News
Newsletter for the week ending Friday 6th September
Welcome back everybody and we hope you had a good summer. A shorter than usual first week and the children have returned full of enthusiasm and ready to go.
We are running after school clubs (Lego – Tuesday, multi-sports – Wednesday, football- Thursday and eco – Friday) during the week in addition to our usual before and after school club (AOOSC) and you should have received an email earlier this week with a letter with more details. There are few spaces in some of the clubs and please contact the office if you are interested. If you didn’t receive the email, here is the letter and please confirm with us that we have your correct contact details.
For any girls in Year 6 interested in rugby, Barnstaple Rugby Club is looking for new players. Just turn up at 6.30pm on a Friday ate Barnstaple Rugby Club. More information here
Our term dates for this academic year and the next are available here.
As part of our art curriculum the children have the opportunity to work towards an art award. Mrs Bannister, our art subject leader, has written a piece about this that was recently published. You can read her article here.
Instilling good attendance habits is very important to ensure children don’t miss a step of their sequenced lessons. Of course children get ill and please only keep them off school if they are unable to come to school. If you are unsure, please call us and be reassured that if we see that your child is unwell and we believe unfit for school we will contact you. For our latest attendance newsletter please see here
Wishing you all a good weekend and see you on Monday
From Jeremy Cooper and all the children and staff
AROUND THE CLASSES
This week in Turtles and Dolphins we have been getting to know our new friends and exploring inside and outside. We have also talked about what we did in the holidays and painted pictures of our holiday adventures.
We have had a wonderful first few days in Year 1. The children have picked up the new routines really quickly which has been fantastic. We have enjoyed reading Dinosaur goes to school, Brave Dave and the Book with no pictures was a firm favourite with the whole class. They have had great fun at playtimes and exploring the jungle with the Year 2’s. Reading records and books will be sent home next week. Have a super weekend!
Welcome to Year 2! These first few days been all about settling into new class routines. We began by working together to create our class rules: be ready, be respectful, be safe. We decorated new pencil cases and made some book marks to use with reading books. Most children have come home with a reading book and a sharing book, so please look in bags. We spent some time in the woodland area working with the new year 1 children and even managed to fit in a piece of writing about a toy. We are excited about working with you all over the year.
Year 3 have had a wonderful start to the year! We discussed our summer holidays and wrote about our favourite day. We also discussed our dreams and aspirations and wrote these in our own dream jars which we then decorated. In Maths, we began our first topic on place value and we recapped representing numbers to 100. In English, we began reading ‘Lord of the Forest’. We wrote about our own animal and explained why we thought they could be the lord of the forest. In Guided Reading, we explored the meaning of the terms ‘extinct’, ‘endangered’ and ‘non-endangered’ and sorted some animals from the book into these categories. In Geography, we looked at two different maps to explore a variety of climates around the world. We then used the maps to identify which climate zone different countries belong to. In Values, we discussed the meaning of ‘responsible’ and we talked about different volunteers in our community and their responsibilities.
A warm welcome to Year 4! I hope your child has had a good start to the year. We have been very busy already! We have started place value in Maths where we will start to look at thousands, we have begun our new topic in English based on the book Meerkat Mail, we have started doing some PE where we practised some coordination and balance skills as well as a bit of dance in the hall, we started looking at what the word ‘sustainability’ means in Geography and finally in Science we looked at what ‘states of matter’ means. I hope you all received the back to school email with information about Year 4. To summarise, homework will be set on a Friday and due the following Friday. Homework will be uploaded to Google classroom (times tables will be given separately and will need to be handed in when completed). If you have trouble with Google classroom, let me know. All login details have been stuck in their reading records. On Monday, please can your child bring in a copy of The Witches by Roald Dahl if they have it at home. This will really help them in Guided Reading for the first half term. PE days will be Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Year 5 have settled really well into their new class and have been working really hard. The children showed maturity when discussing our value of responsibility and have begun to take on greater responsibility within the school helping out with the Dolphins at lunchtime. Year 5 have settled very quickly into the routines of a new year group and engaging with the work set. It’s lovely to see them return to school with so much enthusiasm and readiness for learning. We have already completed most of the ‘beginning of term’ assessments and will begin all of our new units of work next week. This week they produced some great vector drawings in ICT; learning and sharing new skills enthusiastically. They worked hard on Roman numerals and their holiday writing and learnt a new song during their grammar lesson. We welcome Sophia to our class and hope she settles quickly, along with everyone who has returned this autumn. Further information about this term will be sent home in a letter next week. The staff in Y5 look forward to working with our new pupils and their families.
Year 6 have settled well this week which is great to see. Many of them have offered their help in various jobs and are taking those responsibilities seriously which is very encouraging. As we have our residential next week, we have done a few assessments and initial tasks this week and will be in full flow with work after our week away. We have read the story The Princess’ Blankets as part of our work in Literacy and Geography. We have also begun thinking about classification in Science and how we can sort things into groups. In computing, as part of our e-safety work, we have looked at self-image and identity and how we can get help, both on and offline if issues make us feel sad, worried, uncomfortable or frightened. A positive start – well done Year 6.
