Category Archives: Year 6

Book Review, Brilliant Books, Reading, Reading for Pleasure, Year 6

Moving Up – Christian Foley

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Moving Up: How to Ace Secondary School is a handbook that all Year 6 children should take a look at. Foley guides the reader through all aspects of the transition into secondary school discussing the practicalities of having different teachers, subjects and uniforms but also tackling the meatier topics about relationships and bullying.

Moving Up is divided into 3 sections. Part 1 focuses on Year 6, dealing with all the rumours that are going around about secondary school and which ones might actually be true. Part 2 is all about Year 7 and what to expect when you get there: the first day, the subjects, getting lost, the rules, and so on. The final part is probably the one that I’ll be coming back to the most. Much of it doesn’t seem overly relevant at the moment, with talk of peer pressure, bullying, social media and relationships a little way off for my kids just now, but I’m sure they’ll be on the agenda soon enough.

We’ve finished the book and really enjoyed it but it will not be the last time I’ll use it. I will be sharing it with pupils and parents at school and returning to it with my own children at home. It’s a useful book, upon first read, for answering questions that many Year 6s will be concerned about and putting worried minds at ease, but it covers so many important issues, I’m sure we’ll be revisiting certain passages as they move into secondary school.

Tom, age 11, says: “It’s given me tips about secondary school. It’s good to know before I go what things I’ll need for different subject and it was really helpful in letting me know about the different uniform I’ll need.

Discover more brilliant books for Key Stage 2 children below…

Stories for KS2 children
Book Review, Brilliant Books, Reading, Reading for Pleasure, Year 6

The Final Year – Matt Goodfellow

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This book is a must read for all year 6 teachers and children. It’s a very modern classic and, after teacher/education social media went crazy for it in the autumn of 2023, we had to get a copy.

The Final Year is all about the final year of primary school and touches on all of the big events that 10/11 year olds go through. The residential, SATs, transition day, the leavers assembly and much more besides. These are all covered from Nate’s perspective and written as short poems.

Nate has a fairly challenging life and experiences some pretty tough events through the year, but with the help of his friends, family and excellent teacher (Mr Joshua) he gets through it all, learning and growing along the way.

This book has been pretty well hyped but, it turns out, with good reasons. We both really enjoyed it and related to much of what Nate was experiencing (broadly speaking). It’s well worth reading with your Year 6 classes and it’s handily pretty quick as well. Perfect.

Tom aged 10 says… I like that it’s all about the final year of primary school and the transition in to secondary school because that’s what I’m going through right now. It’s written like a diary entry with poems and I’ve never read a book like it before. The main character, Nate, is the eldest of three, and loads of really hard events happen to him, like when Dylan, his youngest brother, has a heart problem and goes unconscious for a while. Also, at the start of the year, he loses his best friend PS to Turner, the class bully, which is really quite difficult for Nate to swallow. Overall I’ve really enjoyed the book, so much so that I’ve given a copy to my teacher and he’s going to read it with the class.

Discover more brilliant books for Key Stage 2 children here…

Stories for KS2 children
Music, Year 6

Year 6 Leavers Song

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It’s the time of year where we begin to plan our Year 6 leavers’ assembly and this year we’ve written our own song based on the song Six from the hit West End musical of the same name. Originally written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, Six tells the story of the six wives of Henry VIII using modern pop music and it’s really rather wonderful.

Some of our year 6 children are fans of the production and one of their parents came up with the idea of turning the title track into a Year 6 tribute. So she set to work on it and did a great job (shout out to Donna Giles). I then played with it a little bit more and put it to the music.

Below you can find the full version with the kids singing using a karaoke backing track from YouTube. After that is my original acoustic attempt. These are the lyrics.

Full version with Karaoke backing
Acoustic version – 1st 3 verses and chorus

If you want to play it on the guitar, you can find the chords on Ultimate-Guitar.com.

You’ll find our lyrics on this Google Doc, please feel free to use them to make your own version.

This is last year’s leavers’ song based on Shotgun by George Ezra