Welcome to Year 6

Our class is called Monarchs and we are taught by Miss Abbott. Mrs Green is our teaching assistant.

PE

Monarchs have PE lessons on Tuesdays and Thursdays. They are taught by a PE specialist teacher, Mr Milbourn. Children will need to wear their PE kit to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays and will remain in them all day. In the autumn term, Thursday's PE lesson is swimming. Please ensure that they have the correct kit so that they can successfully participate. 

Library

Children in Monarchs will have the opportunity to visit the school library every Wednesday. 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 Wednesday.

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. 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. 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...

Maths - page 19 (multiplying and dividing with decimals)

English - pages 36 and 37 (tenses)

Maths Magicians and reading daily

Children could also practice Times Table Rockstars, Rollama 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.

Home learning is given out on a Friday and should be handed in the following Wednesday.

Oracy task - Speech Competition

The document below includes details of an optional homework task for you to complete over half term. Mrs Watkins, our school oracy lead, is looking for pupils to represent Margaret Wix at an oracy competition, taking place at Samuel Ryder Academy later this year.

If you would like to participate, you will need to prepare a five-minute speech (details of which are in the attached document). This speech should be submitted to Mrs Watkins after half term and she will work with you to prepare you for public speaking. She will also make the final selection of children to represent the school in the competition.

It would be fantastic to have a couple of entrants from year six!

Spring 2 Update (April 2025)

The second half of the spring term has been jam-packed - we have managed to fit so much learning into such a short few weeks! This half term has required a lot of hard work as we head towards SATs, including a week of mock tests during which the children tried their best to show off everything that they have learned so far. All children have made improvements since the autumn term, but every child will be bringing a letter home explaining home learning we would like the children to complete over the holidays and  would welcome your support. As well as this, don't forget the numerous resources linked under the KS2 SATs star at the top of this page which can be used to help keep learning ticking over while we are away from school. In working together, we are sure that we can give the children the best possible chance of reaching their full potential.

Since February half term, in English lessons, Monarchs have enjoyed exploring a selection of traditional fairy tales and some which had been innovated, such as 'Jack and the Baked Bean Stalk'. After this, we spent time planning and writing fairy tales of our own. We focused on using a variety of grammatical techniques and literary devices to make our writing entertaining for our readers, including: the past perfect tense, dialogue, a range of adverbials, varied conjunctions, figurative language, and more! Through drama, we were able to role-play conversations between characters in order to ensure that we were selective when writing dialogue, remembering the purpose of it is to reveal detail about characters or move the action on. 

We have continued to work hard in maths this half term, tackling a range of topics. We learned how to multiply and divide fractions, calculate ratios and proportions, work out the volume of 3D shapes and convert metric units of measure. Once again, I have been impressed by the resilience shown by the children as they tackled tricky, new content. Some of this learning gave them opportunities to revise previously taught concepts too, increasing the children's confidence in key areas.

In science, our topic this half term was 'electricity'. During this, we recapped learning from previous years regarding how to make and draw simple circuits, using the correct scientific symbols. We have loved the practical elements of this unit of work, and have persevered when we came across broken bulbs or missing batteries that could have set us back! We have investigated the impact of more or fewer batteries in a circuit on the brightness of bulbs and loudness of buzzers and we loved making a human circuit and seeing how the electrons passed around our circle to light up our energy stick.

Our geography topic this term has seen us learning about Fair Trade. We discovered one of the oldest trading routes in the world: the Silk Road. We compared this to modern trade in which commodities are regularly imported and exported by container ships. It was interesting, and somewhat surprising, to find out some of our our most popular imports, included toys and games from China, and some of our most popular exports included Scottish salmon! Comparing the lives of two banana farmers in St Lucia enabled us to learn about Fair Trade - we were shocked to find out that many farmers only receive 10% of what their product sells for in the UK. We felt this was unfair and so were pleased to find out about the work of Fair Trade foundation. We spotted their logo on a number of products and want to keep an eye out for this when we shop in the future.

In computing, this half term, we have learned about spreadsheets and how they can be used to perform calculations with large amounts of data. We began focusing on using cell references to multiply, divide, add or subtract data, before moving onto more complex functions such as finding the average of a data set. As our skills improved, we looked at larger data sets and eventually managed to plan a party using a spreadsheet, working out the costings per person.

Our RE lessons this half term focused on Christianity and we have been trying to answer the question: 'Is Christianity still a strong religion 2000 years after Jesus was alive?' During this unit of work, we have found out about Christian celebrations, teachings and places of worship and reflected on how Christians are sometimes treated by others. It is always pleasing to hear the children thoughtfully share their own ideas and respectfully make comparisons to their own beliefs and experiences during these lessons.

This half term's PSHE topic was 'Healthy Me'. We have learned about the risks and effects of alcohol and drugs on our bodies and considered the pressure to take part in anti-social behaviour, for example by joining a gang. I was extremely impressed with the considered discussion and thoughtfulness surrounding these mature themes.

Music lessons this half term have seen the children showing great skill on a range of instruments in Mr Mitchell's lessons. They have been working to keep a beat and have had opportunities to improvise too. It was a pleasure to see the children perform, once again, in our spring music concert with such confidence and enthusiasm.

In PE, the children have developed their understanding of tennis and hockey skills and games with Mr Milbourn. They have learned the rules of the games as well as practising their forehand, backhand, passing, dribbling and shooting skills before applying these to game scenarios. Mr Milbourn has seen great skill, teamwork and sportsmanship that has really impressed him.

What a busy half term it has been! Your children have been a credit to you as they endeavour to show our learning powers and values each day while working hard to achieve as highly as possible. Whilst SATs are important in showing the progress that they have made during their time in primary school, we know that there is much more to your children than the results of these tests: at Margaret Wix, we are proud to be developing well-rounded individuals. I hope that everyone has a restful and enjoyable break (with just a little SATs practice) and I look forward to seeing the children again on Tuesday 22nd April.

Kind regards,

Miss Abbott

Spring 1 Update (February 2025)

What a busy half term it has been for Monarchs class once again; despite only being back at school for six weeks, we have managed to enjoy lots of new learning and experienced numerous successes. We even squeezed in a school trip: we visited the Houses of Parliament in January, which was a wonderful experience, enjoyed by all. The children showed great curiosity during the day as we learned about democracy and British values, toured the Houses of Parliament and took part in a workshop that explained how a bill becomes a law. We were also lucky to meet our local MP, Daisy Cooper, who told us about her role and answered our questions. I have been especially pleased to continue to see the children striving to demonstrate our learning powers and values in everything we have done this half term.

Our English lessons this half term have mostly been based upon a fantastic text: Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You. This is an enthralling book, with brilliant language, about an amazing collection of magical and mystical creatures. Through reading it, we have been able to develop our understanding of a variety of grammatical techniques including: active and passive voice, subordinating clauses, hyphenated words, pronouns and adverbial phrases used for cohesion, and much more. We also used drama techniques to immerse ourselves in this fantastical world, such as creating freeze frames to show the chaos a mischievous boggart might create in our classroom. This work has then led to us creating our own non-chronological reports about weird and wonderful beasts that we are looking forward to seeing published in our very own class book.

In maths, we have tackled a range of new topics including long division, BIDMAS and algebra, as well as revisiting and extending our knowledge of previously learning about angles and area and perimeter. Whilst some of this learning has proved challenging, I've been impressed by the resilience shown and the desire to improve.

In science, we have learned about light this half term and have particularly enjoyed the opportunities for practical work: we made our own periscopes, investigated shadows, created our own optical illusions and explored how refraction can be used to create a 'magical' tricks such as making a coin 'disappear'. Monarchs had excellent knowledge about how light travels in straight lines and how opaque objects create shadows, but there were a few surprises for the children too - did you know that our eyes actually see objects upside down? Monarchs learned about the different parts of the eye, including the optic nerve that sends rapid messages to our brain, which then quickly flips the image to ensure we do actually see it in the correct orientation! Amazing!

We delved into the world of the 'Shang Dynasty' during history lessons this half term. We learned how 'dragon bones' revealed much about this ancient dynasty and found that they were used by Shang people to ask questions of their ancestors. We looked at a variety of secondary sources to find out what life was like for emperors and farmers during this time period and were able to identify similarities and differences between them. We were interested to find out about the rise and fall of the Shang Dynasty and learned about the perfect first emperor, King Cheng Tang, who had many desirable qualities. We compared him to King Di Xin, who was a terrible ruler and whose actions resulted in the downfall of the dynasty. Finally, we found out about Fu Hao, a female army general who was in charge of around 13,000 troops. Considering attitudes towards women during this time period, we were surprised that a woman had managed to reach such an esteemed position. It was interesting to see pictures of her tomb, through which we were able to infer much about her life. There has been great interest and curiosity shown during history lessons this term.

RE lessons have been centred around the question: 'Is anything ever eternal?'. During this unit of work, we have found out about the Christian perspective on eternal life and eternal love, but also reflected on our own beliefs. RE lessons often prompt interesting discussion as the children share their own thoughts and I have been pleased to see how respectfully they have listened and responded to one other.

Our PSHE lessons have been focused on dreams and goals. We started our topic by thinking about our long term goals, learning that these needed to be realistic and that we would need to work hard to achieve them. We have aspiring lawyers, vets, authors, gymnastics coaches, footballers, artists, teachers, and more in Monarchs! Next, we reflected on the world around us and things that may concern us such as war, poverty or natural disasters. We thought about our hopes and wishes for the world and what we might be able to do to support others less fortunate than ourselves.

Our computing lessons this term have involved using software called 'Scratch' to programme variables in our own games. We had great fun testing out a variety of games and then seeing how we could create our own versions. We had to programme the games ourselves and, as a result, could make a variety of things happen including creating our own scoring system, changing features after reaching a certain total, some of us introduced a timed element to our games, others enjoyed creating sounds that they programmed to play when certain events happened. Of course, we all very much enjoyed testing out and playing our games too!

I have been impressed with the enthusiasm shown in French lessons over the past half term as we have learned how to talk about our school day. Through various speaking, listening, reading and writing tasks, Monarchs have learned: ten different school subjects, how to state their preferences and give reasons for their views, and to explain on which day and at what time they learn each subject.  I have enjoyed hearing the developing French accents and the confidence in speaking another language is growing - c'est super Monarchs!

We have enjoyed music lessons with Mr Mitchell this half term. He has commented often on how the music that he is teaching Monarchs to play on a variety of instruments is much more advanced than what he is able to teach year six pupils at some of his other schools! With the number of children attending choir and band club, it's clear that we have some very talented musicians in Monarchs and I always feel incredibly proud when I go to collect them a few minutes early and get to hear a snippet of what they have been working on - it sounds great and I'm sure you will also be looking forward to hearing the final masterpiece at our Spring music concert next half term.

Art lessons with Mrs Campbell-Pugh have involved photography this half term. The children very excitedly use images to create their own form from household objects. After exploring some of the most famous paintings in the world, such as the Mona Lisa and The Scream, the children also posed and took photographs of each other which they have then tried to replicate through drawing. They have really focused on ensuring accurate proportions and their creations are coming along very nicely indeed! 

Mr Milbourn has enjoyed teaching dance and health related fitness during PE lessons this half term. The lessons have definitely pushed a number of the children outside their comfort zones, but I have been proud of how they have persevered and shown self-belief. The teamwork demonstrated in creating and performing their carnival dance routines has been wonderful to see.

As well as all of this, we squeezed in a second practice SATs week. I have been so pleased to see the growing resilience and determination to succeed has resulted in improved scores from so many children. I know that tests can often be daunting but, hopefully, through this regular practice the children will continue to grow in confidence and approach the real SATs full of self-belief. Your child will bring home their test papers to have a look at with you - please support them in correcting mistakes that they made and then use additional resources (found by clicking on the KS2 SATs star at the top of this page) to practise further, hopefully ensuring that they can score as highly as possible.

I am sure that you will agree with me saying that I think Monarchs have worked hard this term! We have covered so much in such a relatively short space of time and I am enjoying seeing the progress the children continue to make. I hope that, as well as well as a little SATs practice, the children enjoy a well-earned break over half term and I look forward to seeing them all refreshed and ready to tackle more learning when we return to school on Monday 24th February. As always, thank you parents and carers for your support this half term - together we can help your child reach their full potential.

Kind regards,

Miss Abbott

Autumn 2 Update (December 2024)

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 during Aspirations Day 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 wasps, viruses, homework, homelessness and global warming.

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'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. We enjoyed working with Mrs Lyle, our school Eco Lead, on a project involving designing an sustainable school. Whilst the children did not win the competition, they did make it through to the final and we are extremely proud of them and now have lots of ideas for how to make Margaret Wix more eco-friendly.

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 Milbourn 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.

We finished the term with a DT project involving designing and making automata toys. The children were responsible for every aspect of the process, from measuring and sawing the wood, to gluing the pieces together, creating cams and carefully designing pictures and characters. The teamwork on display during this task was exceptional, with children supporting each other to ensure accurate work. They also demonstrated resilience in abundance as they strove to complete their toys, but faced setbacks such as finding some pieces of wood were not cut straight.

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. 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 parents into our classroom as well as a volunteer from HSBC  for Marvellous Maths Week, participating in Aspirations Day and Anti-Bullying Week, and much more! As you know, during the last week of term we were visited by Ofsted; I could not be prouder of the children who took having visitors in our classroom and around school in their stride and, in fact, confidently showcased their learning. They have all certainly earned a rest over the next couple of weeks.
 

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 2024)

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've 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, conducting book corner competitions 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. Over the past few weeks, writing has been linked to our WWII history topic. We have been writing to persuade mothers to evacuate their children and have looked carefully at how to create different levels of formality. In our final, extended pieces of writing, we took on the role of Winston Churchill or King George VI and performed our persuasive speeches. 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 Bletchley Park where we got to see WWII artefacts, learn about codebreaking and found out more about what life was like during this period.

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. Creating our own classification keys proved to be challenging but, with resilience and curiosity, we were able to pose questions that would help 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 PSHE learning extended beyond the classroom this half term too with a trip to Crucial Crew. On our visit, we enjoyed learning about potential hazards in real-life scenarios and finding out how to keep ourselves and others safe.

Our PE lessons have included netball 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. Netball lessons have included lots of skills development. The children have learned different types of passes, developed their shooting technique and learned some of the key rules, such as the three second rule. The half term culminated with an inter-house tournament with the Marcus Rashford Reds being victorious.

In DT this half term, the children have been cooking with HCL. They have planned, made and evaluated a variety of recipes, including: pizza calzone, chicken fajitas and marbled cookies. Each child was given a certificate after impressing the HCL staff throughout the cooking lessons, showing our learning powers and values at all times.

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 questions, and grammar glossaries, can be found by clicking on the relevant star at the top of this page. Thank you for your support this half term - 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 4th November.

Kind regards,

Miss Abbott