Monarchs (Year 6)

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 - pages 74 and 75 (3D shapes)
• English - pages 10 and 11 (Structure)
• Maths Magicians and reading daily
• Children could also practise Times Table Rockstars and handwriting - links to these pages 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.

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