Years 5 & 6

Years 5 and 6 Curriculum Overview

We are very excited to welcome you back for another fantastic year with lots to look forward to. We begin the Autumn Term with our topic of Darwin’s Delights which will take us on an exciting expedition with Darwin and his crew aboard the HMS Beagle. Along the way we will visit the Galapagos Islands and learn all about the species that helped Darwin develop his theory of evolution. We will also be considering how religious leaders viewed Darwin’s work.

In our English lessons, we will be concentrating on mostly non-fiction writing with the purpose of informing the reader. We will focus on each stage on the writing process and allow the children to become fully immersed in the text type and the features required, building up to a piece of writing in that genre to demonstrate their understanding. During our guided reading lessons, we will be reading a range of texts to develop inference and deduction skills; explanation skills and improve fluency and expression. Cursive handwriting and beautiful presentation will still remain a priority and we will continue to practice this as well as learning our weekly spelling rules and associated words.

In maths, we will be starting with our unit on place value which will support the children with developing the sense of numbers up to and including millions numbers. We will be comparing and ordering these numbers; developing our rounding skills and learning more about negative numbers in context. Speedy recall of times table and division facts is important for all areas of maths and so these will be a priority for us.

In Science, we will be learning about life cycles and the classification of animals as well as building on our prior knowledge about plants and we will end this half term learning about electrical circuits.

Our art focus for this half term is to develop our sketching skills in order to be able to show movement in our drawings. We will also be developing collaging and printing skills.

In PE the children will be working on improving their fitness and developing their knowledge in multi-skills. For PE days, please can children come to school wearing their PE kit and ensure that a jumper and tracksuit bottoms are worn on colder days as the children will have a session outside. Please also ensure appropriate footwear is worn on these days.