Year 6 will no longer have a list of words to learn. We’ll have an activity which will span across two weeks, reflecting the learning we’re doing in class. Each week, there will be a test requiring us to apply this skill.
Here is a list of suffixes and what they do to a word.
Practise adding the suffixes and think carefully about what spelling rules you need to follow. You’ll be tested on Friday 03 March on ten words which require you to apply this practice.
This week’s Talk Time links to our SEAL statement for next week:
How can you help your group to work well together?
Discuss ideas over dinner, in the car, walking to school and make a couple of notes for our class discussion on Thursday 02 March.
From now on, Year 6 will have Practice Makes Perfect homework each week in the lead up to SATs. The children have a ten minute SPaG test to have a go at. However, it doesn’t have to be completed in ten minutes and they can discuss it with you. We’ll then go through this in our homework review on Thursday 02 March.
They also have a Maths activity page which starts off with some arithmetic questions (which is the first Maths test they’ll do) before going on to more problem solving style questions. Again, we’ll go through this together in the homework review on Thursday 03 March.
We expect children by the end of KS1 to be able to name the seven continents of the world. This might need to be changed based on a story in today’s news!
Our age-related expectations set out what children in each year group should know by the end of the year. The expectations are based on the National Curriculum.
In Geography, for Year 2, one of the expectations is to name the seven continents of the world and find them using an atlas, map or globe.
This might need to be changed based on a story in today’s news!
As part of our Time Travel – Entertainment topic, we’re designing, making and selling some fabulous marble runs. Working in groups of three, we put our heads together to create a plan for how we could construct a marble run out of wood. We had to think about how we could keep it simple enough to make, but complicated enough to be fun to play.
When our designs were finished, we decided to make prototypes out of Lego. This meant that we could figure out where our ideas were too complicated and what sort of measures of wood we’d need to cut. We all found it really helpful to make these prototypes and now we’re prepared to get the saws out and create in wood!
This week’s homework is Creative and will be looked at on Thursday 09 February.
I can see area and perimeter all around me.
We’ve been brushing up on our area and perimeter knowledge this week so where can we see it in the world around us? As a class, we thought about some ideas for things we could do for this homework:
Of course, if you can think of something else, we’ll look forward to seeing that too.
This week’s spellings focus on homophones. Here are lots and lots and lots of homophone pairs. In your book, pick out those which you think you find more difficult and create some trick and tips for you to remember which is which. Good practice would be to get someone to say them in a sentence for you to choose which to use, like we do in class.
On Friday 10 February, I will say ten sentences and you will have to choose which spelling to use.
Forgive the pun… Find out more about the Y2 and Y6 tests coming up.
Forgive the pun… When we say ‘testing times’, we’re not talking about Trump or any other tricky ‘T’ word. Instead, we’re talking about the tests children in Year 2 (the end of Key Stage 1) and Year 6 (the end of Key Stage 2) will do in May.
For children in Year 6, the tests are in the week beginning 08 May. For children in Year 2, the tests – which we often call ‘special work’ – don’t need to be on specific days, but will be around the same time.
To help familiarise yourself with the tests, check out these videos:
We’re sad to read the research indicating that girls begin to lose confidence in their talents at an early age – but you can help combat this!
We’re sad to read the research that came out this week indicating that girls begin to lose confidence in their talents at an early age:
Girls start to see themselves as less innately talented than boys do when they are only six years old, a group of US researchers has said. They said the “disheartening” results suggested the problem could snowball to affect future careers.
The study on 400 children, in the journal Science, initially found both five-year-old boys and girls thought their own gender was “brilliant”. But then only one year later, gender differences had emerged.
The study put sets of five, six and seven-year-olds through different experiments.
In one, the children were read a story about someone who is “really, really smart” but it is not clear who the story is about.
They then had to guess the protagonist from four pictures – two of men and two of women.
At age five, boys pick men and girls pick women around 75% of the time. But fast-forward a year to age six and boys are still picking men while girls are now slightly more likely to pick men too.
You can help!
Whether you have a daughter or a son, it’s important to combat gender stereotypes. Check out this list of great books that challenge traditional assumptions and perceptions. (Princess Smartypants is a great book, by the way!)
It’s also a good idea to emphasise hard work and effort with children, rather than some ‘natural gift’:
Fellow researcher Dr Lin Bian advised parents and teachers to emphasise the importance of hard work. She told the BBC: “[Studies suggest] that everyone does better when hard work is believed as the key to success.
“In our studies, girls might be particularly impacted by the messages focusing on ‘hard work’ – they became equally interested in playing the game as boys.
“Thus conveying the importance of hard work to success could protect and even promote young girls’ interests.”
Our Practice Makes Perfect homework takes us back to Mathletics. Go on live Mathlitics throughout the week and gain 1000 points. There’ll be a prize across Y5 and Y6 for the person who earns the greatest number of points, too.