Year 6

Beech Grove Primary School

Spring Term 2025

Head Teacher Message
Happy New Year everyone and welcome to spring term 2025. The time has flown since children started their new classes in September! This Spring term will fly even faster no doubt as the evenings become lighter and the daffodils start to poke through putting a smile on everyone’s face.

As Head teacher of your school, I continue to be so proud of all of the children and the way they have started back since returning from the Christmas break. Their resilience and adaptability remain outstanding.

This was picked up on and noticed in abundance during the schools Ofsted Inspection on the 22nd and 23rd of October. The HMI Ofsted Inspector was blown away of what he described to us as ‘school is an oasis of calm’ for all children at Beech Grove.

“Pupils at Beech Grove are proud of their school, welcoming visitors with exemplary manners and conduct. They understand the school’s ‘next-door neighbour’ principles and the school’s five golden rules well. Pupils consistently show high levels of respect to adults and to one another. They are happy and safe. Highly trained staff put pupils’ needs first in all they do. Pupils thrive in the warm and nurturing environment that the school fosters.” Ofsted 2024/25. What a fantastic first paragraph of the Ofsted Report to read. I’m sure you’ll all agree.

This term we hope to pick up where we left off before Christmas with our children achieving good progress within their core subject areas, due to the tremendous hard-working attitude of themselves and the dedicated staff team here at school.
“Leaders have created a culture of high expectations for pupils’ achievement. Pupils meet these expectations… Behaviour across school is of a high standard. Well-trained staff create a purposeful learning atmosphere. Pupils’ learning is not disrupted by others. ”Ofsted 2024/25.

Children’s classroom and corridor manners remain amazing which continues to maintain a lovely, positive and caring atmosphere around school. The schools “Next Door Neighbour Qualities” of Respect, Tolerance and Kindness are certainly being upheld. The children take great pride in this in and around school and it is wonderful to see. Please keep having a bit of fun at home and test the children regularly on what it takes in school (and the community) to be a good “Next Door Neighbour”!

This term we will also be hoping for some lovely spring sunshine so that children can make full use of our Secret Garden in lesson time and maybe plant some wonderful spring flowers for us all to enjoy (even the ducks!!!). I always think that spring flowers with their vibrant colours and freshness cheer everyone up from the gloom of the long, dark and wet winter months. They are a sign that lighter nights and warmer weather is on its way! (fingers crossed)

Our teachers have lots of interesting activities planned for this term and hope that you will enjoy hearing what children have been working on at consultation meetings/phone conversations, and will support them with their homework and reading outside of school.

Please, please, please x10000 keep encouraging your child to read at home. Reading is the key to everything! The children are showing such a passion and love of reading in school, we hope you will continue this with them at home.

We also hope that every effort is made by you for every child to attend school regularly. It is so important for your child’s development. We can’t continue to stress this enough. (95% and above is GOOD attendance). As a school we need to bet better on the first and last day of terms. Far too many children have these particular days off.

In addition to this being ON TIME every day for school is absolutely vital so that your child does not miss any of their learning. It can be really upsetting and frustrating for children if they come into a lesson that is part way through and they’ve missed vital teacher input and modelling. It can cause them great distress and being left with a feeling of not understanding what is expected of them.
Its really pleasing to see that our ‘lates’ are reducing and that you are all working really hard to support school on this issue. Well done everyone. Keep up the great efforts. Let’s have all the children in on time every day!

Here’s to a really positive Spring term!

John Dixon

Our work for this term:

English
We are extending our writing skills, and looking at making our writing more complex and interesting for our reader. Using a variety of stimuli for writing, we will be writing a formal letter to the government on behalf of Alan Turing and a narrative based on The Wild Robot. A big focus in our writing will be dialogue and how it moves the story along. We will also continue to build our skills reading skills in reading through book talk and SATs preparation.

Maths
We are going to continue learning about decimals and then introduce percentages to the children. We will continue to relate this back to fractions and maintain our arithmetic skills through weekly quizzes. The children will explore the wonders of algebra, ratio and proportion. We will then learn about shape and space – with a focus on properties of shapes and angles inside and outside of them. We will recap statistics and as ever keep our times tables skills sharp.

Topic
In our first half term we will be learning about ‘Tomorrow’s World’ where we will look at key individuals in the world of technology as well as learning about how light travels and how shadows are cast in science.  After half term, our topic is Darwin’s Delights.  We will develop our knowledge of evolution and inheritance.  We will also conduct a Science investigation to investigate why different birds have different beaks.  We will also learn about the functions of the human eye. We will also be planning two DT projects this term.  We will be designing a motion detection light and a blanket for rescue dogs.

Keeping Safe and Healthy (This section will tell you what we are teaching children about lifestyle choices)
We will continue to do Jigsaw as part of our PSHE teaching. During this term we will be looking into dreams and goals for the future and setting high aspirations for ourselves.
Over the term we will also be adopting techniques that will help us to keep calm during our SATs.

Dates for your Diary
Spring Term:    Monday 6th January 2025 – Friday 11th April 2025
Half Term:         Monday 24th February 2025 – Friday 28th February 2025