Welcome to Year 5/6’s Class Page!

Our class teacher is Miss Hutchings.

Mrs Adamson works in our class sometimes too and supports us with our learning.

Picture children growing up, finding their wings and stretching them. Our children are inspired in Y5/6 to confidently take more and more responsibility for themselves and for helping younger children. Our oldest children are the role models for the rest of the school through the way they work and play and care for each other.

Our oldest children are warmly nurtured as they look ahead to taking the step up to secondary school, given the support they need to thrive and given the skills to grow beyond that support as they start to become independent young people.

Our children are skilfully enabled to achieve their very best and to achieve well in the national tests they are challenged to do at the end of Y6; they are equipped with the skills to tackle anything that comes their way, knowing that they have successfully conquered so many things already.

Our young people learn in Y5/6 how to start to become even more their own unique selves, to learn, to share, to create, to perform, to care about each other and our world.

Year 5/6 systems

The details below show our normal routines and practices; we are always willing to discuss variations on these for individual children so that they can be successful at their own level of challenge (such as reduced spelling lists or extended time for homework), and not feeling they cannot do what everyone else is doing.

Maths

In our maths, we practice our core skills every day, aiming to reach ‘automaticity’, where we don’t even need to think about them any more to be able to use them successfully. We use pictures and manipulatives to support our learning – these are a key part of understanding the harder concepts encountered in Y5/6. We work independently but also in pairs and groups, supporting each other and building our learning through articulating and explaining our ideas. We have plenty of time to practise and plenty to challenge us – there is always something new or deeper to explore. 

Homework

We have two pieces of homework every week, apart from the ongoing expectations to read, practice spellings and practice core maths skills for Maths Ninjas. Each is expected to take around 30-40 minutes. We are given these on a Friday and hand them in on a Wednesday. Uncompleted work has to be done in our lunchtimes and our parents are contacted in cases of repeated lateness. We take responsibility for this ourselves, building good habits for secondary school. We are always welcomed to bring individual questions and requests for help to our teacher on Monday and Tuesday lunchtimes.

Reading

It is impossible to overstate how incredibly important reading is. It builds vocabulary, embeds language and phrasing in our minds, helps our understanding of the world around us; it inspires us and moves us and helps us to grow. Plentiful and challenging reading makes an enormous difference to us in English lessons but also far beyond – even in our digital world, reading is still the key way that knowledge is passed on.

In Year 5/6, we are expected to read most days (at least four each week), for a good length of time (at least 15 minutes), and to read both independently and to adults at home, outside school. Many of us choose to read every day and that supports the excellent progress we make at school. We are expected to choose challenging and engaging books and we are supported with suggestions from our teacher when we are ready for a new challenge or to help us discover new authors. We have a very well-stocked school library full of carefully-chosen authors.

In class, we have dedicated time for independent and shared reading on a daily basis alongside taking part in whole class guided reading lessons to enhance our comprehension, fluency and prosody. 

Spellings

Our spellings in Y5/6 revise the key Y3/4 words and spelling patterns as well as all of those for Y5/6 and key vocabulary arising from other topics. We send home a list of all the spellings for the term at the end of the previous term and then each week look in class at the words and pattern covered that week.

Every Friday, we have a test on that week’s 16 words, plus 4 unseen ‘bonus’ words that follow the pattern we have been learning that week. We aim to achieve 12/16 on the main test and have a retest the following week for another chance to be successful if needed; there are rewards for 14/16 and upwards and for successfully applying the rule of the week to the unseen words.

We also have a whole-school spelling scheme, ‘Spelling Buzz’, where we can move up through levelled words every few weeks. We always get an individual reminder in the week before our next test is due, so we can make an extra push to practise at home beforehand.

Maths Ninjas

Every week we have a 2-minute ‘Maths Ninja’ test, as we progress upwards to applying our times table and number bond knowledge to increasingly challenging mental calculations. For example, knowing 4 x 7 = 28, we might be challenged to solve 0.4 x 0.07 or 2800 ÷ 0.7. Our teacher supports us individually when we find types of calculation that consistently puzzle us, to help us break problems down into things we do know and questions we can solve.

Wider Curriculum

Our learning is mainly taught discretely as we are scientists, historians, artists, geographers. We have chances not only to learn and create but to shape what we are taught through bringing our own interests into our school subjects. Take a look at our Curriculum Overviews to find out what we are learning about! 

PE

We run the Daily Mile at the start of every day and have taught PE lessons twice a week. In term 6 we have a set of swimming lessons. We have chances throughout the year to represent our school in competitions ranging from dodgeball to netball to cross-country running.