Year 6 SATs Revision It’s the perfect time for Year 6 children to brush up on those tricky SAT tests by taking a look at one or two areas that frequently come up. We have just published sets of SAT style questions that seem to come up an awful lot, namely sequences, reading scales, conversions and co-ordinates. 1. Scale/proportion/conversion of units Nearly all the questions on these topics occur at levels 4 and 5. Consequently, many of the concepts covered are quite difficult. Some of the calculations are also tricky, so a calculator may be needed for the harder examples. The work falls into the following categories: Proportion questions are normally of the recipe ingredients type. Children are given the quantities of materials needed to make a cake, concrete path etc. and are asked to find how these quantities vary as the number of cakes/total amount changes. Conversion questions, especially conversion of currencies, litres to gallons, miles to kilometres etc. Children may be required to perform a simple calculation or use a chart, table or graph. The reading scales questions usually involve an object placed against a ruler drawn on the page. The idea is to use the scale to give the length of the object, which may involve a direct reading or the difference between two readings. 2.Co-ordinates Children are usually very familiar with co-ordinates in the first quadrant (i.e. with positive x and y co-ordinates). However, problems involving negative co-ordinates have been covered in the old year 6 syllabus of the Primary Framework Document and may therefore pop up at any time. With this in mind, most of the problems in this module are set with co-ordinates in the first quadrant, but there is a section involving negative co-ordinates at the end. An understanding of how position is described using co-ordinates is crucial. Children should not only be able to describe the position of a point using co-ordinates, but should also be able to say how far one point is from another in both the x and y directions. They should then be able to find the co-ordinates of intermediate points and notice relationships such as “To get from one dot to another on this line you go along two squares and up one”.  (No algebra is needed to describe these relationships at this stage apart from knowing that the number on the horizontal axis is the x co-ordinate and the one on the vertical axis is the y co-ordinate. When a shape is reflected on a grid (whether the grid is shown or not), children should be taught to find the distance from the mirror line to the corners of the shape and use this information to find the co-ordinates of the reflected shape. Go to Year 6 SATs Revision