Dear Parents, Welcome back! I hope you had an enjoyable holiday, the children have certainly come back rested and eager to get into Year 6 life. We are lucky to have Mrs. Dolman working with us and continuing the support she started with the class last year. We will continue to include a daily physical activity; your child will need to ensure they come to school prepared with a PE kit. There will also be weekly PE and Games lessons. So far this term in literacy, we have been looking at imagery in poetry. We have mainly focused on the use of personification and have had a go at writing our own poems ourselves. The children will also become familiar with a range of fiction genres exploring the style and structure of different story types before applying these ideas to help them write their own stories. Although your child is able to read independently it would be very beneficial to listen to them read or discuss the text they have read with them focussing on children’s opinions of texts, their ability to infer messages in the text and understand characters in stories. Additionally children will need to continue to work on learning spellings and spelling patterns and developing neat and joined handwriting. Any practice of these skills at home would be really helpful. In Numeracy the children will be working on developing mental and written methods to solve calculations including using decimal and whole numbers. They have already shown a great aptitude to this subject area! Times tables will be sent home soon on a weekly basis to help your child progress in this area. Much of our learning will happen through our topic work which combines subjects such as science, art, history and geography. We have started the year with a short topic on ‘The Wizard of Oz’ which have combined the subject’s art, science and ICT. Later this term we’ll be looking at the topic ‘The Way I see it’, which is a science-based topic focusing on light and shadows, and ‘Ships and Shipwrecks’. No doubt you will have heard about the laptops the children are going to have for the year, there has been little else talked about in class! These laptops will be used regularly in all curriculum areas in school to support learning and help develop children’s skills in becoming more independent learners. Please support us with this by ensuring your child makes good use of the equipment.
The children are able to take these laptops home throughout the week, however please remind them to bring them back in in the morning fully charged! Year 6 is an important year for your child; it is their last year at Blandford St Mary and a preparation time for the move to The Blandford School. It is also the end of Key Stage 2 which will involve assessing your child to see the achievements they have made during Key Stage 2. Despite these important factors my aim is to make your child’s year an enjoyable and successful year. If you do have any concerns or queries, please do get in contact by popping in at the start or end of day or leaving me a message for me to call you. Best wishes
Miss O’Sullivan
Mrs Dolman