Year 6
At Sacred Heart, we use The Oxford Reading and Writing Criterion to aid us in our assessment of reading and writing skills.
These criteria describe the reading and writing journey that children make, from their first pre-writing behaviours through to a more complex and sophisticated understanding and mastery of writing skills. The reading and Writing Criterion Scales break down children’s development into small steps so that it is easy to identify the point children have reached, and the steps they need to make next in order to progress.
Although the criteria are set out in a rough hierarchy, every child’s reading and writing journey is different, so the Criterion Scales support a ‘best-fit’ teacher judgement against national expectations.
End of Year 6 reading expectations:
By the end of Year 6, children should be able to:
Work out the meaning of unknown words using a range of strategies. Read aloud with appropriate pace and expression.
Retrieve information from within and across texts to support ideas and opinions.
Understand and explain how point of view impacts on the reader.
Confidently infer and deduce meaning based on evidence from the text and using wider knowledge and experience.
Identify and explain the different structural devices and features a writer has used.
Comment on the success – or otherwise – of a text in achieving the writer’s intention, referring to both structure and language choices.
Evaluate the relative importance of characters, events or information in a text.
Essential Year 6 writing skills:
The following skills must be secured as a priority in Year 6:
Show variety in sentence type and structure, including the confident use of a range of sentence openings, punctuation for effect and the inclusion of additional detail and/or description.
Use very interesting language with a wide range of words that are ambitious for their age and some literary features (e.g. alliteration, onomatopoeia, figurative language, etc.).
Use the full range of punctuation accurately (as and when appropriate).
Use a range of formal and informal styles or ‘voice’ when appropriate.
Use a wide range of connectives for the full range of purposes and begin to use more sophisticated connectives.
Produce handwriting that is fluent, neat and joined.
Organise writing appropriately, including the use of paragraphs and a range of organisational devices.
Initiate edits and improvements to their work by proof reading what they have written.
Year 6– end of year expectation
By the end of Year 6, children should be able to:
- demonstrate a wide range of the criteria in Years 5 and 6 effectively and in a well- managed and mature way, within a single piece of totally independent writing (one and a half sides or more)
- Write with at least 98% accuracy across all aspects of their writing, e.g.
- text type/genre
- response to stimulus or purpose
- basic skills
- ‘writing voice’
A secure piece of writing requires the production of a striking piece of writing, similar to that of a literate adult, although the stimulus may be more age appropriate. When asked, “How might this be appropriately improved?” there should be little or no improvement identifiable.