News
Newsletter for the week ending Friday 9th January
Welcome back and a happy new year to you all. We hope you had a really enjoyable Christmas.
Congratulations to those pupils who have achieved 100% attendance for the autumn term. A postcard recognising this was sent home with those children on the last day of the autumn term. Across the school a total of 56 postcards were sent home. Let’s see if we can have more this term! Please see here for December’s attendance newsletter.
For details of holiday rugby camps for all abilities please see here and here.
Please remember to park and drive responsibly on the streets around school and that Kingsley Avenue is a private road and parking is not permitted there. Thank you.
Have a lovely weekend everybody
From Jeremy Cooper and all of the children and staff
Happy new year! This week in Turtles and Dolphins we have been learning about winter. We talked about the things that we already know about winter and how we would all love to make a snowman! We make snowflakes using playdough and we cut snowflakes out. We have talked about where winter fits into our seasons and today we went to the Jungle to look for signs of winter.
Year 1 have had a lovely week back at school. We talked lots about the lovely time they had over Christmas and drew pictures of the favourite things they did. In writing we have started a new book, it is a non-fiction book all about weather. We have been discussing the differences between non-fiction and fiction books and will be comparing books more next week. We started by going for a weather walk around the school where we really used our senses and then discussed the weather back in class. Then in groups we thought about things we like and don’t like about different types of weather, as well as what we would wear and words to describe the weather. In Maths we are looking at numbers to 20, we have been ordering them forwards and backwards, matching the number to the word and making the number out of different manipulatives. We have also started our new topic which is about how nursing has changed over time. We started by looking at some significant people in history and then the significant people in our lives.
Welcome back Year 2. This week they have been learning to count money in Maths – pence, pounds and then mixed amounts. They really enjoyed looking at the different coins and we were impressed by how much they had remembered from Year 1. In English, they have been planning and writing stories to match the video clip ‘Baboon on the Moon’. They have started a new History topic about everyday heroes and will be learning all about Grace Darling and her rescue. In their Science, they are learning about what humans need to stay healthy and what animals need to survive. They enjoyed taking photographs around the classroom in computing.
A big thank you to everyone who joined us at St. Mary’s church at the end of last term for the key stage 2 Christmas performance of “Silent Night”. It was a lovely way to end a busy term and the children gave it everything they had left. They sung, danced and acted their socks off to tell an endearing story and as I said to them in singing assembly, I hope they really enjoyed doing it but I also hope they can take something from the experience which will help them going forward. Well done to them all!
Year 3 has returned to school very excited about all the new learning this term. We have started our new text for both writing and reading, Great Women who changed the World. So far we have looked at Gertrude Ederle, Ellen MacArthur and Bessie Coleman. We are continuing with our work on multiplication and division, this week we have finished off our assessments and secured our knowledge of multiples of 10. We looked at the bones in the human skeleton for our science session and in history we have started to learn about the life and work of Marie Curie. It was great to get to the pool this week for the first swimming session.
In Year 4 this week, the children have been learning how to calculate factor pairs of a number in Maths and they have also learnt how to multiply and divide by 10 and 100. In English, we have started reading the text ‘Jack and the Dreamsack’ where we have unpicked it and learnt and remembered a few pages to start inspiring us for our own story. In History, we have started to learn about rationing and how this impacted people’s diets. In Guided Reading, we have started reading our new text ‘Digging for Victory’ where the children will learn even more about the war effort during WWII and what the campaign ‘Digging for Victory’ means. In PE, we practised our balancing and coordination skills and we also did some gymnastics in the hall where the children worked on their partner balances. On Friday afternoon, the children had outdoor learning where they cooked a meal only using rations!
This week, Year 5 have had a fantastic start to the new term across the curriculum. In maths, we have been learning about multiples, factors, prime numbers and square numbers, with the children showing great enthusiasm and confidence when tackling new challenges. In literacy, we launched our new history-based topic on the Great Plague and began exploring our new class novel Plague by Tony Bradman, which has already sparked lots of thoughtful discussion. In science, the children were excited to start our Earth and Space topic; they formulated their own research questions about a planet of their choice before beginning independent research. In history, we introduced our new topic on the Shang Dynasty, while in values we explored what emotions are, why we have them, when they can feel challenging, and how we can meet our emotional needs. In grammar, we focused on using commas in a list and practised this by writing our own sentences.
Happy New Year to you all! Year 6 have been learning about multiplying and dividing fractions. In Literacy, they have begun Pig Heart Boy by Malorie Blackman and will be focussing on making a balanced argument. History is all about how life expectancy has increased, starting with what people had for the first time about 11,000 years ago. We have completed Lino cutting in Art to create a picture based on nature. In music, we used the chime bars to accompany a song about Climate Change.It’s been great to see so many coming back ready to learn and do their best!
