e
pl
English
m
YEAR
6
Sa
Victoria Burrill
AN HACHETTE UK COMPANY
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Contents
Introduction 1 People’s poverty
10
2 Under the sea
20
3 From tail to trunk
4 Words of war
5 In sickness and in health
50
6Shakespeare
60
7 Created creatures
70
8 Shark attack
80
9 Egyptian adventure
90
e
30
m
pl
40
10 Sporting stories
100
110
Index
120
Sa
Glossary
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Introduction
pl
e
Reading unlocks the world. Reading newspaper and magazine
articles provides you with valuable information about what is going
on around you, reading letters and diary extracts allows you to
share the thoughts and experiences of other people, and reading
stories and poems unlocks your imagination and lets you fly freely
to places, spaces and times you may never be able to visit in real
life. And being able to retrieve and summarise what you have read,
to understand the structure and purpose of a text and why an
author has used the language they have used, and to infer meaning
and make deductions from what you have read are the keys to
reading. In turn, reading helps you learn how to speak, how to listen
and how to write; how to communicate your own thoughts, feelings
and ideas with those around you.
m
This series adopts a skills-based approach to teaching English.
This means that you will be introduced to a skill, such as the
comprehension skill of inference or how to write a descriptive
passage, and you will return to it throughout Years 3 to 6, getting
better and better at it over time. This series also fulfils the
requirements of both the ISEB English Syllabus and the National
Curriculum at Key Stage 2.
➜ Notes on features
Sa
Throughout this series you will come across the following features
that are designed to help you:
Skill focus
This box will tell you which comprehension skill
each chapter focuses on and explains which
aspect of the skill you will be learning about.
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practise your comprehension skills
●
practise using grammar correctly
●
practise using punctuation correctly
●
practise your spelling
●
develop your vocabulary
●
practise your creative writing skills.
pl
●
e
Boxes like this contain questions, which give you opportunities to
practise your skills. In this book you will come across questions
to help you:
Speaking and listening
m
Speaking and listening activities, that help you develop your speaking and
listening skills, have a special box all of their own.
Sa
At the end of each chapter you will find a list of fiction and non-fiction books linked
to the theme of the chapter that you might like to read.
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➜➜Comprehension
e
1
People’s poverty
m
pl
Skill focus: Inference
In this chapter you will revise how to approach
questions that require you to put clues together
to create an answer. These questions require
you to find something, perhaps more than one
thing, in the text and then use your skills of logic,
reasoning and deduction to write your answer.
Inference questions are usually worth more than 1 mark. You will
often need to form an opinion or judgement about something
based on what you have read – this may be about a character, a
setting, a mood for example.
Sa
There are several steps that you need to take in order to answer
inference questions successfully:
1 Read the question carefully to find out exactly what you are
being asked about.
2 Find all the relevant evidence in the text. You may choose to
highlight it.
3 Consider all the evidence together.
4 Write an answer that pulls your ideas together.
1
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Grammar
➜➜Grammar
When you are writing stories, it is important to know when to
use formal language and when to use informal language, and to
understand how the two are different.
e
Formal and informal language
pl
Most of the time when you are writing, you will be using formal
English. This means writing in full sentences, and not using slang
(the informal language we use when we speak; for example ‘quid’
is slang for ‘pound’) or idioms (commonly recognised phrases such
as ‘over the moon’ meaning ‘very happy’). However, when your
characters are talking, depending on what kind of characters they
are, you might choose to use informal language to show more
about their character. For example:
m
Callum was a young man of only 21, but of his 21 years, at least 8 had been spent
living on the streets. His home was the pavement, his shelter a shop doorway, his bed a
cardboard box and a tattered sleeping bag. He spent his nights shivering under the stars
and his days begging for money and food on the city streets. ‘’Scuse me, fella. Spare a
couple of quid for a poor homeless bloke? Ain’t much fun ’ere in the winter!’
The narration is formal English, but the speaking is informal.
Sa
21 Rewrite these phrases and sentences, changing the formal
language to informal language and vice versa.
Formal
Informal
(a)
I ain’t half hungry.
Would you lend me some
money please?
(b)
(c)
He’s my mate.
(d)
I’m gonna kip ’ere tonight.
I don’t have anywhere to go.
(e)
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22 Decide whether you would use formal or informal language for
these types of text. For some, you might be able to use either:
(a) A letter to a friend
(b)A complaint email to a large company
e
(c) A poem
(d)Dialogue between a judge and a criminal in a play
(e) An advertising leaflet for a holiday to New York
(f) A debate speech about the importance of education
pl
(g)A recipe for making chocolate cookies
➜➜Punctuation
m
Stories often require dialogue, although it must be balanced with
the narration. This dialogue is called direct speech, and punctuation
is very important to make it clear for the reader.
Direct speech
Here is an example of correctly punctuated speech to help you revise:
Sa
Speech marks (“ ” or ‘ ’) show which
words are actually being spoken.
The spoken words should be punctuated
within the speech marks.
‘Don’t forget to bring in your donations for the Harvest Festival,’ stated the head teacher.
‘We need them in the school hall by Wednesday afternoon.’
1 People’s poverty
Anil raised his hand, ‘Miss, where will we send all of the food?’ he asked.
‘It will go to our local foodbank,’ she replied, ‘where it can be distributed to people in
need.’
When a new person speaks, a new
line should be used. When the
first person starts speaking, a
new line is not required.
Other sentence
punctuation
separates the speech
from the narration.
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➜➜Spelling
When you are writing stories, it is important to use a range of
vocabulary to interest the reader. Instead of repeating the same
word you might use a synonym (a different word with the same
meaning). Or you could use the word with the opposite meaning
(an antonym) and a negative. For example:
e
He was courageous and daring. He wasn’t fearful.
Using a mixture of synonyms and antonyms can also show contrast
or differences between things. For example:
pl
Although his sister was brash and loud, Lenny was timid,
reserved and quiet.
25 Use a thesaurus to find a range of synonyms and antonyms
for the following words. Try to find words you have not seen
before and think about how to use them in your writing:
poor
sad
hot
comfortable
small
rough
colourful
dry
m
interesting
clever
kind
For example:
Synonyms
obscure, tenebrous, sombre, aglow, fluorescent,
sunless, nebulous
vivid, lustrous, luminous
Sa
dark
Antonyms
26 Play Synonym Tennis. With a partner, choose a starting word. Take it
in turns to say synonyms out loud. The last person to think of a new
synonym wins a point. Keep playing with a range of starting words. You
might like to have a referee who chooses the starting words and makes
a list of the words to put on the wall. You can also adapt the game to
make it trickier – one person says synonyms and the other person says
antonyms.
1
People’s poverty
Speaking and listening
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Vocabulary
➜➜Vocabulary
In this chapter you have been reading and writing about poverty.
When writing about this topic, you will need to use descriptions of
quantity, both large and small, in your writing. In order not to sound
repetitive, it is important to have a range of ways to describe how
much or how little of something you have. You can use:
such as: richer, luckier
● simple adjectives, such as: more, less, fewer
● more descriptive adjectives of quantity, such as: numerous,
meagre, sparse.
e
● comparatives,
pl
Many people make a mistake with ‘less’ and ‘fewer’. You use ‘less’
when you can’t count something using a number and you use
‘fewer’ when the thing you are referring to can be counted. For
example:
He has less luck. (You can’t have three lucks.)
He has fewer books. (You can have three books.)
m
The same is true of ‘much’ and ‘many’. ‘Much’ is used when
something can’t be counted and ‘many’ when something can be
counted. For example:
much happiness (You can’t have three happinesses.)
many dreams (You can have three dreams.)
Sa
27 Find the definitions of these words and then use each of them
in a sentence of your own:
(a)ample
(g)adequate
(b)plethora
(h)sufficient
(c)copious
(i) paltry
(d)profuse
(j)negligible
(e)abundant
(k)scant
(f)immeasurable
(l)insignificant
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28 Copy out these sentences adding in ‘less’, ‘fewer’, ‘much’ or ‘many’ so
that each sentence makes sense:
(a) My clever brother passed
(b)We wear
exams than I did.
jumpers in the summer.
(c) Being with my family brings me
e
happiness.
(d)To have healthy teeth, you should eat
sugar.
(e) Today the teacher was pleased because Claire had
brilliant ideas.
pl
(f) Mum was pleased because my report said that I had made
progress in maths.
(g)It’s not fair because I always get
than my sister.
(h)As an only child, I have
Christmas presents
siblings than all of my friends.
(i) I’m not that hungry. Please can I have
normal.
m
(j) The pool is shallower than before; it has
potatoes than
water in it.
➜➜Creative writing
1 People’s poverty
Sa
The first passage you read, from Oliver Twist, is a good example of
narrative writing. It has a good balance of action and dialogue with
some clear characters. In this section, you will write a short story about
a poor child.
The key to an engaging short story is that something interesting
happens. It can’t be too complicated or have too many twists and
turns – you are writing a short story, not a whole book – but it has
to keep the reader’s attention. Remember this tip: write a lot about
a little, not a little about a lot. You will need:
● Two
or three clearly described characters
● A setting described in detail
● A main event, problem or dilemma that is exciting and includes
some suspense
● A clear resolution.
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