Key Stage 2 · Year 6 · ages 10 or 11
Year 6 English: what your child learns
Year 6 draws the primary curriculum together: children discuss and justify views about books, summarise what they read and choose formal or informal language. Grammar covers active and passive voice, synonyms and antonyms, cohesive devices, and semi-colons, colons, dashes and hyphens. The Key Stage 2 tests in reading, and in grammar, punctuation and spelling, are in May, and writing is teacher-assessed.
Guides for parents
Year 6 English
Active and passive voice
What active and passive voice mean in Year 6, how to turn one into the other, the mistakes children make and easy ways to practise at home.
Year 6 English
Cohesion, ellipsis and layout devices
How Year 6 children link ideas across paragraphs with repetition, adverbials and ellipsis, and use headings and bullets to organise writing, with a worked example.
Year 6 English
Semi-colons, colons, dashes, bullets and hyphens
How Year 6 children use semi-colons, colons, dashes, bullet points and hyphens correctly, the mistakes teachers see, a worked example and ways to practise at home.
Year 6 English
Formal language, synonyms and antonyms
How Year 6 children learn to choose formal or informal words and sentence patterns, and to use synonyms and antonyms, with a worked example and ideas for home.
Everything in the Year 6 English curriculum
The National Curriculum topics for Year 6, in the order the National Curriculum lists them.
Spoken language
- Active listening and collaborative discussion (Years 5 and 6)
- Arguing, hypothesising and evaluating viewpoints (Years 5 and 6)
- Public speaking, performance and register (Years 5 and 6)
Reading – word reading
- Morphology and etymology for reading new words (Years 5 and 6)
Reading – comprehension
- Reading widely and recommending books (Years 5 and 6)
- Themes, comparisons, poetry by heart and performance (Years 5 and 6)
- Inference, prediction and summarising (Years 5 and 6)
- Authors’ language, fact and opinion, and information retrieval (Years 5 and 6)
- Discussing, presenting and justifying views about reading (Years 5 and 6)
Writing – transcription (spelling)
- Prefixes, suffixes, silent letters and confusable words (Years 5 and 6)
- Using dictionaries and a thesaurus (Years 5 and 6)
Writing – handwriting and presentation
- Writing legibly, fluently and with speed (Years 5 and 6)
Writing – composition
- Planning for audience and purpose (Years 5 and 6)
- Drafting: grammar choices, narrative description and précis (Years 5 and 6)
- Cohesion and organisational devices (Years 5 and 6)
- Evaluating and editing for effect, tense, agreement and register (Years 5 and 6)
- Proofreading and performing compositions (Years 5 and 6)
Writing – vocabulary, grammar and punctuation
- Formal language, passive verbs and perfect forms (Years 5 and 6)
- Noun phrases, modal verbs and relative clauses (Years 5 and 6)
- Commas, hyphens, parenthesis, semicolons, colons and bullet points (Years 5 and 6)
Vocabulary, grammar and punctuation – English Appendix 2
Spelling – English Appendix 1
- Endings –cious, –tious, –cial and –tial (Years 5 and 6)
- Endings –ant, –ance, –ancy, –ent, –ence, –ency (Years 5 and 6)
- Endings –able, –ible, –ably and –ibly (Years 5 and 6)
- Adding suffixes to –fer words; using hyphens (Years 5 and 6)
- ei after c and the letter-string ough (Years 5 and 6)
- Silent letters, homophones and often-confused words (Years 5 and 6)
- Statutory word list years 5 and 6: accommodate to convenience (Years 5 and 6)
- Statutory word list years 5 and 6: correspond to hindrance (Years 5 and 6)
- Statutory word list years 5 and 6: identity to pronunciation (Years 5 and 6)
- Statutory word list years 5 and 6: queue to yacht (Years 5 and 6)