year 6 post sats homework

KS2 SATs: How To Best Prepare Your Year 6 for SATs!

Share this post, table of contents, ks2 sats - spelling, punctuation and grammar.

The first papers that your students will be sitting are the spelling, punctuation and grammar papers. These papers will be sat on Monday 9th May 2022.

There are 2 SPaG papers that your students will be required to sit:

Paper 1 consists of roughly 20 punctuation and grammar questions. Students will be tested on many different topics such as suffixes, tenses, basic punctuation and standard English etc. There are many question types, such as tick box, circle the answer and fill in the gap.

Paper 2 is a 20 word spelling test. Pupils are given a sentence with a missing word which is read aloud. It is then repeated back to them to ensure that they have heard the word correctly. They then have to spell this word out in the blank space provided.

How to prepare your year 6 class for their SPaG exams:

•  Spotting the right word – give your students 3 incorrect spellings and one correct spelling. Have them identify which is the correct one! This is an excellent starter activity that will get your students practising for their KS2 SATs.
• Have your students keep a reading log – getting each of your students to keep a reading log encourages them to read more, thus expanding their vocabulary! Reading more also familiarises students with correct grammar and sentence structure. A fun task could be getting students to recall different word types which they have seen when reading.
•   Colour-coding – Have your students read through an extract and highlight each noun, verb, preposition and adverb etc. in a different colour. Having students identify each of these in a colour-coded fashion can be a great way of learning these key terms.

KS2 SATs - Reading

The third paper that your students will sit is the English Reading paper which will take place on Tuesday 10th May 2022.   This paper consists of fiction extracts, non-fiction extracts and poetry extracts -summing up to around 2000 words. Following these passages will be a mixture of comprehension questions and further questions surrounding author technique and style. 

This paper is worth 50 marks. Here are some helpful tips to aid your students with the reading paper:

• Work together  – get your students working in groups to see if they can create the perfect answer! Give them some practise questions and let them craft the perfect full mark answer. This gives students a chance to share  skills and learn from one another!
•   Practise interference  – the questions that most pupils seem to struggle with are interference questions. Get your students familiar with these question types and have them complete lots and lots of practise questions! Again, incorporating group work into this can make this often dreary activity more fun! Sometimes hearing each other’s answers can help a topic to click.
• Summarise – have your students summarise extracts before their exams. This is a great way of ensuring that they are really taking in the details of the text which they’re reading. Getting them into this habit before sitting the exam is really important.

KS2 SATs - Maths

The final subject your students will be tested on is maths! There are three maths papers that your year 6 class will sit – an arithmetic paper , a reasoning paper (which will take place on Wednesday 11th May 2022) and another reasoning paper (which will take place on Thursday 12th May 2022). The arithmetic paper tests students on their maths skills e.g., decimals, percentages, fractions, order of operations etc. The reasoning papers are a little different as they include problem-solving question which also cover these key topics.

How to prepare for the arithmetic paper:

•   Regular mental maths tests  – adding mental maths tests into your weekly routine with students is  key  to their improvement! Have a weekly mental maths test with a few difficult questions to really challenge your class. Incorporating mental maths into most maths lessons is also really important to help familiarise them with doing sums in their head.
• Play fun maths games  – playing educational games is a great way of engaging pupils in revision. A good maths game is countdown! If you are unfamiliar with the game show, contestants will choose 6 unknown numbers (big or small) and will have to use them to make a random 3 digit number. This is a great game to get students excited about mental maths!

How to prepare for the reasoning papers:

• Daily word problem – why not have your students complete a daily word problem before the school day begins? You could do a fun yet challenging word problem in the mornings to get their brains warmed up, whilst also getting them used to the types of questions they will be asked in their maths reasoning papers.
• Number of the week – these are excellent worksheets that improve students’ mathematical fluency! This is a super important skill to have when sitting the reasoning papers. You will pick a number of the week and your students will solve maths problems using this number.

Emile is an excellent game-based online learning resource for primary school students!

Emile is the perfect learning resource in the lead up to KS2 SATs. Children will be doing key revision, whilst also having fun! This is a less intense revision resource for your pupils who are already stressed! Watch as your students’ KS2 SATs scores rocket when using Emile.

Over 4,000 UK schools use and love Emile! 

Why not encourage your students to let off a little steam, whilst also doing  effective   learning?

Try Emile out today with a demo!

KS2 SATs - Dealing With Students' Exam Stress:

As I’m sure you’re well aware, KS2 SATs can be a really tough time for students as this is their first proper formal examination. 

It’s important that students feel supported at this time and you help them to minimise stress. Whilst it is normal to feel a  little  pressure during the exam period, your pupils shouldn’t be feeling overly stressed!

Ways to tell if a student is feeling anxious:

–  Eating less/losing appetite

– A desire to not attend school

– Stomach aches/headaches can be caused by stress

Here are some great ways to reduce students’ stress:

• Make the weekend before KS2 SATs a homework free time! Let your students have a little time to relax, get some rest and get ready for the big week ahead.
• Offer an in-school breakfast time for your year 6’s. This way you can see that they are getting a good meal before their exam and they have an opportunity to ask any questions that may ease their minds. Being at school earlier reduces stress as they have some time to themselves before the exam!
• Allow students to burn off some energy after the exam. Maybe play a fun game or play some sports outside! This gives them a chance to be a little loud and let off some much needed steam. Exercise is a great stress reliever!
• Tell them how well they’re doing! Your students may not show it, but they may need to hear that you are proud of their efforts in order to keep them motivated throughout KS2 SATs.

Teacher Wellbeing During KS2 SATs:

We know that your students will be at the forefront of your mind during the KS2 SATs period, however it is important to take care of yourself too!

Make sure that you are following the same advice that you are giving your students – get enough sleep, eat well and have some time to relax!

Although this is a lot of work to be done, it’s vital that you don’t overwork yourself . Your students know when their teachers are feeling stressed, which won’t help them or you! Anxiety during this period is often high for you and your students, so it’s important that you take steps to reduce this!

Here are some tips to reduce stress during KS2 SATs:

•   Get 8 hours of sleep  – getting enough rest is  so important for mental health and reducing stress! Prioritising sleep and having healthy sleeping habits can significantly help to minimise stress.
• Practise meditation  – giving yourself an allocated 10 minutes a day to breathe and meditate can truly make all the difference. Meditation is proven to help in stressful time periods! This could be a great activity to add into class time as all students are able to join in and meditate together.
• Exercise  – Fitting in a good workout can improve your mood significantly! It is a great, healthy way to blow off some steam and release stress. This also ties in with sleep as you will likely sleep better after a good workout!

Question Analysis From 2016-2019:

*Percentages are rounded

*The word counts are not entirely accurate, however are fairly representative of the actual word counts.

Useful Links To KS2 SATs Past Papers:

• National  curriculum assessments
• Past papers from 2016 – 2019

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The ultimate Year 6 SATs revision apps

Meet the interactive programmes that are perfect for Year 6 SATs practice

Or discover Doodle for schools

Meet the award-winning programmes that are perfect for Year 6 SATs practice!

Discover the apps that make Year 6 SATs revision fun!

SATs: an acronym that’s enough to strike fear into kids, parents and teachers alike. But luckily, Doodle is here to help!

Covering the entire KS2 curriculum, our four apps create each child a personalised learning experience tailored to their needs. 

Designed to be used for a just few minutes a day, they target the topics they find tricky and revise what they already know, boosting their confidence and placing them in great stead for Year 6 SATs.

Covering the entire KS2 curriculum, our four apps create each child a personalised learning experience tailored to their needs.

SATs: an acronym that’s enough strike fear into kids, parents and teachers alike. But luckily, Doodle is here to help!

Discover the apps that make SATs revision fun!

Designed to be used for a few minutes a day, they target the topics they find tricky and revise what they already know, boosting their confidence and placing them in great stead for Year 6 SATs.

What makes Doodle ideal for Year 6 SATs revision?

Aligned to the curriculum

Created by our team of teachers, Doodle is aligned to the EYFS, KS1 and KS2 curriculum, ensuring children cover all the content they need to ace their Year 6 SATs.

Provides personalised learning

Doodle creates every child a unique work programme that automatically fills gaps in their knowledge, consolidates their learning and introduces new topics, making it the perfect SATs study buddy.

Boosts exam confidence

Filled with fun, interactive exercises that reward effort over ability, Doodle helps kids feel really positive about maths and English, reducing any anxieties they may have about SATs. It's also perfect for the 11 Plus exam !

Automatically tracks progress

Doodle instantly marks work and identifies each child’s gaps in an online hub, making it easy to offer additional support where needed. Adults can even set extra exercises in these areas in just a few clicks!

Builds key learning skills

Our apps contain in-app help features and use interactive explanations to revise concepts, boosting their independent learning skills and building a solid foundation of understanding.

Use online or offline

Doodle can be used offline and on tablets, phones, laptops and desktops, letting children learn anywhere, anytime.

What makes Doodle ideal for SATs revision?

Created by our team of teachers, Doodle is fully aligned to the EYFS, KS1 and KS2 curriculum, ensuring children cover all the content they need to ace their Year 6 SATs .  

Doodle creates every child a unique work programme that automatically fills gaps in their knowledge, consolidates their learning and introduces new topics, making it the perfect SATs study buddy.  

Filled with fun, interactive exercises that reward effort over ability, Doodle helps kids feel really positive about maths and English, reducing any anxieties they may have about SATs.  

Builds positive learning skills

Designed to be used for just 10 minutes a day, Doodle can be used offline on tablets, phones and laptops, making it perfect for fitting into your busy schedule.  

Ready to give our Year 6 SATs apps a go?

Create an account to discover everything Doodle has to offer

Discover our award-winning SATs apps

DoodleMaths

From arithmetic to mathematical reasoning, DoodleMaths uses digital manipulatives and hands-on activities to explore key concepts, making it the perfect study buddy ! Find out more

DoodleTables

Going beyond instant recall, DoodleTables helps children to understand the relationships between numbers , empowering them to truly master their times tables. Find out more

DoodleEnglish

DoodleEnglish helps learners feel confident approaching different types of comprehension exercise  while developing their knowledge of word formation and sentence structure . Find out more

DoodleSpell

Unlike traditional spelling practice, DoodleSpell explore s the meaning behind words and how to use them in sentences , boosting each child’s literacy skills . Find out more

Proxima™, our clever algorithm, works with each child to identify where they're strong and where they need help

Doodle then works its magic, building them a personalised learning and revision programme tailored to their needs

With fun and interactive questions designed to be used a little each day, your child will soon be consolidating what they know and filling in what they don't

See a boost in ability in as little as six weeks, more than enough time to get ready for those all important exams!

From arithmetic to mathematical reasoning, DoodleMaths uses digital manipulatives and hands on activities to explore key concepts, making it the ultimate study buddy ! Find out more

Going beyond instant recall, DoodleTables helps children to understand the relationships between numbers , empowering them to  truly master their times tables. Find out more

DoodleEnglish helps learners feel confident approaching different types of comprehension exercise  while developing their knowledge of word formation and sentence structure . Find out more

Unlike traditional spelling practice, DoodleSpell explore s the meaning behind words and how to use them in sentences , boosting each child’s literacy skills .  Find out more

Used by thousands of learners around the country

Used by 1 million+ learners​, more year 6 sats resources.

The ultimate guide to KS2 SATs

We take a look at what SATs are, when they’re taking place and what’s included in the exams.

How to support your child with SATs

From fun activities to relaxation methods, we share some tips to help your child prepare for the exams.

Everything you need to know about SATs

Not sure how SATs are graded? Take a look at our comprehensive guide to how the exams are assessed.  

What are SATs? Everything you need to know

W e take a look at what SATs are, when they’re taking place and what’s inclu ded in the exams .  

From fun activities to relaxation methods, we share some tips to help your child prepare for the exams.  

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Ultimate Year 6 SATs preparation plan from MathShed

We hope to help you and your classes in your journey to Year 6 SATs success by providing:

• Why it’s key to prepare pupils to score marks based on their learning from prior KS2 year groups
• The importance of arithmetic for meeting National Standard in the KS2 SATs
• Where to prioritise revision by blocks / areas of learning in mathematics for SATs success and how MathShed’s digital Lessons can support this
• Arithmetic practice as part of your class’s daily routine and how MathShed’s Quick Maths is perfect for that
• Downloadable worksheet or online self-marking practice papers from MathShed
• Using MathShed’s digital fluency games to consolidate key procedures
• A takeaway CPD presentation download to share all this information with your colleagues!

The Imporance of Prior Learning for KS2 SATs Success

As the chart above shows, in some years (2016 and 2017), children can meet the National Standard for age-related expectations (ARE) in their KS2 SATs without answering a single question from the Year 6 curriculum correctly.

In 2018 and 2019 where Year 6 content factors into meeting the National Standard, it is a matter of a few marks. 

So, it is really important to identify and plug any gaps in children’s mathematical learning from Years 3 to 5. 

Importance of arithmetic fluency for Year 6 SATs

To meet the National Standard in Mathematics, children need between 56 and 60 marks out of 110 in total across all three papers, which is 51-54% .

Paper 1, Arithmetic by itself is 40 marks .

Also, these skills with conceptual variation are covered heavily in the reasoning papers, Paper 2 and Paper 3.

As the bar chart shows, a good score of 90+% of marks from Paper 1 alone will get children over halfway towards meeting the National Standard.

Marks by Block or Unit of Learning within Previous KS2 SATs Papers

Four Operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) tend to make up a mean of about 33% of all marks across the three papers each year. Combined with Number and Place Value, the total for number and operations is closer to 45% of marks as a mean. 

Fractions, Decimals and Percentages on average make up a further ~20% of marks.

Followed by Measurement, Ratio & Proportion, Geometry which make up between 5% and 10% of marks each.

Then, Algebra, Statistics and Position & Direction with each of these areas of maths make up less than 5% of total marks. 

Although it is worth focusing on areas like Algebra to encourage algebraic thinking to help in other areas of mathematics or Statistics to help where tables and charts have been used to test other aspects of the curriculum, the data does show that focusing on properties of number and the four operations should offer the greatest benefit in delivering SATs success for your pupils.

Example MathShed Lessons sequence based on prioritising scoring for SATs success

• Problem solving using addition and subtraction ( shed.ly/LYSDWZI )
• Number & place value up to 10 million ( shed.ly/LNYNPHT – a FREE sample Lesson!)
• Problem solving involving Money – mixed domain involving decimals, +/- and place value ( shed.ly/LYKQHTZ )
• If you still have any children who are struggling with any of their times tables knowledge, that is a key fix.  MathShed provides a free times tables game as part of our individual teacher and whole school subscriptions.

Using MathShed’s Quick Maths to support the learning of key skills for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division

Quick Maths, is our daily arithmetic fluency scheme, for all years from Year 1 to 6. 

All of the Year 6 Quick Maths weeks in the Spring and Summer terms, in the run-up to the SATs, are based on past papers.

MathShed’s Quick Maths provides spaced repetition for rapid recall .

From our experience, it is best to do this when children are settling into the school day in the morning or after break or lunchtime. Try to have the questions up on the board and give each child scrap paper or jotters to do their arithmetic practice. 

If you do so, children will benefit from covering similar questions each week, providing retrieval practice for key procedures and known facts.

Self-marking past paper-inspired Question Sets , for in-class or at home use

We also have practice Paper 1 question sets based on each of the sample and past papers that can be either produced as PDFs and completed on paper or completed online, that way it is self-marking and the data feeds into our curriculum competency reporting dashboard.

Using MathShed’s arithmetic fluency games for effective and engaging KS2 SATs preparation

If you identify weakness with times tables, number bond recall or mental addition and subtraction, you could use our abstract fluency games.

If you find that there are particular questions children struggle with you could then set them the corresponding Lesson or question set on MathShed.

If there are many gaps, refer back to prioritised list of objectives to cover based on the historical allocation of marks in SATs papers.

How can you use MathShed to support problem solving and reasoning for Papers 2 and 3 ?

As with Paper 1, we also have practice Paper 2 and Paper 3 question sets modelled on each of the sample and past papers that can be either produced as PDFs and completed on paper or completed online, that way it is self-marking and the data feeds into EdShed’s curriculum competency reporting dashboard.

Thanks for reading and don’t hesitate to reach out if you need any further advice or support from any of the EdShed team in helping your pupils’ journey to SATs success!

If you would like to share these insights with your colleagues, please download our Engaging and Effective Year 6 SATs Preparation presentation!

Bonus: Video Webinar recording for all of the above

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• SATs Revision Booklets and Practice Tests
• Class Pages

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English Revision Resources

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• t2-e-2199-year-6-grammar-revision-guide-and-quick-quiz-tenses-powerpoint.ppt
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• t2-e-3506-sats-survival-year-6-english-revision-morning-starter-weekly-5-powerpoint-pack_ver_1 (1).ppt

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• The-Science-Behind-Trampolines-Y5m-Y6d-Black-Guided-Reading-Pack.pdf
• Theseus-and-the-Minotaur-3a-Guided-Reading-Pack.pdf
• The-Signing-5-Guided-Reading-Pack.pdf
• The-Story-of-Hercules-Y4m-Y5d-Y6e-Guided-Reading-Pack.pdf
• The-Zika-Virus-Outbreak-Y5m-Y6d-Black-Guided-Reading-Pack.pdf
• Tick-the-Word-Closest-in-Meaning-to-Reading-KS2-Beginner.pdf
• Tick-the-Word-Closest-in-Meaning-to-Reading-KS2-Easy.pdf
• Tick-the-Word-Closest-in-Meaning-to-Reading-KS2-Expert.pdf
• Tick-the-Word-Closest-in-Meaning-to-Reading-KS2-Tricky.pdf
• True-or-False-Statements-KS2-Reading.pdf
• True-or-False-Statements-KS2-Reading-Interactive-Beginner.pdf
• True-or-False-Statements-KS2-Reading-Interactive-Easy.pdf
• True-or-False-Statements-KS2-Reading-Interactive-Expert.pdf
• True-or-False-Statements-KS2-Reading-Interactive-Tricky.pdf
• What-Does-This-Word-or-Phrase-Suggest-KS2-Reading-Beginner.pdf
• What-Does-This-Word-or-Phrase-Suggest-KS2-Reading-Easy.pdf
• What-Does-This-Word-or-Phrase-Suggest-KS2-Reading-Expert.pdf
• What-Does-This-Word-or-Phrase-Suggest-KS2-Reading-Tricky.pdf

Reasoning and Arithmetic test questions

• paper-1.docx
• Arithmetic-1.pdf
• Key Stage 2 Reasoning 2016 Practice Paper R8 (1).pdf
• Key Stage 2 Reasoning 2016 Practice Paper R7 (1).pdf
• Key Stage 2 Reasoning 2016 Practice Paper R6 (1).pdf
• Key Stage 2 Reasoning 2016 Practice Paper R5 (1).pdf
• Key Stage 2 Reasoning 2016 Practice Paper R4 (1).pdf
• Key Stage 2 Reasoning 2016 Practice Paper R3 (1).pdf
• Key Stage 2 Reasoning 2016 Practice Paper R2 (1).pdf
• Key Stage 2 Reasoning 2016 Practice Paper R1 (1).pdf
• test-2-number-1.docx
• calculator questions money.doc
• LENGTH PROBLEMS.doc
• missing numbers A.doc
• missing numbers B.doc
• non calc money questions.doc
• Number cards A new.doc
• Number cards A.doc
• number cards B.doc
• percentages a.doc
• percentages B.doc
• Rounding.doc
• scales - length.doc
• time calc intervals.doc
• time with clocks.doc
• trail and imp B.doc
• weight - calculating.doc
• weight and ratio.doc
• weight reading scales.doc
• working backwards A.doc
• working backwards B.doc
• Daily-Dozen-10.pdf
• statistics assessment term 1.pdf
• statistics assessment term 2.pdf
• statistics assessment term 3.pdf
• assessment term 1.pdf
• assessment term 2.pdf
• assessment term 3.pdf
• fractioins term 3 assessment.pdf
• fractions term 1 assessment.pdf
• fractions term 2 assessment.pdf
• assessment tyerm 3.pdf

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After SATs Lessons: 5 Golden Rules for Year 6 Teachers

Aidan Severs

KS2 SATs week is over! But what should teachers do in their lessons after SATs? An almost audible collective sigh of relief rises from Year 6 teachers and KS2 pupils across the realm. Suddenly, the prospect of life beyond SATs becomes tantalisingly real and, at least for now, it is there to be enjoyed.

Feelings during the next few weeks will (though I hate to have to remind you) morph from the relief that the end of the SATs week brings into the impatient wait for results day.

For KS2 teachers, the initial feeling of relief may even be tempered by less positive feelings: ‘if onlys’, questions about pass marks in KS2 Reasoning papers, and thoughts of that awful test question. But (and take note, Year 6 teachers!) it is important that we don’t dwell on these things – they’re out of our hands and we do not have the power to change them.

However, there is plenty you can do in the meantime to make the most of your last few weeks with your class.  So here are five ways Year 6 teachers can make the most of  KS2  lessons after SATs:

1. Keep calm & carry on for KS2!

There is plenty to motivate you even when you feel the lethargy that inevitably comes once such a monumental event has been and gone. It is tempting to ‘ease off’ once the KS2 tests are over and, to some extent, you can; but there are things to consider:

• Behaviour can worsen without proper routine and structure.
• Children already spend 6 weeks at home between year 6 and year 7, a lack of ongoing learning in the summer term is detrimental to their transition to secondary school.
• Teacher assessment data is due in on June 29th, so helping children to achieve all of the interim assessment objectives (in Reading, Writing, Maths and Science) is really important. Remember that you know the children better than the tests do, so your assessment means a lot!

2. Be creative, plan for fun!

As part of your structured approach to finishing off the summer term, plan to have some fun. Now that you don’t have the responsibility of preparing children to sit the tests, you can be more creative with your teaching and learning opportunities. Think about:

• Educational visits and visitors always go down well and (if well-planned) can have a great effect on learning.
• Activities with a focus on confidence-building are essential to a Year 6 pupil’s transition process: residentials are perfect for this, but if you don’t have one booked outdoor adventure-type activities are a great shout.
• Some may disagree but a couple of events that are purely organised for fun show the children that you care: water fights or theme park trips are popular and fairly easy to organise.
• And of course, let’s not forget the end of year production!

3. Plan ahead & be prepared for new Year 5s

Thinking about the next year might seem like the last thing you want to do right now. But actually, it’s a great way to help you as a teacher move past any of those negative thoughts or worries surrounding SATs week.

Reflect on the this year’s teaching and learning in light of the test content and the children’s attitudes towards the tests – what went well that you would do again? What can be done differently next year?

Learning from past experiences is the best way to beat any feelings of failure, and being proactive about how you will do things differently helps quell thoughts of regret. You and your colleagues might consider, for example:

• An emphasis on ensuring all arithmetic methods are secure earlier in the year (this could even mean liaising with your Year 5 colleagues and asking them to start work on this right away).
• Which children from the next cohort might need a 1:1 intervention like the   programmes provided by Third Space Learning  to help them succeed.
• A strategy to introduce more SATs-style reasoning and problem solving into your teaching sequence.

SATs Question Breakdown

A detailed look at three Maths SATs Papers, with the 15 key points you need to take from them into your next staff meeting

4. Year 6 teachers, embrace the calm!

Let’s not fool ourselves, there is no ‘wind down’ in the summer term. However, there are windows of opportunity for a Year 6 teacher to relax perhaps a little more than in the run-up to SATs. Look for the opportunities and take them when they come.

We all know teaching is a million-mile-an-hour job which could take up all of our time 24/7, and because of this we frequently miss chances to just stop when they present themselves, telling ourselves we should just do more.

So have some evenings off and enjoy the (hopefully) approaching summer; it’ll keep you fresh as a teacher over the next couple of months. Sure, you may possibly be spending a fair amount of time marking writing books, but this is why it’s worth trying to make yourself have some down time.

Don’t forget to be wise with your planning over the next few weeks so that you don’t overload yourself with assessing writing – you can’t be doing it every day!

5. Enjoy YOUR half term holiday

The aforementioned teacher assessment has the potential to ruin the most glorious of all half term holidays. Don’t let it.

Do enough during the preceding weeks to ensure you don’t leave with a stack of marking –  a little bit of careful planning of your own time should make this possible.

Don’t be tempted to do ‘just one more piece of writing’ on the day you break up – it possibly won’t be the kids’ best work anyway and you’ll be lumbered with 30 (potentially substandard) stories to mark in what should be your free time.

You don’t want to spend the holiday under the black cloud of that bag of marking in the car boot, only to mark it and then spend the rest of the time worrying that you’ve got so much to teach just because they didn’t do their best piece on the last day of their most stressful half term.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: make plans for the holiday. Make unbreakable commitments to your family and friends, and to yourself! Give yourself a reason not to work, one that means you won’t be able to. It is your holiday – so have it.

Enjoyed this? Read our popular SATs breakdown post: SATs 2023 , our guide to SATs 2022 , Math s SATs 2022 and our Maths SATs Reflections . And take a look at our collection of Year 6 SATs maths papers .

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FREE KS2 Maths SATs Practice Papers (Set of 6)

Get ready for KS2 SATs tests with this set of 6 maths SATs practice papers.

Includes 2 Arithmetic and 4 Reasoning Papers, with mark schemes and answer booklets, that follow the National Curriculum Assessments.

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Week after Sats Project for Year 6

Subject: English

Age range: 7-11

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22 January 2015

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Year 6 SATS homework

Over the Easter holidays, have go at the following sites and see if you can improve your skills

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/revision/
• This is an excellent site, providing revision help for KS2, KS3, KS 4 and KS5. This covers all subjects through activities and tests.
• http://www.icteachers.co.uk/children/children_sats.htm
• A wide range of KS2 SATs questions, from both past papers and their own team of teachers.
• http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/revision/index.html
• Revision pages at Woodlands Junior School . These revision pages support the work they do at Woodlands Junior School. They have been put together for their students to help them with their revision. Included are some sample questions taken from past Key Stage 2 SATs papers, as well as a whole host of interactive tests/quizzes.
• http://www.compare4kids.co.uk/maths.php
• This links to lots of other websites which have games and activities on specific subjects
• http://www.emaths.co.uk/index.php/4-students/past-papers/ks2-sat-papers
• Over 10 years of past SAT papers for you to use
• (Please do not use papers after 2007 as these will be used in school during revision lessons)
• http://www.parkfieldict.co.uk/sats/
• English and Maths revision activities and games.

Reading a 24hr clock

Stop the Clock

Difference between two times

Prepositions:

Prepositions 1

Prepositions 2

Ordering Fractions

BBC activity

BBC activity 2

BGFL activity

Fraction Monkey

Equivalent Fractions

Equivalent Fractions BBC

Polyhedra Investigation:

Click here to open investigation

Tests for divisibility:

Ordering Decimals:

11th April Activity

Percentages of amounts:

Number invaders.

Percentages

TIMES TABLE WEBSITES

Grid Multiplication

Times table games

Times Table challenges

3d Shape Activity

3D Shape Challenge

Reading Scales

Measure and Weight

Pinpoint that number

Temperature

Measures with Jack the Builder

Coordinates

Billy the Bug

2 comment on “ Year 6 SATS homework ”

Hello Year 6 Please have a go at some of the revision activities over the Easter holidays. You are all working so hard and I am so proud of you!

Have fun and enjoy your Easter break! Mrs O’Brien

hi, can you post the time table for revision because I’ve lost my letter

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SATs Companion can be used in lots of different ways. From intervention to assigning targeted tasks- we’ve got you covered!

We’ve put together this helpful guide to using the platform for catch up and intervention.

Assigning Targeted Practice Tasks

Setting targeted practice tasks and additional homework for your pupils is quick and easy. Once you have logged into the SATs Companion teacher dashboard, you can assign and manage tasks easily with these simple steps…

How To Assign Targeted Practice Tasks

On the teacher dashboard calendar, choose the date you wish to set the task. Then, click and select ‘Formative’. You will then be asked to complete the following fields;

• Online Class/Group
• English/Maths
• Subject Strands
• Subject Topics
• Difficulty level

After you have completed this, you will have the option to:

• Preview the questions assigned and deselect any of your choices
• Assign a start and completion date
• Set a name for the task/homework e.g “Mr Riley’s Nouns Homework”

Finally, click submit.

On the Manage tasks section of the platform, you can preview how many pupils have attempted the task and you can click to view the task report for each task or homework.

Using GoLive to Identify Gaps

GoLive is a powerful real time feedback tool that can be used for:

• Receiving real time pupil responses
• Identifying instant gaps and providing instant intervention
• Smaller intervention sessions
• Daily targeted practice tasks

How to conduct a GO-Live lesson?

To set up a GoLive lesson, on the teacher dashboard calendar, choose the date you wish to set the task. Then, right click and select ‘Formative’. You will then be asked to complete the following fields:

• Online/Printable/GoLive
• Class/Group
• Difficulty level.
• Preview the questions assigned and deselect any of your choice.
• Assign a start and end date.
• Set a name for the lesson e.g “Mr Riley’s Algebra Lesson 6b”

You can view the online lesson set, by clicking on the Manage Task sub-header on the toolbar in the left column. Here, you can start the lesson and view your personalised access code for the GoLive lesson which you will need to send to your pupils.

Pupils can access the GoLive lesson set, on the pupil end of the platform by,

• clicking on the ‘Tasks’ tab
• selecting the Golive lesson
• clicking start and entering the unique access code.

Next, on the Teacher end of the platform, after clicking ‘start lesson’, the GoLive Dashboard will show you which pupil names have accessed the lesson, with a green plug icon, and those who have not with a ‘red’ plug icon.

To commence the lesson, you can either go question-by-question or you can send your pupils all the questions so pupils can work at their own pace. Questions pushed from the teacher end, will come up on the pupil-end.

As pupils answer the questions, you will receive live pupil responses. This will show which pupils have answered the question/s correctly or incorrectly, alongside their actual answers that have been inputted.

After all questions have been answered, the colour coded pupil response chart will help you to identify instant gaps in certain topics or common misconceptions. At the end of the lesson, GoLive will automatically populate a report which will show pupil names who need intervention for this topic and will allow you to assign homework instantly to consolidate their understanding.

Identifying Gaps in Understanding

Identifying gaps in pupil understanding is quick and easy with SATs Companion’s reporting features. Find out how to access data insights that will help inform your planning and provide targeted intervention.

How To Identify Gaps In Understanding?

Class Report

This report can be accessed from the ‘Reports’ section of the teacher dashboard. To identify gaps in smaller groups click on the group option and insert dates. Alternatively, select the class option to view this data on a class level.

Overview Report

Within the overall report, you can access data for the following;

Tasks Assigned

Any specific tasks and homework you have set previously, will each show an average percentage score for your class. This score will help inform your lesson planning

Strand Breakdown

This section provides you with a more detailed overview on individual sub-strands for each topic in English and Maths. Scores on each sub-strand will allow you to identify any common misconceptions within the class. For example, you may find pupils need support with identifying ‘Verbs, Tenses and Consistency’ which you can plan for accordingly.

Intervention Topics

This area of the report will highlight the scores of the intervention topics assigned to pupils.

Using Videos During Lessons

Make use of SATs Companion’s bank of 80+ animated video lessons. Structured just like a real lesson, our videos cover all the key topics in KS2 English and Maths. Assign targeted video lessons to your pupils to support their understanding and build up knowledge.

How To Use Video Lessons to Recap Topic Knowledge?

Pupils can watch our bank of 80+ videos independently.

Alongside the independent access, you can assign pupils a video to watch as a task or for homework. Under ‘Manage Tasks’, click ‘Set a video lesson’, choose the topic, substrand, date and select the video to add.

You can also assign a video when setting up a formative task. This will allow pupils to watch the related video before completing questions on that topic.

You could also use the videos within the classroom. You may like to play the videos within the lesson and have your pupils follow along and answer the questions.

Boosting Pupil Confidence

Whether awarding pupils on completing specific tasks or homework, find out how to assign goals and trophies to your pupils.

How To Boost Pupil Confidence and Motivation?

Select ‘Rewards’ on the left panel of the platform and choose whether you wish to set an instant trophy or task trophy. You will then be asked to complete the following fields;

• Reward title
• Trophy image
• Percentage required to receive the trophy
• Pupil names

Finally, select ‘add.’

This function is also available upon setting up your GoLive lessons.

Teacher Training Support

Our team at SATs Companion are working closely with teachers to providing support with catch-up and intervention.

Whether it’s our regular ‘refresher’ or ‘Catch-Up and Intervention’ training, we’re here to help support you and your pupils.

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The Crackdown on Student Protesters

Columbia university is at the center of a growing showdown over the war in gaza and the limits of free speech..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

[TRAIN SCREECHING]

Well, you can hear the helicopter circling. This is Asthaa Chaturvedi. I’m a producer with “The Daily.” Just walked out of the 116 Street Station. It’s the main station for Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus. And it’s day seven of the Gaza solidarity encampment, where a hundred students were arrested last Thursday.

So on one side of Broadway, you see camera crews. You see NYPD officers all lined up. There’s barricades, steel barricades, caution tape. This is normally a completely open campus. And I’m able to — all members of the public, you’re able to walk through.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

Looks like international media is here.

Have your IDs out. Have your IDs out.

Students lining up to swipe in to get access to the University. ID required for entry.

Swipe your ID, please.

Hi, how are you, officer? We’re journalists with “The New York Times.”

You’re not going to get in, all right? I’m sorry.

Hi. Can I help please?

Yeah, it’s total lockdown here at Columbia.

Please have your IDs out ready to swipe.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today, the story of how Columbia University has become the epicenter of a growing showdown between student protesters, college administrators, and Congress over the war in Gaza and the limits of free speech. I spoke with my colleague, Nick Fandos.

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

It’s Thursday, April 25.

Nick, if we rewind the clock a few months, we end up at a moment where students at several of the country’s best known universities are protesting Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks, its approach to a war in Gaza. At times, those protests are happening peacefully, at times with rhetoric that is inflammatory. And the result is that the leaders of those universities land before Congress. But the president of Columbia University, which is the subject we’re going to be talking about today, is not one of the leaders who shows up for that testimony.

That’s right. So the House Education Committee has been watching all these protests on campus. And the Republican Chairwoman decides, I’m going to open an investigation, look at how these administrations are handling it, because it doesn’t look good from where I sit. And the House last winter invites the leaders of several of these elite schools, Harvard, Penn, MIT, and Columbia, to come and testify in Washington on Capitol Hill before Congress.

Now, the President of Columbia has what turns out to be a very well-timed, pre-planned trip to go overseas and speak at an international climate conference. So Minouche Shafik isn’t going to be there. So instead, the presidents of Harvard, and Penn, and MIT show up. And it turned out to be a disaster for these universities.

They were asked very pointed questions about the kind of speech taking place on their campuses, and they gave really convoluted academic answers back that just baffled the committee. But there was one question that really embodied the kind of disconnect between the Committee — And it wasn’t just Republicans, Republicans and Democrats on the Committee — and these college presidents. And that’s when they were asked a hypothetical.

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct? Yes or no?

If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.

And two of the presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, they’re unwilling to say in this really kind of intense back and forth that this speech would constitute a violation of their rules.

It can be, depending on the context.

What’s the context?

Targeted at an individual. Is it pervasive?

It’s targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them?

And it sets off a firestorm.

It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes. And this is why you should resign. These are unacceptable answers across the board.

Members of Congress start calling for their resignations. Alumni are really, really ticked off. Trustees of the University start to wonder, I don’t know that these leaders really have got this under control. And eventually, both of them lose their jobs in a really high profile way.

Right. And as you’ve hinted at, for somewhat peculiar scheduling reasons, Columbia’s President escapes this disaster of a hearing in what has to be regarded as the best timing in the history of the American Academy.

Yeah, exactly. And Columbia is watching all this play out. And I think their first response was relief that she was not in that chair, but also a recognition that, sooner or later, their turn was going to come back around and they were going to have to sit before Congress.

Why were they so certain that they would probably end up before Congress and that this wasn’t a case of completely dodging a bullet?

Well, they remain under investigation by the committee. But also, as the winter wears on, all the same intense protests just continue unabated. So in many ways, Columbia’s like these other campuses. But in some ways, it’s even more intense. This is a university that has both one of the largest Jewish student populations of any of its peers. But it also has a large Arab and Muslim student population, a big Middle Eastern studies program. It has a dual degree program in Tel Aviv.

And it’s a university on top of all that that has a real history of activism dating back to the 1960s. So when students are recruited or choose to come to Columbia, they’re actively opting into a campus that prides itself on being an activist community. It’s in the middle of New York City. It’s a global place. They consider the city and the world, really, like a classroom to Columbia.

In other words, if any campus was going to be a hotbed of protest and debate over this conflict, it was going to be Columbia University.

Exactly. And when this spring rolls around, the stars finally align. And the same congressional committee issues another invitation to Minouche Shafik, Columbia’s President, to come and testify. And this time, she has no excuse to say no.

But presumably, she is well aware of exactly what testifying before this committee entails and is highly prepared.

Columbia knew this moment was coming. They spent months preparing for this hearing. They brought in outside consultants, crisis communicators, experts on anti-Semitism. The weekend before the hearing, she actually travels down to Washington to hole up in a war room, where she starts preparing her testimony with mock questioners and testy exchanges to prep her for this. And she’s very clear on what she wants to try to do.

Where her counterparts had gone before the committee a few months before and looked aloof, she wanted to project humility and competence, to say, I know that there’s an issue on my campus right now with some of these protests veering off into anti-Semitic incidents. But I’m getting that under control. I’m taking steps in good faith to make sure that we restore order to this campus, while allowing people to express themselves freely as well.

So then the day of her actual testimony arrives. And just walk us through how it goes.

The Committee on Education and Workforce will come to order. I note that —

So Wednesday morning rolls around. And President Shafik sits at the witness stand with two of her trustees and the head of Columbia’s new anti-Semitism task force.

Columbia stands guilty of gross negligence at best and at worst has become a platform for those supporting terrorism and violence against the Jewish people.

And right off the bat, they’re put through a pretty humbling litany of some of the worst hits of what’s been happening on campus.

For example, just four days after the harrowing October 7 attack, a former Columbia undergraduate beat an Israeli student with a stick.

The Republican Chairwoman of the Committee, Virginia Foxx, starts reminding her that there was a student who was actually hit with a stick on campus. There was another gathering more recently glorifying Hamas and other terrorist organizations, and the kind of chants that have become an everyday chorus on campus, which many Jewish students see as threatening. But when the questioning starts, President Shafik is ready. One of the first ones she gets is the one that tripped up her colleagues.

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia’s code of conduct, Mr. Greenwald?

And she answers unequivocally.

Dr. Shafik?

Yes, it does.

And, Professor —

That would be a violation of Columbia’s rules. They would be punished.

As President of Columbia, what is it like when you hear chants like, by any means necessary or Intifada Revolution?

I find those chants incredibly distressing. And I wish profoundly that people would not use them on our campus.

And in some of the most interesting exchanges of the hearing, President Shafik actually opens Columbia’s disciplinary books.

We have already suspended 15 students from Columbia. We have six on disciplinary probation. These are more disciplinary actions that have been taken probably in the last decade at Columbia. And —

She talks about the number of students that have been suspended, but also the number of faculty that she’s had removed from the classroom that are being investigated for comments that either violate some of Columbia’s rules or make students uncomfortable. One case in particular really underscores this.

And that’s of a Middle Eastern studies professor named Joseph Massad. He wrote an essay not long after Hamas invaded Israel and killed 1,200 people, according to the Israeli government, where he described that attack with adjectives like awesome. Now, he said they’ve been misinterpreted, but a lot of people have taken offense to those comments.

Ms. Stefanik, you’re recognized for five minutes.

Thank you, Chairwoman. I want to follow up on my colleague, Rep Walberg’s question regarding Professor Joseph Massad. So let me be clear, President —

And so Representative Elise Stefanik, the same Republican who had tripped up Claudine Gay of Harvard and others in the last hearing, really starts digging in to President Shafik about these things at Columbia.

He is still Chair on the website. So has he been terminated as Chair?

Congresswoman, I —

And Shafik’s answers are maybe a little surprising.

— before getting back to you. I can confirm —

I know you confirmed that he was under investigation.

Yes, I can confirm that. But I —

Did you confirm he was still the Chair?

He says that Columbia is taking his case seriously. In fact, he’s under investigation right now.

Well, let me ask you this.

I need to check.

Will you make the commitment to remove him as Chair?

And when Stefanik presses her to commit to removing him from a campus leadership position —

I think that would be — I think — I would — yes. Let me come back with yes. But I think I — I just want to confirm his current status before I write —

We’ll take that as a yes, that you will confirm that he will no longer be chair.

Shafik seems to pause and think and then agree to it on the spot, almost like she is making administrative decisions with or in front of Congress.

Now, we did some reporting after the fact. And it turns out the Professor didn’t even realize he was under investigation. So he’s learning about this from the hearing too. So what this all adds up to, I think, is a performance so in line with what the lawmakers themselves wanted to hear, that at certain points, these Republicans didn’t quite know what to do with it. They were like the dog that caught the car.

Columbia beats Harvard and UPenn.

One of them, a Republican from Florida, I think at one point even marvelled, well, you beat Harvard and Penn.

Y’all all have done something that they weren’t able to do. You’ve been able to condemn anti-Semitism without using the phrase, it depends on the context. But the —

So Columbia’s president has passed this test before this committee.

Yeah, this big moment that tripped up her predecessors and cost them their jobs, it seems like she has cleared that hurdle and dispatched with the Congressional committee that could have been one of the biggest threats to her presidency.

Without objection, there being no further business, the committee stands adjourned. [BANGS GAVEL]

But back on campus, some of the students and faculty who had been watching the hearing came away with a very different set of conclusions. They saw a president who was so eager to please Republicans in Congress that she was willing to sell out some of the University’s students and faculty and trample on cherished ideas like academic freedom and freedom of expression that have been a bedrock of American higher education for a really long time.

And there was no clearer embodiment of that than what had happened that morning just as President Shafik was going to testify before Congress. A group of students before dawn set up tents in the middle of Columbia’s campus and declared themselves a pro-Palestinian encampment in open defiance of the very rules that Dr. Shafik had put in place to try and get these protests under control.

So these students in real-time are beginning to test some of the things that Columbia’s president has just said before Congress.

Exactly. And so instead of going to celebrate her successful appearance before Congress, Shafik walks out of the hearing room and gets in a black SUV to go right back to that war room, where she’s immediately confronted with a major dilemma. It basically boils down to this, she had just gone before Congress and told them, I’m going to get tough on these protests. And here they were. So either she gets tough and risks inflaming tension on campus or she holds back and does nothing and her words before Congress immediately look hollow.

And what does she decide?

So for the next 24 hours, she tries to negotiate off ramps. She consults with her Deans and the New York Police Department. And it all builds towards an incredibly consequential decision. And that is, for the first time in decades, to call the New York City Police Department onto campus in riot gear and break this thing up, suspend the students involved, and then arrest them.

To essentially eliminate this encampment.

Eliminate the encampment and send a message, this is not going to be tolerated. But in trying to quell the unrest, Shafik actually feeds it. She ends up leaving student protesters and the faculty who support them feeling betrayed and pushes a campus that was already on edge into a full blown crisis.

[SLOW TEMPO MUSIC]

After the break, what all of this has looked like to a student on Columbia’s campus. We’ll be right back.

[PHONE RINGS]

Is this Isabella?

Yes, this is she.

Hi, Isabella. It’s Michael Barbaro from “The Daily.”

Hi. Nice to meet you.

Earlier this week, we called Isabella Ramírez, the Editor in Chief of Columbia’s undergraduate newspaper, “The Columbia Daily Spectator,” which has been closely tracking both the protests and the University’s response to them since October 7.

So, I mean, in your mind, how do we get to this point? I wonder if you can just briefly describe the key moments that bring us to where we are right now.

Sure. Since October 7, there has certainly been constant escalation in terms of tension on campus. And there have been a variety of moves that I believe have distanced the student body, the faculty, from the University and its administration, specifically the suspension of Columbia’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. And that became a huge moment in what was characterized as suppression of pro-Palestinian activism on campus, effectively rendering those groups, quote, unquote, unauthorized.

What was the college’s explanation for that?

They had cited in that suspension a policy which states that a demonstration must be approved within a certain window, and that there must be an advance notice, and that there’s a process for getting an authorized demonstration. But the primary point was this policy that they were referring to, which we later reported, was changed before the suspension.

So it felt a little ad hoc to people?

Yes, it certainly came as a surprise, especially at “Spectator.” We’re nerds of the University in the sense that we are familiar with faculty and University governance. But even to us, we had no idea where this policy was coming from. And this suspension was really the first time that it entered most students’ sphere.

Columbia’s campus is so known for its activism. And so in my time of being a reporter, of being an editor, I’ve overseen several protests. And I’ve never seen Columbia penalize a group for, quote, unquote, not authorizing a protest. So that was certainly, in our minds, unprecedented.

And I believe part of the justification there was, well, this is a different time. And I think that is a reasonable thing to say. But I think a lot of students, they felt it was particularly one-sided, that it was targeting a specific type of speech or a specific type of viewpoint. Although, the University, of course, in its explicit policies, did not outline, and was actually very explicit about not targeting specific viewpoints —

So just to be super clear, it felt to students — and it sounds like, journalistically, it felt to you — that the University was coming down in a uniquely one-sided way against students who were supporting Palestinian rights and may have expressed some frustrations with Israel in that moment.

Yes. Certainly —

Isabella says that this was just the beginning of a really tense period between student protesters and the University. After those two student groups were suspended, campus protests continued. Students made a variety of demands. They asked that the University divest from businesses that profit from Israel’s military operations in Gaza. But instead of making any progress, the protests are met with further crackdown by the University.

And so as Isabella and her colleagues at the college newspaper see it, there’s this overall chilling effect that occurs. Some students become fearful that if they participate in any demonstrations, they’re going to face disciplinary action. So fast forward now to April, when these student protesters learned that President Shafik is headed to Washington for her congressional testimony. It’s at this moment that they set out to build their encampment.

I think there was obviously a lot of intention in timing those two things. I think it’s inherently a critique on a political pressure and this congressional pressure that we saw build up against, of course, Claudine Gay at Harvard and Magill at UPenn. So I think a lot of students and faculty have been frustrated at this idea that there are not only powers at the University that are dictating what’s happening, but there are perhaps external powers that are also guiding the way here in terms of what the University feels like it must do or has to do.

And I think that timing was super crucial. Having the encampment happen on the Wednesday morning of the hearing was an incredible, in some senses, interesting strategy to direct eyes to different places.

All eyes were going to be on Shafik in DC. But now a lot of eyes are on New York. The encampment is set up in the middle of the night slash morning, prior to the hearing. And so what effectively happens is they caught Shafik when she wasn’t on campus, when a lot of senior administration had their resources dedicated to supporting Shafik in DC.

And you have all of those people not necessarily out of commission, but with their focus elsewhere. So the encampment is met with very little resistance at the beginning. There were public safety officers floating around and watching. But at the very beginning hours, I think there was a sense of, we did it.

[CHANTING]: Disclose! Divest! We will not stop! We will not rest. Disclose! Divest! We will not stop!

It would be quite surprising to anybody and an administrator to now suddenly see dozens of tents on this lawn in a way that I think very purposely puts an imagery of, we’re here to stay. As the morning evolved and congressional hearings continued —

Minouche Shafik, open your eyes! Use of force, genocide!

Then we started seeing University delegates that were coming to the encampment saying, you may face disciplinary action for continuing to be here. I think that started around almost — like 9:00 or 10:00 AM, they started handing out these code of conduct violation notices.

Hell no! Hell no! Hell no!

Then there started to be more public safety action and presence. So they started barricading the entrances. The day progressed, there was more threat of discipline. The students became informed that if they continue to stay, they will face potential academic sanctions, potential suspension.

The more they try to silence us, the louder we will be! The more they —

I think a lot of people were like, OK, you’re threatening us with suspension. But so what?

This is about these systems that Minouche Shafik, that the Board of Trustees, that Columbia University is complicit in.

What are you going to do to try to get us out of here? And that was, obviously, promptly answered.

This is the New York State Police Department.

We will not stop!

You are attempting participate in an unauthorized encampment. You will be arrested and charged with trespassing.

My phone blew up, obviously, from the reporters, from the editors, of saying, oh my god, the NYPD is on our campus. And as soon as I saw that, I came out. And I saw a huge crowd of students and affiliates on campus watching the lawns. And as I circled around that crowd, I saw the last end of the New York Police Department pulling away protesters and clearing out the last of the encampment.

[CHANTING]: We love you! We will get justice for you! We see you! We love you! We will get justice for you! We see you! We love you! We will get justice for you! We see you! We love you! We will get justice for you!

It was something truly unimaginable, over 100 students slash other individuals are arrested from our campus, forcefully removed. And although they were suspended, there was a feeling of traumatic event that has just happened to these students, but also this sense of like, OK, the worst of the worst that could have happened to us just happened.

And for those students who maybe couldn’t go back to — into campus, now all of their peers, who were supporters or are in solidarity, are — in some sense, it’s further emboldened. They’re now not just sitting on the lawns for a pro-Palestinian cause, but also for the students, who have endured quite a lot.

So the crackdown, sought by the president and enforced by the NYPD, ends up, you’re saying, becoming a galvanizing force for a broader group of Columbia students than were originally drawn to the idea of ever showing up on the center of campus and protesting?

Yeah, I can certainly speak to the fact that I’ve seen my own peers, friends, or even acquaintances, who weren’t necessarily previously very involved in activism and organizing efforts, suddenly finding themselves involved.

Can I — I just have a question for you, which is all journalism, student journalism or not student journalism, is a first draft of history. And I wonder if we think of this as a historic moment for Columbia, how you imagine it’s going to be remembered.

Yeah, there is no doubt in my mind that this will be a historic moment for Colombia.

I think that this will be remembered as a moment in which the fractures were laid bare. Really, we got to see some of the disunity of the community in ways that I have never really seen it before. And what we’ll be looking to is, where do we go from here? How does Colombia repair? How do we heal from all of this? so That is the big question in terms of what will happen.

Nick, Isabella Ramírez just walked us through what this has all looked like from the perspective of a Columbia student. And from what she could tell, the crackdown ordered by President Shafik did not quell much of anything. It seemed, instead, to really intensify everything on campus. I’m curious what this has looked like for Shafik.

It’s not just the students who are upset. You have faculty, including professors, who are not necessarily sympathetic to the protesters’ view of the war, who are really outraged about what Shafik has done here. They feel that she’s crossed a boundary that hasn’t been crossed on Columbia’s campus in a really long time.

And so you start to hear things by the end of last week like censure, no confidence votes, questions from her own professors about whether or not she can stay in power. So this creates a whole new front for her. And on top of it all, as this is going on, the encampment itself starts to reform tent-by-tent —

— almost in the same place that it was. And Shafik decides that the most important thing she could do is to try and take the temperature down, which means letting the encampment stand. Or in other words, leaning in the other direction. This time, we’re going to let the protesters have their say for a little while longer.

The problem with that is that, over the weekend, a series of images start to emerge from on campus and just off of it of some really troubling anti-Semitic episodes. In one case, a guy holds up a poster in the middle of campus and points it towards a group of Jewish students who are counter protesting. And it says, I’m paraphrasing here, Hamas’ next targets.

I saw an image of that. What it seemed to evoke was the message that Hamas should murder those Jewish students. That’s the way the Jewish students interpreted it.

It’s a pretty straightforward and jarring statement. At the same time, just outside of Columbia’s closed gates —

Stop killing children!

— protestors are showing up from across New York City. It’s hard to tell who’s affiliated with Columbia, who’s not.

Go back to Poland! Go back to Poland!

There’s a video that goes viral of one of them shouting at Jewish students, go back to Poland, go back to Europe.

In other words, a clear message, you’re not welcome here.

Right. In fact, go back to the places where the Holocaust was committed.

Exactly. And this is not representative of the vast majority of the protesters in the encampment, who mostly had been peaceful. They would later hold a Seder, actually, with some of the pro-Palestinian Jewish protesters in their ranks. But those videos are reaching members of Congress, the very same Republicans that Shafik had testified in front of just a few days before. And now they’re looking and saying, you have lost control of your campus, you’ve turned back on your word to us, and you need to resign.

They call for her outright resignation over this.

That’s right. Republicans in New York and across the country began to call for her to step down from her position as president of Columbia.

So Shafik’s dilemma here is pretty extraordinary. She has set up this dynamic where pleasing these members of Congress would probably mean calling in the NYPD all over again to sweep out this encampment, which would mean further alienating and inflaming students and faculty, who are still very upset over the first crackdown. And now both ends of this spectrum, lawmakers in Washington, folks on the Columbia campus, are saying she can’t lead the University over this situation before she’s even made any fateful decision about what to do with this second encampment. Not a good situation.

No. She’s besieged on all sides. For a while, the only thing that she can come up with to offer is for classes to go hybrid for the remainder of the semester.

So students who aren’t feeling safe in this protest environment don’t necessarily have to go to class.

Right. And I think if we zoom out for a second, it’s worth bearing in mind that she tried to choose a different path here than her counterparts at Harvard or Penn. And after all of this, she’s kind of ended up in the exact same thicket, with people calling for her job with the White House, the Mayor of New York City, and others. These are Democrats. Maybe not calling on her to resign quite yet, but saying, I don’t know what’s going on your campus. This does not look good.

That reality, that taking a different tack that was supposed to be full of learnings and lessons from the stumbles of her peers, the fact that didn’t really work suggests that there’s something really intractable going on here. And I wonder how you’re thinking about this intractable situation that’s now arrived on these college campuses.

Well, I don’t think it’s just limited to college campuses. We have seen intense feelings about this conflict play out in Hollywood. We’ve seen them in our politics in all kinds of interesting ways.

In our media.

We’ve seen it in the media. But college campuses, at least in their most idealized form, are something special. They’re a place where students get to go for four years to think in big ways about moral questions, and political questions, and ideas that help shape the world they’re going to spend the rest of their lives in.

And so when you have a question that feels as urgent as this war does for a lot of people, I think it reverberates in an incredibly intense way on those campuses. And there’s something like — I don’t know if it’s quite a contradiction of terms, but there’s a collision of different values at stake. So universities thrive on the ability of students to follow their minds and their voices where they go, to maybe even experiment a little bit and find those things.

But there are also communities that rely on people being able to trust each other and being able to carry out their classes and their academic endeavors as a collective so they can learn from one another. So in this case, that’s all getting scrambled. Students who feel strongly about the Palestinian cause feel like the point is disruption, that something so big, and immediate, and urgent is happening that they need to get in the faces of their professors, and their administrators, and their fellow students.

Right. And set up an encampment in the middle of campus, no matter what the rules say.

Right. And from the administration’s perspective, they say, well, yeah, you can say that and you can think that. And that’s an important process. But maybe there’s some bad apples in your ranks. Or though you may have good intentions, you’re saying things that you don’t realize the implications of. And they’re making this environment unsafe for others. Or they’re grinding our classes to a halt and we’re not able to function as a University.

So the only way we’re going to be able to move forward is if you will respect our rules and we’ll respect your point of view. The problem is that’s just not happening. Something is not connecting with those two points of view. And as if that’s not hard enough, you then have Congress and the political system with its own agenda coming in and putting its thumb on a scale of an already very difficult situation.

Right. And at this very moment, what we know is that the forces that you just outlined have created a dilemma, an uncertainty of how to proceed, not just for President Shafik and the students and faculty at Columbia, but for a growing number of colleges and universities across the country. And by that, I mean, this thing that seemed to start at Columbia is literally spreading.

Absolutely. We’re talking on a Wednesday afternoon. And these encampments have now started cropping up at universities from coast-to-coast, at Harvard and Yale, but also at University of California, at the University of Texas, at smaller campuses in between. And at each of these institutions, there’s presidents and deans, just like President Shafik at Columbia, who are facing a really difficult set of choices. Do they call in the police? The University of Texas in Austin this afternoon, we saw protesters physically clashing with police.

Do they hold back, like at Harvard, where there were dramatic videos of students literally running into Harvard yard with tents. They were popping up in real-time. And so Columbia, really, I think, at the end of the day, may have kicked off some of this. But they are now in league with a whole bunch of other universities that are struggling with the same set of questions. And it’s a set of questions that they’ve had since this war broke out.

And now these schools only have a week or two left of classes. But we don’t know when these standoffs are going to end. We don’t know if students are going to leave campus for the summer. We don’t know if they’re going to come back in the fall and start protesting right away, or if this year is going to turn out to have been an aberration that was a response to a really awful, bloody war, or if we’re at the beginning of a bigger shift on college campuses that will long outlast this war in the Middle East.

Well, Nick, thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Michael.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. The United Nations is calling for an independent investigation into two mass graves found after Israeli forces withdrew from hospitals in Gaza. Officials in Gaza said that some of the bodies found in the graves were Palestinians who had been handcuffed or shot in the head and accused Israel of killing and burying them. In response, Israel said that its soldiers had exhumed bodies in one of the graves as part of an effort to locate Israeli hostages.

And on Wednesday, Hamas released a video of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American dual citizen, whom Hamas has held hostage since October 7. It was the first time that he has been shown alive since his captivity began. His kidnapping was the subject of a “Daily” episode in October that featured his mother, Rachel. In response to Hamas’s video, Rachel issued a video of her own, in which she spoke directly to her son.

And, Hersh, if you can hear this, we heard your voice today for the first time in 201 days. And if you can hear us, I am telling you, we are telling you, we love you. Stay strong. Survive.

Today’s episode was produced by Sydney Harper, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Olivia Natt, Nina Feldman, and Summer Thomad, with help from Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Devon Taylor and Lisa Chow, contains research help by Susan Lee, original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

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Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Nicholas Fandos

Produced by Sydney Harper ,  Asthaa Chaturvedi ,  Olivia Natt ,  Nina Feldman and Summer Thomad

With Michael Simon Johnson

Edited by Devon Taylor and Lisa Chow

Original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell

Engineered by Chris Wood

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

Columbia University has become the epicenter of a growing showdown between student protesters, college administrators and Congress over the war in Gaza and the limits of free speech.

Nicholas Fandos, who covers New York politics and government for The Times, walks us through the intense week at the university. And Isabella Ramírez, the editor in chief of Columbia’s undergraduate newspaper, explains what it has all looked like to a student on campus.

On today’s episode

Nicholas Fandos , who covers New York politics and government for The New York Times

Isabella Ramírez , editor in chief of The Columbia Daily Spectator

Background reading

Inside the week that shook Columbia University .

The protests at the university continued after more than 100 arrests.

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

Research help by Susan Lee .

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government. More about Nicholas Fandos

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