What is taught in year 6 English?
Year 6 will be a formative and exciting year for your child. Now that they are at the top of the school, they will be preparing for both SATs and secondary school in earnest, and they will develop much more independence and resilience over the year.
In English, your child will now be expected to understand how to use a full range of punctuation, to write with a wide variety of sentence structures, use powerful vocabulary, and to generally spell words accurately. They may well be fully independent readers, choosing their own books and non-fiction texts based on their own interests. The writing your child does at school will be increasingly confident and creative.
Grammar, Punctuation and Writing in Year 6 – your child will learn to:
Understand and use the passive voice to change the focus of a sentence or in formal writing. In a passive sentence, the person or thing that is doing the verb is not as important as the person or thing that is having the verb done to it or them.
For example:
Active voice: The dog chewed the slipper.Passive voice: The slipper was chewed by the dog. or The slipper was chewed.
Active voice: We added sodium to the beaker.
Passive voice: Sodium was added to the beaker.
Use different techniques to link ideas across paragraphs to give their writing cohesion. To help their writing flow, your child will be taught to use cohesive devices such as:
Determiners (such as the, a/an, this, those, my, your, some, every) to explain exactly which thing is being talked about. For example: ‘some spiders are venomous’ or ‘that spider is venomous’.
Pronouns (such as he, she, it, them) to avoid repetition. For example: ‘Liz was hungry so she made a sandwich.’
Conjunctions (such as but, and, because) to link ideas together. For example: ‘I went to play football after I’d finished dinner.’ or ‘I asked him to move so I could see the sign.’
Adverbials (for example ‘later that day,’ ‘when we’ve finished’) are phrases that work like adverbs to provide more information about a verb. Fronted adverbials are particularly useful for creating links between paragraphs, for example: ‘A few days later, he decided to try again.’ or ‘On the other hand, homework helps children to progress.’
Ellipsis (missing out a word or phrase when the assumed meaning is obvious) can help text to flow. For example: ‘I wanted the red jumper, not the blue.’ rather than ‘I wanted the red jumper instead of the blue one.’
Understand the difference between informal language, the type of language we use in everyday speech, and formal language that we might use in presentations or in some forms of writing. Your child will learn to think about the purpose and audience of their writing and choose the right level of formality. As part of their work on formal and informal language, your child will learn about:
Using the subjunctive form in formal writing, for example: ‘Were you to look at the numbers, you would see the problem.’ or ‘If you were to practise more, you would get better.’
Using question tags in informal speech, for example: ‘That’s the right answer, isn’t it?’
Using formal vocabulary, for example: inquire, recommend, assist.
Use semi-colons, colons, and dashes to link sentences that are closely associated.
A semi-colon is used to join two sentences that are to closely linked to be separate sentences. For example: ‘I’ll be there tomorrow; that’s a promise.’
A colon can be used to join two sentences where the second idea is caused by the first. For example: ‘All the practice was worth it: the boy got full marks.’
A dash can be used to replace a colon or a full-stop – particularly in informal writing. For example: ‘I’ll be there tomorrow – that’s a promise.’ or ‘All the practice was worth it – the boy got full marks.’
Use colons, semi-colons and commas when writing lists. Your child will practise using a colon to introduce a list and commas to separate items, for example:
Choose any of the following: sandwich, crisps, juice, water, apple, grapes and cake.’Use hyphens to make their meaning clear.
Hyphens can be used to make compound words, for example ‘man-eating tiger’ (rather than man eating tiger).Hyphens can be used with prefixes, for example to show the difference between ‘re-cover’ (cover again) and ‘recover’ (get better).
Use different ways of presenting non-fiction, for example by using headings, subheadings, captions, columns, bullet points, tables and so on.
Practice finding antonyms (opposites) and synonyms (words with similar meanings for words) for example, shouted, called, whispered, mumbled.
Spelling - In Year 6, your child will continue to practise:
to spell words with silent letters, for example, doubt, island, lamb, solemn, thistle, knight
to spell words ending in ence/ance or able/ible
to spell more homophones and other confusing words
to talk about word families, for example, sign, design, signature, significant
to use a thesaurus to find new words
to use a dictionary to check their spelling
And that’s it for our guide to Year 6 English! We wish you and your little Year 6 all the best, and are super excited for you to engage with the course!
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