Primrose Kitten
The objectives focus on developing a love of reading while enhancing comprehension skills. Students are expected to:
🐾 Read various texts, including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
🐾 Understand and explore themes, structures, and meanings in texts.
🐾 Infer meanings and deduce information from the context.
🐾Summarise critical points and make comparisons within and across texts.
Reading
Reading is a fundamental part of the Year 6 English curriculum, aiming to develop a love of reading while enhancing comprehension and analytical skills. Here's a breakdown of the critical aspects:
Comprehension Skills
Inference and Deduction: Students learn to read between the lines, understand implicit meanings and make logical deductions based on evidence in the text.
Summarising: They practise summarising main ideas and themes.
Comparing and Contrasting: Identifying similarities and differences within and between texts.
Evaluating Author's Choices: Analysing why authors make specific choices in their writing, including language, structure, and style.
Reading for Pleasure
Wide Range of Genres: Encouraging reading a variety of genres, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and plays.
Book Discussions: Promoting book discussions to deepen understanding and share different perspectives.
Independent Reading: Supporting regular independent reading to build fluency and enjoyment.
Reading Strategies
Skimming and Scanning: Teaching techniques for quickly finding information in a text.
Questioning: Developing questions before, during, and after reading to enhance engagement and comprehension.
Context Clues: Using surrounding text to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words.
A personal note from Jen: I grew up in London and commuted into central London for a year. Way back then, the only thing to do on a long underground tube journey was to read a book. So, it became a habit that I passed to my kids whenever we would travel by tube, I'd always make them take a book.
Now they are reading chapter books; this generally leads to comments from older generations about how nice it is to see children reading books, etc. I laugh internally; they would be horrified if they knew the contents of my children's books. The Adventure of the Famous Five is too tame for my boys. One time this happened, I told an older couple we were off to Waterstones to see their favourite author at a literacy event. We saw Jamie Smart (author of Bunny vs Monkey and creator of Danger Sausage) describe how to draw fart ghosts.
Writing
Students are encouraged to write clearly, accurately, and coherently for various purposes and audiences.
Objectives include:
🐾 Planning, drafting, and editing written work.
🐾Using a wide range of vocabulary and grammatical structures.
🐾 Writing narratives, descriptions, reports, and persuasive texts.
🐾 Applying spelling, punctuation, and grammar rules accurately.
Writing in Year 6 focuses on clarity, coherence, and creativity. Students are encouraged to write for different purposes and audiences, refining their skills through various forms and styles.
Writing Process
Planning: Mindmap ideas and organise them coherently before writing.
Drafting: Writing initial drafts focusing on getting ideas down on paper.
Revising: Improving content by adding details, rearranging text, and clarifying meaning.
Editing: Correcting grammatical errors, improving word choice, and refining sentences.
Publishing: Sharing final pieces with peers, teachers, or broader audiences.
Handwriting: not necessarily cursive, but that handwriting adds to composition, fluency and spelling.
Types of Writing
Narrative Writing: Crafting stories with straightforward plots, well-developed characters, and vivid settings.
Descriptive Writing: Using sensory details to paint pictures with words, making descriptions vivid and engaging.
Expository Writing: Writing to explain or inform, including essays, reports, and factual articles.
Persuasive Writing: Constructing arguments to convince the reader of a particular viewpoint, using evidence and rhetorical techniques.
Poetry: Exploring different forms of poetry and experimenting with rhythm, rhyme, and imagery.
Writing Skills
Sentence Structure: Varying sentence lengths and types to create engaging and dynamic writing.
Vocabulary Development: Expanding vocabulary to make writing more precise and exciting.
Coherence and Cohesion: Ensuring ideas flow logically and smoothly from one to another.
Audience Awareness: Tailoring writing to suit the intended audience and purpose.
Grammar, Punctuation, and Spelling (GPS)
The curriculum aims to ensure students have a firm grasp of the technical aspects of writing.
Objectives cover:
•🐾 Understanding and using various parts of speech correctly.
🐾 Applying punctuation marks accurately.
🐾 Spelling a range of words, including common exception words and those with complex patterns. Words that they may have had as homework in year 3 or 4 are also included on the list of words they are expected to know, and these can come up in the test.
A solid understanding of grammar, punctuation, and spelling is essential for effective communication. The Year 6 curriculum emphasises these technical aspects of writing.
Grammar
Parts of Speech: Understanding and correctly using nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and interjections.
Sentence Types: Identifying and using different sentence types, including simple, compound, and complex sentences.
Tenses: Using the correct tense consistently, including simple, progressive, and perfect forms.
Clauses and Phrases: Recognising and using main and subordinate clauses and phrases.
Punctuation
Basic Punctuation: Correctly using full stops, commas, question marks, apostrophes and exclamation marks.
Advanced Punctuation: Mastering apostrophes, colons, semicolons, dashes, hyphens and parentheses.
Direct Speech: Punctuating dialogue correctly with quotation marks and appropriate punctuation within the speech.
Spelling
Spelling Patterns: Learning standard spelling rules and patterns, such as prefixes, suffixes, and root words.
Homophones and Homographs: Understanding and correctly using words that sound the same but have different meanings (homophones) and words that are spelt the same but have different meanings (homographs).
High-Frequency Words: Spelling common exception words and words from the KS2 statutory spelling list.
