Year 6 - Oak Class

Welcome to our Year 6 page. Here you will find all the information you need to help your make child progress, by supporting the learning that goes on in class and also giving you a window into what they are doing through the year.

English

We are often asked whether there are any books which we can recommend for pupils. The website: https://schoolreadinglist.co.uk shows lots of good choices for individual year groups. We are using the 'Pathways' teaching approach from The Literacy Company, which provides a scaffold for children to base their own writing. It also ensures that they are exposed to a range of quality texts as they make they way through school.

Writing

At Hill Top, we want every child to leave school confident and capable in their writing. In Year 6, our English teaching is carefully designed to meet the needs of each individual child by focusing on any gaps in their learning.

We use the Alison Phillipson three-week writing model, which follows three key phases: reading phase, toolkit phase, and writing phase. This approach allows children to fully engage with the books they study, explore what makes great writing, and then apply these skills in their own work. By taking time to revisit and embed key skills, our children develop as thoughtful, creative, and effective writers ready for the next stage of their learning journey.

Autumn 1

We began the Autumn 1 term using The Girl and the Dinosaur by Hollie Hughes as the focus for our writing. To start the year, we went back to the basics of sentence construction, exploring what makes a complete sentence and learning about different sentence types — simple, compound, and complex — as well as how to use conjunctions effectively. By the end of the unit, the children applied these skills by writing an informal letter in the role of Marianne, describing her exciting discoveries to a friend.

Following on from our first unit, we continued with a similar theme and based our learning around Darwin’s Dragons by Lindsay Galvin. Our writing outcome for this unit was to create diary entries written from the perspective of Syms, capturing his thoughts and feelings during the time he was lost at sea. During this unit, pupils built on the sentence structure and conjunction work from earlier in the term, while also developing their understanding of verb tense and informal language, including the use of contractions. This helped the children to make their writing sound more personal and authentic, just like a real diary entry.

Autumn 2

This term, we are basing our English work around Fearground by Jennifer Killick. Our writing outcome is to create an exciting narrative that includes both description and dialogue. Throughout this unit, pupils have been learning how to use a range of descriptive devices, such as expanded noun phrases and adverbs, to add detail and bring their writing to life. We have also focused on how to punctuate speech correctly and use dialogue to move the story forward and develop character interactions.

Maths

As a school, we follow the White Rose Maths schemes of learning; please find the overview for the year below, it will help you support your child in knowing what concepts are taught throughout Year 6.

Another useful website is The School Run, as it contains information on what we teach and how we teach it: https://www.theschoolrun.com/fractions-learning-journey.