will be comparing our forest to UK forests and then to the Amazon Rainforest, using our locational skills to map, fieldwork opportunities at Park Hall, exploring the local area and completing a case study of Manaus and comparing it to our locality. In Science, we will be studying Electricity. The children will be studying how an electrical circuit works and developing their circuit with different components. In PE, we will be focusing on dance, cricket and athletics, ready for our final Sports Day. Throughout this final half term for Y6, they will have many opportunities for enriching experiences such visits to Park Hall, sports competitions and of course transition visits to new secondary schools. Get ready for a busy half term!

During this topic, Year 6 will be journeying back to Ancient Greece to understand what the Ancient Greeks did for us. We will be learning about the influence of Greek art on our own local history, through the development of the pottery industry. We will study key aspects, such as: Government systems, religion and the legacy of the Olympic Game. To delve deeper in to the Government system, we will be visiting London to tour around the Houses of Parliament with our local MP, Jack Brereton. Our Love of Reading text, this half term, will be ‘Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief’, this will help inform our writing in English, whilst also studying different Myths and Legends. In Maths, we will be continuing to work on our arithmetic, focusing on speed and accuracy, whilst also continuing to develop our reasoning skills, preparing the children for their SATs later in the year. Some of year 6 will also be off to Paris – how exciting!

This topic, we will step back in history to explore the effect of war on our locality, debating if World War 1 or World War 2 had the biggest impact. The children will research the Blitz to understand where and why this happened, whilst finding out if Stoke-on-Trent was directly impacted. We will start to understand what it was like for men, women and children during the war and how they were affected. The children will have the opportunity to become a real life evacuee and experience first-hand what it was like to be evacuated from the city to the countryside. From Woolton pie to black outs, the children will have an exciting and engaging overnight stay that they will not forget.
Our English will be closely linked to our topic, as we will be studying The Boy in Striped Pyjamas. We will begin with war poetry, writing our own poem based on WW1, character and setting description, which will be edited into a narrative piece, based upon characters Bruno and Shmuel. Alongside this, we will be holding debates about the morality of the story and who really was to blame?
Our science unit this half-term is all about classifying living things. We will be looking at common observable characteristics allowing us to place animals and plants in to broad groups. Furthermore, learning what the 5 kingdoms are and why fungi has a kingdom of its own. In Art, we will be looking at the work of Salvador Dali and adapting his style when creating a batik piece of work.

During Autumn 1, we will be heading off on an adventure over the rooftops of Paris with Charles and Sophie with our love of reading text Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell. Year 6 will be writing a debate about the guardianship of Sophie, arguing if Charles or Miss Elliot would be better suited, as well as, a setting description from the rooftops of Paris and a well thought out guide to Paris. In Maths, we will be focusing on the key arithmetic skills, including lots of fraction work. Your child will also be engaging with reasoning and problem solving tasks. Our first science topic focuses on Healthy bodies with the component question: How do we make the most of our body? We will be learning about how our lifestyle choices can impact the way our body works, focusing on the respiratory system. Protecting Staffordshire, our topic this half term, focuses upon the question ‘ Are we damaging our world?’ During geography we will be learning all about the environmental threats that face our local area, our world, in the present and potential for the future, and look at ways that we can help to prevent these.