BURGHFIELD ST MARY’S C OF E (CONTROLLED) PRIMARY SCHOOL

Theale Road Burghfield Village Reading Berkshire

RG30 3TX

Tel: 0118 983 6387 Fax: 0118 983 2957 E-mail: office@burghfield.w-berks.sch.uk

5th September, 2018

Dear Parents,

Welcome to Year 6. We hope that you had a lovely summer and that the children are happy to be returning to school. Year 6 is a fantastic year for the children, however it is also the year in which they leave Burghfield St. Mary’s. In preparation for this, please could you encourage your child to take responsibility for remembering everything they need for school themselves: their homework, spelling folder, reading book and diary. They will also need to bring their PE kit in school on Monday mornings and take it home on Fridays. Please ensure that your child adheres to the school uniform policy for their PE kit and their uniform in general.

In the first two weeks of this new term, we will be carrying out some assessments to determine your child’s spelling age, reading age, maths age and verbal and non-verbal comprehension ability. In addition, we will be looking at how the children learn and helping them to develop strategies to be more independent learners.

HomeworkIn year 6, we start to introduce homework as preparation for secondary school. We would like the children to revise areas of the curriculum and hopefully start to embed them in their long-term memory. It is especially important that your child continues to read high quality texts and discuss their reading with you. This is extremely beneficial to a child’s development. Continue to read to your child as well so that they can access books that challenge them. Please could you encourage your child to read frequently and to read aloud to you to develop their fluency. The more words that children read, the more they will know and the more they will understand and start to use. Children who are very fluent readers will often skip words they don’t recognise when reading independently as they understand enough to get the meaning of the text, so reading aloud is still very important. When your child encounters a new word or phrase, please encourage them to find out the meanings and jot them down in their home-school diary. Please sign your child’s reading diary each time you hear them read and encourage them to comment on their reading when they read independently. We would like all children in key stage 2 to read at least three times a week to an adult. The children will be rewarded with house points for their comments and the amounts of time they read.

The children will each be given a folder for their weekly spellings. They will also be given a copy of the new National Curriculum Spelling lists to work on and an information sheet on ways to help learn spellings. We will continue this in class and test the children regularly. The children should

Headteacher: Mr A Gallagher

practise their spellings on a daily basis as this is more effective than trying to learn them in one go. In addition, in year 6, we will set maths homework and grammar exercises once a week. The grammar exercises will occasionally be online on the website www.spag.com and the maths on MyMaths which the children all have a log-in for. Please let me know if your child can not access the internet at home. Occasionally the children will be given a longer project type of homework that can be completed over a number of weeks. Finally, we will check that the children know all their multiplication tables and encourage them to practise them. If they are confident with the normal ones, they can start to learn square numbers and decimal number facts, such as: 0.6 x 0.3 = 0.18, 6 x 0.3 = 1.8; 0.06 x 0.3 = 0.018, etc.

The children will find it useful to have access to a dictionary and thesaurus to help them with their homework. If your child would like to do further practise at home, they can still use Mymaths. We are also sending home an overview of the term’s maths with details of the relevant Mymaths pages so your child can practise relevant areas of the curriculum.

Thank you again for your continued support and commitment to Burghfield St. Mary’s Primary School. The help and encouragement that you give your child will make a real difference to their development and progress, as will your support with our classroom strategies. If you have any queries you would like to discuss please call in at the beginning or end of the day. Alternatively, please call or email and make an appointment for a longer discussion.

Kind Regards

Helen Bowen and Tracy Little