The song All seasons in one day, has been heard sung in school today as March began with some wintery showers. We’ve had a super week hosting our parent/carers meetings with the Class teachers, thank you for attending, chatting with our School Governors and School nurse, and also not forgetting sampling the tasty treats provided by our school caterers AiP.

Last Friday was our PTA school disco- a huge thank you to our PTA for providing this most enjoyable event, it was a great success, raising invaluable funds for our school. Thank you to the parents/carers and staff who gave their time to support.

Our Reception children had a surprise visitor on Wednesday from farmer Andy and his tractor. We were really astonished by the size of the tractor’s wheels! The children had some great questions for farmer Andy- thank you for taking the time to drive your tractor to school and for telling us how it is used on your farm.

Well done to our Year 4 footballers who represented our school in the league. Thank you to Mr Campbell for supporting the children, please read on for the report within this newsletter.

Next week we will be participating in World Book Day on Thursday 7^th. We have activities planned on the theme Once upon a time..’ we are not dressing up this year but will be having lots of story based fun in school. The following week is national STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) the theme is Time. One of the whole school activities is to design and build a marble run, with the challenge of designing the run with the slowest marble descent. We will be entering our ‘slowest’ marble runs to an inter-school competition at the Wills memorial building at the end of term. For starters, please start collecting cardboard inner tubes, we are only allowed to use recyclable materials.

Inset and Academy Days:

Monday 22nd July - INSET day, children not in school

Tuesday 23rd July - INSET day, children not in school 

Monday 2nd September - INSET day, children not in school 

Tuesday 3rd September - INSET day, children not in school 

Disco: 

Thank you to all who helped, donated and took part! Thanks to all of you, we raised more than £1,100 for the school! 

Second hand uniform sale & collection: Friday 22nd March

Thank you to those who helped or donated for the second hand uniform sale today. The next one will take place on 22^nd March (usual time and place, details will be confirmed closer to the date)

We're always looking for helpers to sort/fold/label uniform. If you're able to help, please drop us an email with your contact details at [email protected]

Upcoming PTA events: 

Adults Quiz Night – date TBA

Campfest - 12-14th July

Dear Staff, Parents and Carers,

As part of the Headteacher recruitment process, the Governors of Christ Church CE Primary School would like to better understand your vision for the school.  The survey is anonymous.  Please respond to the survey below by Monday 4th March, 8am.

Governor Survey - School Vision 

Governor Bios:

Over the next few weeks we will be contunuing to introduce all our Governors to you through this newsletter.  

Thank you for your help and support.

Georgina and Charlotte, Co-Chairs of Governors

Healthy eating was on the learning menu at the beginning of the week. We discussed what is meant by healthy food and why it is so important for us. We really enjoyed sorting the healthy and unhealthy food from the shopping basket! Our adults were very impressed by our great knowledge and healthy choices!

On Tuesday we read Jack and the Beanstalk and had a go re-telling the story. We also learnt about the life cycle of a bean and we have planted some in our classrooms. We were hopeful for a magic beanstalk but fingers crossed they at least grow nice and tall!

As always, we have been very creative this week and did some beautiful observational drawings and watercolours of daffodils. We took care to look closely at the flowers and produced some lovely, jolly pieces of art.

On Wednesday we had a surprise! A real tractor and its driver Farmer Andy were here for a visit! We loved having a close up look at the tractor and asked Farmer Andy some super questions. Thanks so much for visiting us Farmer Andy!

On Friday we read the story Handa’s Surprise by Eileen Browne and really enjoyed joining in with some music that goes with the story.  

Wow! What a wonderful week! It really has bean fantastic!

In maths this week we have been learning about doubles, using Numicon to explore doubles within 20. We then used tens frames to understand how we can apply our knowledge of doubles to solve 'near doubles'. For example, we can use 3+3 to help us solve 3+4.  

In science we learned about the transition from winter into spring. We discussed the changes in weather, daylight, and wildlife including trees and plants. To observe the changes, we put our coats on and headed out into the playground to draw one of the trees as it is now in winter. We will then draw the same tree once we're in spring to identify and compare the differences. 

In Art we are looking at Impressionism with a focus on Monet. We learned lots about the French artist, including how the style of Impressionism got its name from one of his paintings Impression, Sunrise.

We learned about how this style of artwork isn't always supposed to look exactly like the object that it's of, but rather an impression of it. We looked at close ups of his work to decipher what they were trying to depict. By looking at the close ups we were able to see how Monet used his brush strokes to apply paint which we imitated when painting some blossom from the playground, inspired by Monet's love of flowers in bloom. 

This week in year 2 we have been immersing ourselves into our new story 'Man on the Moon'. We were inspired by the aliens in the story and, in particular, the one which looks curiously like the main character Bob. We thought about the characteristics and qualities of the aliens and created versions of ourselves as aliens!  I think you can agree that our ideas were incredibly creative. We then went on to describe our aliens in detail using a range of adjectives and conjunctions to make our sentences more detailed. 

In our music lesson we began to think about sounds which could be associated with space such as stars twinkling and aliens communicating. We then went on to create these sounds with our voices. This resulted in a space soundscape which was really effective when we added all of the elements together. 

The term is flying by as ever and we’re suddenly at the end of week 2. We started Fractions in maths this week and this has been a roaring success! We have been so impressed with how quickly the children are retaining the knowledge and applying it to the problems we propose to them. We have also launched our ‘marble run’ competition as part of British Science week coming up. The whole school is extremely excited but our year 3’s were full of ideas after the assembly. We decided to get planning whilst the ideas were fresh so the children began planning, making prototypes and sharing ideas in their groups. We cannot wait to see what they come up with!

Year 4 have produced some truly masterful writing this week. Inspired by Roald Dahl’s character, Miss Trunchbull, the children have been delving deep into what makes the villain tick. We looked at her movement, speech, attitude and facial expressions to produce some vivid character descriptions that left us adults quaking in our boots!

Continuing with WW2 as our history topic, the children got to explore how Europe became engulfed in a world war. In groups, the children used putty on a laminated European map to demonstrate how German forces moved through the continent.  Different colored dough signified Allied and Axis forces with which the children had to move and adapt through a series of step-by-step instructions.

This week in Year 6 we have continued our Literacy text – Rose Blanche – producing a range of outcomes. We have written diary entries from the point of view of Rose, writing creatively and demonstrating fantastic empathy skills. After listening to Edwin Starr’s song ‘War’ we also wrote poems to give an opinion of war; we were asked to include Kennings. These we performed.

In Dance lessons, we have learned about swing dance, which developed with the swing style of jazz music in the 1920s -1940s. We have begun some of the steps. Each week we plan to build on our new dance skills – so watch this space for lots of energetic dancing! 

Term 4 will see the Worship Council continue to develop their project to implement a ‘pop-up’ prayer space in the quiet area for children to access during lunchtime. This is an opportunity for any pupils to have some quiet time to reflect, pause and be still using the activities that proved the most popular with children used by Pastor Ruthy from Christ Church.

Watch this space for further developments!

CC Worship Council and Mrs Petters.  

Carrots and courgettes were in the spotlight for Week 2 of VegPower, with some more yummy treats on Tuesday’s Tasting Table. There was firstly, carrot sticks with a yoghurt and cucumber dip, and also courgettes crisps cooked in the air fryer. Don’t forget to upload your photos to Google Classroom, to earn your class a treat in the final week of term. We will be celebrating cucumber, tomatoes and peppers next week.

The Year 4 football league concluded last night with some more super performances. I have been so impressed with the progress made over the three weeks  of competition. Thanks again to parents for supporting with transport to the vent, and for cheering on the team in all weathers.