News
Newsletter for the week ending Friday 24th October
Day trips and residential trips have been part of this week in school and please read on to find out what has been happening in an around all the classes.
Friends of Appledore School (FOAS) hosted their AGM last week and hope to recruit helpers. Last year the events they organised brought in over £5000 profit that all went to very good causes for the benefit of the children. Please consider offering your support to them, because without more helpers this support is not guaranteed. To read their AGM minutes please see here and to contact them to see if you can help please contact admin@appledoreprimary.co.uk and we will forward your details to FOAS.
Dates for the diary
- Cake Sale after school on Friday 24th October. Cake donations on the morning of the sale please.
- Half term Appledore Library activities include a stop frame animation workshop and a Shaun the Sheep trail
- Xmas disco Friday 28th November Reception 7 Years 1&2 @5-6pm and Years 3-6 @6.30-7.30pm
- Xmas fair Friday 12th December 3-5pm
- Wishing you all a lovely weekend and don’t forget next week is half term!
From Jeremy Cooper and all the children and staff
AROUND THE CLASSES
This week in Turtles and Dolphins we have been celebrating Harvest. We talked about how people celebrate harvest and how we have celebrated it in school. We loved singing for you all on Tuesday. We watched a video about combine harvesters and labelled the different parts of the machine. We talked about how all the different parts of the crops are used. We have also painted pictures of combine harvesters and made them out of tubes.
In Year 1 this week we have been making our booklets for our own versions of the book My Day at the Zoo. In Maths we have been carrying on with addition and subtraction and we have been brilliant at writing number sentences for part whole models! We started with addition sentences and have now moved onto looking at subtraction sentences. We have also worked hard on our reading this week. We’ve been practising sounding out in our heads to help our fluency. We hope you have a lovely break over half term
Year 6 explored how Jews use a Seder Plate as the centrepiece to their Passover celebrations. They did this by tasting the foods on a Seder plate. Well done to the children who tasted the bitter herbs to understand how it reminds Jews of the feelings of bitterness associated with slavery. Less well done to the children who over-estimated how much horseradish they could tolerate. I hope the sweet apple sauce took the taste away eventually. Year 3 made pledges for things they would do to help look after this world and year 4 made beautiful Happy Eid cards to explore how Muslims celebrate this special time.
Year 2 to have had a great first half term. They performed brilliantly for the Harvest Festival and we hope you enjoyed watching. In English, they have written their instructions for how to wash an animal based on the book ‘How to wash a woolly mammoth’. These were really entertaining and everyone had tried hard to use the skills that they had learnt over the learning sequence – well done! In Maths, they are adding and subtracting across tens. It’s really important to know the number bonds to 10 for this so I’ve added a game to google classroom for them to practise. They enjoyed another art session this week where they were practising their drawing skills. Everyone has worked so hard over the half term and we wish you all a relaxing, well-deserved half term break.
Year 3 enjoyed their outdoor learning today, despite the weather, they were able to make a sundial and see it in action. In writing we have completed our writing about interviewing another animal and started to think about the next text; what it was like in Pompeii before the eruption. We have continued to look at strategies for subtraction and slowly we are seeing accuracy in our calculations. We looked at why deserts are so dry compared to the rainforest and began our new science unit on rocks and soils. In the art studio this week we have been drawing toucans and using chalk pastels to add colour. It’s been a really productive half term and all deserve a good half term break.
In Year 4 this week, the children visited Exeter Energy from Waste where they learnt how they use rubbish to create electricity as an example of sustainability. They had a look around the factory, visited the control room and they took part in some games and a Kahoot quiz to test their knowledge. Aside from that, the children have been busy writing a story on the film The Girl and the Fox which will be ready to display in the corridor in the main building. In Maths, we have been learning about area and perimeter and the children are going to use the skills they have learnt to design their own solar farm. In Science, the children learnt that metals have different melting points and presented this information as a bar chart. In Geography and Computing, the children presented their Google Slides to each other and it was lovely to see what they have learnt and remembered throughout their sustainability topic. After half term, we will be reading the book Roman Invasion by Jim Eldrige. If you can get your hands on a used book on Amazon or even Vinted, that would be great! I do have some spares but unfortunately it won’t be enough for everyone! Have a lovely half term.
The Year 5 two-night residential stay at St George’s House was a brilliant experience, with many of the children staying away from home for the first time. The children took part in a wide range of activities, including canoeing on the lake with fun teamwork games, fencing, archery, orienteering, as well as team-building challenges such as crossing a ‘river’ using crates and planks, building a giant marble run, and completing a picture trail to the beach. While the first night’s sleep was a little challenging, everyone settled well for the second night. The food was amazing, and each evening we enjoyed games and stories together. The children also took it in turns to take on various jobs: laying the table for breakfast and dinner, washing up and sweeping the floors. They also did a brilliant job of keeping their rooms clean and their things organised, with daily room inspections! Back at school, the children researched their choice of a woman in science using Chromebooks and wrote biographies. On Friday, we finished our geography Fair Trade unit and rounded off our reading unit on Holes by watching the film. We hope everyone has a wonderful half-term!
Year 6 have been busy writing about Climate Change in Literacy and refining multiplication skills in maths as well as looking at squared and cubed numbers. In Science, they have been investigating with bread – we’ll see where mould grows best. In PE, they worked really hard running in groups of three – they had great determination. It’s been a busy half-term and they have all worked incredibly hard! We hope you enjoy the half-term holiday.
