Welcome to Morpurgo class page

Welcome to the Morpurgo class page!  Here you will find important information about our class and life in Year 6.

Mr Beesley is the class teacher with Mrs Best working alongside him. Mr Ford will be taking the class for PE on Wednesday afternoons and Mrs Sheen will be teaching the class every other Monday afternoon.

Curriculum Overview – AutumnTerm

In English this half-term, our class text will be "Rose Blanche" by Roberto Innocenti and Ian McEwan. We will be starting this unit in our first week and we will use the characters and settings to inform our writing.

In Maths, we will be focuisng on place value and then moving onto addition and subtraction. In our daily fluency work, we will be reviewing learning from previous years to help us recall key facts.

Our Science units are Living Things and their Habitats - Classification and Animals Including Humans - The Circulatory System. The children will be learning about the key functions of the circulatory system as well as how living things are classified based on their characteristics.

Our History enquiry this term is The Mayans. The children will be learning about how Mayan civilisation was structured as well as finding out about what daily life looked like for Ancient Mayans.

Our Geography enquiry this term will be "Why does population change?" In this inquiry, the children will be studying the factors behind population change as well as identifying patterns in population decline and growth around the world.

We will also have a weekly French lesson where the children will be developing their vocabulary and develop their conversation skills.

Reading

Listening to your child read aloud at home is really beneficial, so your support is greatly appreciated. Reading aloud on a regular basis supports both your child’s reading fluency and expression. We encourage children to read a range of genres, but also to read texts which they find interesting. Your child will also have the opportunity to bring Big Cat books home, which include both fiction and non-fiction, as well as poetry. Please record any reading your child does at home on the BoomReader app. When your child finishes their book, they will complete a quiz on it in school on Accelerated Reader. This will assess their understanding of the text. The children can also complete this quiz at home if preferred.

To further support your child's comprehension skills, please ask a range of questions. 

PE

PE sessions are on Wednesday with Mr Ford  The children are to come in their PE kit. Please ensure that all PE kit is clearly labelled with your child’s name.

Long hair should be tied back for lessons. Jewellery should not be worn in school. This is especially important for PE.

Water bottles, snack and school bags

Children are permitted to bring water bottles into school.  Please ensure that bottles are taken home on a daily basis for washing and are clearly labelled with your child’s name.

Children are encouraged to bring a healthy snack in to eat during their morning break. As we have children with nut allergies in school, please ensure that snacks from home are nut free. 

Children need to bring in their black school bags and reading books each day.

Homework

Homework this term will focus on the three core areas of: reading, times tables practice and spellings. We will also be setting additional reading and maths homework for the children in Year 5 and 6.

• Spellings: An overview of the spellings for the year will be sent home. Please practise these each week with your child. You may also wish to look ahead at future spellings to support them further. The spellings patterns follow those we are learning in school.
• Reading: Children are expected to read a minimum of five times at home. Please record these reads on Boomreader - thank you for your support with this.
• Times Tables: TT Rock Stars allows your child to test their times table ability against the clock in studio mode or practise following this week’s teacher set activity. The teacher set activity will set a different combination of times tables to focus on building your child's confidence and ability in time for the Times Tables test at the end of the year.  You can log in via https://ttrockstars.com/ or by downloading the app. Login details will be sent home, but please contact me if you need these again.
• Maths and Reading CGP books - the children will bring home their CGP books and have a number of pages to complete each week. Please return these books each Thursday and we will mark them in school. CGP books will be sent out each Friday.

Should your child have any questions/queries regarding their homework tasks, please encourage them to ask a member of staff so that additional help and support can be given.

Contact

Please feel free to contact me via my school e-mail: cbeesley@tarvinprimary.school

Alternatively, you can contact me via the school office or at the end of the day (01829 740399).

Kind regards,

Mr Beesley