Welcome to Year 6

Our class is called Monarchs and we are taught by Miss Abbott. Mrs Green is our teaching assistant. Miss Bourne also supports our class in the afternoons.

PE

Monarchs have PE lessons with a specialist teacher, Mr Stevenson-Leigh, on Mondays. Children will need to wear their PE kit to school every Monday and will remain in it all day. In the autumn term, Thursday's PE lesson is swimming. Please ensure that children have the correct kit so that they can successfully participate. 

Library

Children in Monarchs will have the opportunity to visit the school library every Thursday. They will be able to choose a book to take home to read. If they need to change a book, please ensure that they have it in school on a Thursday.

Home Learning

Give Me Ten - Children are expected to read for at least ten minutes every day and should record this in their reading record. Children should bring their reading record to school every day. In year 6, children are not expected to always read to an adult, however a parent/carer will need to sign their reading record to show that they have read at home. Further information and recommended texts can be found under the reading star at the top of the page. We hope to see lots of children becoming Reading Champions this year! 

Maths Magicians - There are a number of key mathematical facts that children should know and remember. These are, of course, taught in school but it is essential that children practise them at home too. You can find out which facts your child is currently working on by checking the record in the front of their maths home learning book. Further information and practice ideas can be found under the maths star at the top of the page. Children will be quizzed on their maths facts every Friday. As they progress through the different stages of facts, children have the opportunity to earn rewards and work towards becoming Maths Magicians!

Times Tables - Times tables (and the associated division facts) are a vital part of mathematical knowledge and understanding. It is crucial that your child practises these skills at home by logging onto the Times Table Rockstars website daily, for at least ten minutes. Their username and password can be found in the front of their maths home learning book.

Handwriting - Using www.letterjoin.co.uk, your child can practise their handwriting at home. There are desktop and tablet login details that can be found by clicking on the writing star at the top of the page.

Spelling - In school, we will teach the children spelling patterns and rules. At home, we would like the focus to be on learning and practising the Year 5 and 6 statutory spellings (you can find these by clicking on the spelling star at the top of this page)

English and maths - Children have English and maths written tasks to complete each week. The pages to be completed in their CGP books can be seen below. Home learning is set every Friday and should be handed in the following Wednesday.

This week's home learning is...

English - Pages 36 and 37 (tenses)

Maths - Pages 74 and 75 (3D shapes)

Maths Magicians and reading daily.

Children could also practice Times Table Rockstars and handwriting - links to these websites can be found under the maths and writing stars at the top of this page.

If the maths or English task is taking your child much longer than 30 minutes for each, then please write a note in the book and we will look at it with them in school.

Autumn 2 Update - December 2025

I am struggling to believe that we have reached the end of the autumn term! The past few months seem to have flown by and the children are now a third of the way through year six! What a wonderful first few months it has been. I have loved continuing to see the children embrace everything that Margaret Wix has to offer, demonstrating our learning powers and values at all times. Monarchs have shown: kindness when supporting younger pupils on the playground at lunchtimes each day; curiosity in lessons and when we have had visitors in school; respect for others during Anti-Bullying Week when identifying what bullying is and how our differences should be celebrated; self-belief and resilience in their learning, particularly while tackling their first set of practice SATs. The results show some great progress already; I can't wait to see what the rest of the year will bring.

In English, this half term, we have written to both entertain and persuade. Our first unit of work was based on a beautiful picture book titled 'Wisp'. It is a powerful and uplifting story about a young refugee born into a world of tents and fences, who discovers hope and the promise of someday. Children developed an understanding of multi-clause sentences, joining with a range of conjunctions, and also practised using dialogue to advance the narrative when writing their own additional chapters for the story. More recently, children have developed their persuasive writing by exploring a selection of famous speeches from throughout history. Together, we read speeches from influential people including: Malala Yousafzai, Abraham Lincoln, Greta Thunberg, Winston Churchill, Helen Keller and more. We identified what made the speeches successful and then enjoyed writing some of our own. Children chose a pet peeve to banish to Room 101 and enjoyed writing to persuade me to eliminate things such as litter, homework, homelessness, bullying and even embarrassing parents.

Maths this half term, has seen Monarchs tackle fractions, decimals and percentages. We've spent a lot of time learning how to calculate each of these separately, but have also had to try to understand how they are all linked and master converting between them. It has required a lot of self-belief and resilience but we have certainly made great strides. As we know that these are three areas of mathematics frequently tested in SATs, in addition to being valuable to understand for real-life contexts such as shopping, we will definitely be revisiting this learning again! In recent weeks, we have also explored properties of 2D shapes and learned how to compare and classify polygons. We ended the term learning the names and properties of 3D shapes as well as tackling nets. We've been very busy!

Monarchs have loved being super scientists this half term while learning all about evolution and inheritance. We began this unit of learning by looking at real fossils and coming to understand how they tell us about living things that existed millions of years ago. The children enjoyed learning about a variety of plants and animals and discussing how they are adapted to suit their environments. Two stories, 'The Molliebird' and 'Moth' helped the children to understand that evolution is a gradual change that takes place over time in order to ensure that creatures are suited to their environments and able to survive. Children have also learned how characteristics are inherited, which explains why offspring look like their parents but less like their cousins. The children found this incredibly interesting and reflected on their own families and how members are similar and different.

Geography has involved learning about climate change and its impact on our planet. The children have been extremely interested and shocked to learn that heatwaves, bushfires, floods, droughts, polar regions melting and sea levels rising are all results of the way we are mistreating our world. They have drawn upon skills from other areas of the curriculum in these lessons, creating graphs, designing flood defences and more. There are many strong opinions regarding what we should now do as a school to help reduce the impact of global warming. 

In RE, we have been learning about how Christians celebrate Christmas and have been asking if their traditions help them to understand who Jesus was and why he was born. We were interested to find out how a number of Christmas traditions may have originated as religious ways of celebrating at this time of year, but now are enjoyed by many people in a secular way. We created questionnaires to find out if everyone in our class celebrates Christmas and if so how - we heard about lots of lovely family traditions that some children enjoy and are very much looking forward to over the coming weeks. It was also wonderful for children from different faiths to share knowledge of celebrations they partake in and explain how they are similar and different to Christmas celebrations. Just this week, we also visited Christ Church where we brought the nativity story to life, dressing up as the key figures.

Monarchs have continued getting to grips with learning French this half term. Our focus has been on habitats, linking with our work in science. Children have learned how to say, in French: the essential things that plants and animals need to survive; five key habitats around the world; which plants grow in each habitat and which animals live there too. Tackling a new language is always challenging, but I've been impressed with how willing the children have been to have a go! 

We have some future computing experts in Monarchs class, I am sure! I have been so impressed with the children's work this half term: they have designed and created their very own websites! Each child chose a subject to create a site about and then they have worked hard to add everything from images and text to hyperlinks in order to make their websites fully functional. It's been brilliant to see how excited they have been each week to get the laptops out and enjoy developing these skills.

Our latest PSHE unit of work was titled, 'Celebrating Differences' and we have certainly done that in Monarchs class! We have discussed what makes each of us special and unique, and thought about how these things are positives and shouldn't be used to judge or discriminate against people. The mature discussion that takes place in our classroom during every PSHE lesson is wonderful and I feel privileged to be involved. I can really see the children taking the time to think carefully before they share ideas and they are all showing great respect when faced with differing opinions.

Mr Stevenson has been extremely impressed with Monarchs during PE lesson this half term. They have enjoyed developing their gymnastics skills and he has noticed a real improvement in their abilities and teamwork as the half term has progressed. In the second PE session of each week, Monarchs have been honing their swimming skills. This culminated with the sponsored swimming session. The children tried extremely hard to swim as much as possible in order to raise money for our class - thank you to those of you who have already sent the sponsorship money in. If you are yet to, please do so as soon as possible. Some of our class also participated in a netball match against Redbourn Primary School, which they won 6-4. This was an exciting way to end the term and we are very proud of all who were involved.

We finished the term with a DT unit based on cooking and nutrition. It involved researching, designing, making and evaluating stuffed peppers - delicious! The children were responsible for every aspect of the process including, dicing onions, crushing garlic, frying meat, adding seasonings, and grating cheese. The enthusiasm for learning during this process was exceptional, with children supporting each other to ensure careful work whilst having a lot of fun!

Music with Mr Mitchell is always exciting - especially with our winter music concert which is the culmination of a great half term's work. The children chose their song to perform and then worked incredibly hard over a number of weeks to play a variety of instruments and sing. This year was particularly impressive as the children sung 'Feliz Navidad' in Spanish while playing their instruments! We hope that you enjoyed watching them all perform.

We have crammed a lot into a busy half term - as well as all the learning taking place in class, we've enjoyed: watching the pantomime and nativity; welcoming visitors into our classroom from the travel planning team; participating in Anti-Bullying Week; developing our pupil leadership through giving assemblies, supporting with house activities, carrying out pupil voices and organising charity events; and much more! I wish those of you who celebrate, a very merry Christmas, and look forward to seeing all of your children again in the new year, feeling refreshed and ready to learn again!

Thank you for your continued support,

Miss Abbott

Autumn 1 Update - October 2025

What a brilliant first half term we have had in Monarchs! The children have quickly settled into school routines and have shown me what enthusiastic learners they can be. They have risen to the challenge of being top of the school and are striving to always demonstrate our learning powers and values. It was fantastic to see the number of children who wanted to take on leadership roles: our house captains, pupil parliament, maths and reading ambassadors, and digital leaders are already proving to be responsible. They are supporting key stage one at lunchtimes, leading school tours, adding maths puzzles to the weekly newsletter and more. I can't wait to see their impact throughout the year.

In the classroom, the children have been working extremely hard. In English, we first wrote narratives to entertain based on a picture book, 'Night of the Gargoyles'. The children thought carefully about how to build tension and create atmosphere through their word choice. It was lovely to see them sharing their work with year five after putting so much effort into their stories. During our second unit of work, we wrote about the planets in our solar system after reading a range of brilliant non-fiction texts that inspired us. Inventing our own planets was great fun; we had to consider the weather and atmosphere, habitats and life forms, position in the solar system and more. We tried to ensure that we kept the audience and purpose in mind when writing, using varied sentence structures and a formal tone. Throughout our writing this term, we have been concentrating on ensuring that every sentence makes sense and is correctly punctuated as well as trying to widen our vocabularies and make use of ambitious words and phrases. 

Maths this half term has predominantly focused on number and place value. This has involved ensuring that we understand the value of every digit in numbers up to ten million. We have been ordering and comparing numbers, rounding them, multiplying and dividing them by 10, 100 and 1000, and much more! We also learned how to calculate the areas of rectilinear shapes, triangles and parallelograms. We revised properties of number recently, in particular revisiting factors and multiples from learning in previous years. Understanding of this is particularly important as we move onto learning about fractions next half term. I've been pleased to see many children progressing through each Maths Magicians stage - this also helps to ensure that they can access our learning in class and feel confident to tackle other areas of maths. Keep it up!

We have been immersed in our World War II history topic this half term. Our young historians have amazed me with the knowledge that many of them already have as well as their determination to find out new information about this interesting period in history. We learned how the war began and which countries were involved, made WWII rations, created comic strips depicting the Battle of Dunkirk, made model Anderson shelters, compared sources of evidence when predicting who won the Battle of Britain, and much, much more! The highlight, of course, was our exciting trip to RAF Hendon where we got to see and handle WWII artefacts, learn about key figures who helped us win the Battle of Britain and found out more about the aircraft that were used in the war. Year six were praised by the museum staff for their effort and behaviour - it was great to see our learning powers being used throughout the day.

In science, Monarchs have been investigating living things and their habitats. We have learned about classification of living things using keys developed by an important scientist, Carl Linneaus. Using classification keys proved to be challenging but, with resilience and curiosity, we were able to answer questions that helped us to sort and group various living creatures based on observable characteristics. We learned that living things are sometimes much smaller too - we have carried out two investigations into micro-organisms and found that some types of bacteria can be harmful, whilst others are much more useful. Over time, we watched the effect of bacteria on food items and saw how mould grew. As well as this, we found out that yeast played a positive role in cooking as it helped us to bake bread that rose.

In RE, this half term, we have been learning about Humanism. Through our enquiry, we have looked at famous people (Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Alice Roberts) who may be role-models to Humanists and how their words or actions correlate to Humanist beliefs. We learned that Humanists try to live by the 'golden rule', which is to treat other people as you would like them to treat you, and noted that this concept is found in most religions. We found that Humanists believe in reason, questioning and science. They focus on human achievement and scientific discovery rather than learning from a sacred scripture. We learned that Humanists do not believe in life after death and think that the impact we have in this life is what lives on. I enjoyed hearing the children respectfully share their personal beliefs about inspirational people and note similarities and differences between their own faiths and Humanism.

In computing, we have been learning about systems and networks, with a focus on communication and collaboration. We learned how data is sent from one computer to another using IP addresses and data packets. We discussed methods of online communication, such as email, social media, video sharing sites, instant messaging, video calls, and more. We thought about the benefits and drawbacks of each method including how private they were and whether they had age restrictions. Next, we used one method of communication, Google Docs, to work on a collaborative project with people who were sitting on opposite sides of the room to us. Linking this learning to WWII, we created fact files about Adolf Hitler or Winston Churchill.

I've been impressed with the developing French knowledge and understanding in Monarchs. This half term, we have learned how to understand longer and more complicated texts based on WWII. The children have learned to pick out key words from previous units of learning, as well as using cognates and near cognates, in order to decipher extended pieces of writing. Children have gained a deeper understanding of the role of nouns, verbs, articles/determiners and adjectives in sentences. The medium of WWII helped to provide context for lots of new French vocabulary.

This half term's PSHE unit was titled 'Being Me in My World' and involved us thinking about our goals for this year as well as universal rights of children and how our behaviour and choices can impact others. We compared things we want with things we need and thought about how there are many people, less fortunate than ourselves, whose needs are not met at all. Monarchs have also taken part in 'Hello Yellow' - a day to raise awareness of young people's mental health - and showed racism the red card recently. During October, we learned about influential black people and ensured their stories were told as part of Black History Month. We also took part in the NSPCC 'Speak Out. Stay Safe.' programme through which we learnt about types of abuse and how we can reach out for help if we ever need it.

Our PE lessons have included tag rugby and swimming this half term. I have heard lots of excellent things about the successes in swimming, with children showing great self-belief, swimming further and developing stronger strokes. Tag rugby lessons have included lots of skills development. The children have learned passing techniques, how to defend, the key rules of the game and more. Mr Stevenson has been really impressed with their effort in lessons so far and the developing sportsmanship. 

In art, Monarchs had undertaken a drawing unit of work involving looking at different styles of street art, understanding and applying chiaroscuro and created symbolic and expressive drawings. this topic encouraged the children to form their own opinions about art, understand the impact of techniques and convey messages through their artwork.

It was a pleasure to meet many of you at parent consultations this week. Many of the documents referred to, such as reading lists and practice maths quizzes, can be found by clicking on the relevant star at the top of this page. Thank you for your support this half term - through working together we can help your children to reach their full potential. 

Finally, what a jam-packed half term it has been; I hope the children enjoy a well-earned break next week and I look forward to seeing them all again on Monday 3rd November.

Kind regards,

Miss Abbott