News
Newsletter for the week ending Friday 25th September
Unbelievably, we are halfway towards half-term already! It’s been a good week in school and you can read all about it in Around the Classes.
The Devon Educational Psychology Service (EPS) is running group sessions which aim to reduce worrying in children and young people. The sessions can help parent carers develop skills that can be helpful in managing worries and supporting school attendance.Please see here for more information and how to reserve a place.
In continuance of support for a family known to many of us, please see here for a new fundraiser happening on Saturday 4th October.
Dates for the diary:
-
-
- For information on Bideford College Open Evening on 1st October see here
-
-
- 6th October Atlantic Academy open evening for pupils in years 4, 5 & 6 see here and here for details of their Christmas Fayre
- 8th October, 2pm, Key Stage 2 (years 3-6) Harvest Festival at St Mary’s Church, Appledore – we hope to see you there!
- For details of open mornings and evenings at Great Torrington school for current year 6 pupils see here
- For information on Kingsley School open days for entry into year 7 see here
- Park School opening morning and evening are next week see here
- Nursery and Reception classes Harvest Festival 2.30pm 20th October in the school hall
Wishing you all a good weekend
From Jeremy Cooper and all the children and staff
AROUND THE CLASSES
This week in Turtles and Dolphins we have talked about healthy eating. On Tuesday Asda Man brought some lovely fruit in for us to try. We used lots of words to describe them. We have painted our self-portraits using powder paints. Today, we walked down to the library to change our library books. Don’t forget to have a look on the website and find out what we have been doing.
This week, Sea Lions (Year1) have been learning all about the fascinating continent of Antarctica. They have loved exploring its amazing features, including Mount Vinson and were very surprised to discover that there is an active volcano in such a cold place! The children have done an amazing job creating their own Antarctica models and carefully labelling its different features. In literacy this week, the children have had so much fun and lots of giggles sharing the book The Naughty Bus by Jan and Jerry Oke. We discussed all the cheeky things the bus had got up to in the story and then tried our very best to write our own stories about a toy.In maths this week, we have been delving deeper into the number 5 and revisiting all of its number bonds. The children have explored lots of different ways to make the number 5 and have enjoyed sharing their ideas and discovering the different possibilities.
Year 2 have been in the Art Studio again this week and have been working on their drawing skills. In their English, they have been designing new outfits for Traction Man and writing a sentence about it. In Maths they have been partitioning numbers to 100. Here is a link to a game if you’d like to do some more partitioning at home: https://www.topmarks.co.uk/learning-to-count/place-value-basketball
In their Geography work, they looked at pictures and sorted them into human geography (made by humans – towns, cities, farms) and physical geography (naturally occurring – cliffs, beaches, valleys). They had their first session with the cricket coach last Friday and are looking forward to another session this week.
Having considered the beauty of nature last week Year 3 looked at the order of creation and explored what it means to a Christian if they believe God created the world. Having looked at the opening of the Qur’an in detail last week, Year 4 revised the 5 pillars of Islam in preparation for a detailed study of Muslim prayer. Year 5 followed up their work on the Hindu belief in a cycle of birth death and rebirth by looking at the story of the man in the well which exemplifies how hard the struggle of existence is. Year 6 looked at the Jewish festival of Rosh Hashanah and began giving thought to their hopes for a new academic year as Jews do for the start of the Jewish New Year.
This week Year 3 have been busy writing using fronted adverbials and starting to use a range of punctuation for speech. In maths we have continued to add in 10s and 100s and apply these skills to word problems. We compared climate graphs in our geography session and did a shadow investigation in science. We had fun in cricket, learning to control the ball with the cricket bat and then seeing how far we could hit the ball.
This week, Year 4 have been doing lots of practise writing using postcards to send messages home from Tibbles the cat! We have been focussing on specific spellings that are common but tricky – like Wednesday! In maths, we have compared and ordered four digit numbers and have been problem solving with roman numerals to round the week off. In Computing, we looked at the internet being lots of networks and modelled this practically between tables. In Geography, we looked at the countries that use most solar panels and identified them around the world using atlases. We explored perhaps why the UK may not be in the top 10. In our values lesson, we looked at safety in numbers and being an upstander as well as thinking about scripts we can use where it is safe to do so. We practised this as a class. In PE, we continued with cricket skills including batting and in our dance lessons, we made 6 shapes and tried to sequence them to music. In Science, we used line graphs to track the temperature of the classroom as we dive deeper into an experiment next week all to do with melting. In Guided Reading, we continue with our Witches Text and we are about to meet the Grand High Witches!
In Year 5 English this week, we have started writing our own emotion thief stories, focusing on using the grammar features we have studied, including expanded noun phrases, adverbial phrases and correctly punctuated speech. The children have come up with some wonderfully imaginative ideas! In maths, we have been learning to round numbers to the nearest 100 and explaining our reasoning. In geography, we learned about Marco Polo and his journey along the Silk Road. The children then wrote journal entries imagining they were merchants travelling the Silk Road in 1271. There were some brilliant entries that really captured what it might have felt like to make such a challenging journey. In science, we explored transparent, translucent and opaque materials and investigated how light behaves when it passes through different materials. In PE, we recapped our handball skills and put them into practice through some mini matches. Today, we were lucky to welcome PC Adam Peart, who spoke to the children about criminal responsibility and making positive choices. This linked beautifully with our values work on responsibility.
Year 6 have settled well this week after their residential and have started to work hard. In maths, they are working on place value with numbers up to 10,000,000. They are also refining writing skills in literacy including using subordinating conjunctions. In science, they were using basic classification keys to look at sorting plants and animals. In Geography, they have been looking at life in The Gambia. In reading, we have begun a class text ‘Skellig’ and we are focussing on the detail in our answers for comprehension using evidence from the text. We played handball in PE and had some close matches! This week we went to The Tent at Skern to listen to an author called Louie Stowell who talked about her books, illustrations and story writing.
