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Dear Parents and Carers,
As we reach Friday, it was lovely to hold our first celebration assembly with the children and some of our parent community. This provides a point in each week that enables us to recognise the efforts and achievements of just some of our children. As I am sure you will know, Christ Church is a school where the ethos of nurturing, encouraging and rewarding all children is at the centre of all things. As a staff team, we have been working to review the many ways in which we can continually encourage children to do their best and we will soon be bringing some new and exciting rewards into our approach, and we hope that this will in turn, further motivate and celebrate the children.
Alongside this will be a newly structured positive behaviour system and strategy. Our purpose will be to ensure that we provide children and staff with absolute clarity and consistency when setting expectations, addressing any negative behaviour and teaching children how to resolve mistakes, conflict and to make the right choices independently.
This week, our wonderful and energetic PTA have held their AGM and will be kickstarting their calendar of events with the Saturday Fun Run and I am sure that many of you will be joining in the fun and enjoying coming together to raise some money for the children of our school.
Finally, thank you and well done to our children on their excellent work on writing poetry, preparing for our ‘poetry posts’ next week, where we will share hundreds of carefully crafted poems and verse across the school.
Kind regards
Mark Oldfield
Headteacher
October | Monday 21st | Year 3 yoga |
Tuesday 22nd | Reception 2025 Tour, 9.15am | |
Thursday 24th |
Harvest Celebration, Church, 10am all welcome Tea Afternoon - 6EW |
|
Friday 25th | Last day Term 1 | |
Monday 28th - Friday 1st November | Half Term | |
November | Monday 4th | Term 2 starts |
Inset and Academy days for the rest of the year (these are days when school staff are in training involved in other school oepration - children are not in school on these days):
- Monday 6th January - Inset day
- Friday 23rd May - Academy day
- Monday 21st July - Inset day
- Tuesday 22nd July - Inset day
Thanks for all who attended to PTA AGM last night; a special thanks to Mrs Richardson and Mr Oldfield for staying late to ensure we were able to cover all basis.
PTA Fun Run
We’re really excited to see lots of you at the Fun Run tomorrow; the weather is looking good. This event is an amazing community event that really pulls the whole school together - both children and parents.
There will be cakes, hot drinks (please bring your own cups) and a tuck shop for the children.
Second hand uniform sale
There will be a secondhand school uniform sale at Mary’s Living and Giving on Friday 11th October 9-10am for those that need additional pieces for their children.
Would you like to join our prayer walk with Pastor Ruthy on Wednesday mornings?
We meet at the Woodland Gate at 8:55, post drop-off, and finish by 9:15… we pray for the whole school community and all are welcome.
This year the children will be designing their own Christmas cards that we will be having printed for you to buy packs of. This is a great fundraiser for the school and of course a very personal way to send Christmas cards. Mrs Rowe is kindly organising this for us and further details of how to buy will be shared once the cards have been designed.
‘All about Autumn’ in Reception
We officially welcomed ‘Autumn’ into our learning this week looking at what happens during this colourful and changeable season. This included some fantastic books to enhance our knowledge and extend our vocabulary, communication and listening skills. Autumn by Ailie Busby, The Windy Day by Anna Milbourne and Tattybogle by Sandra Horn.
We are continuing to work on classroom routines and building relationships with the children and adults in our classes. We are getting used to coming to school in our PE kit and having our lesson in the hall – enjoying the freedom of the space. We also enjoyed exploring the dressing up clothes and taking on the role of doctors, nurses, policemen/women and being princesses!
We read the book ‘Leaf Man’ by Lois Ehlert and used all the autumn leaves and conkers we found in our community to make an assortment of leaf characters using our imaginations and help from pages in the story. To enhance our fine motor skills we loved wrapping wool around the pine cones and stretching the rubber bands onto the ridges on the munchkins! (See photos for details).
In phonics this week we have continued to learn 4 new phonemes i,n,m,d and are working really hard with our oral blending. We have enjoyed sorting everyday objects by their initial phoneme and using large paper and pens to write the grapheme using the rhymes. In maths we have been making our own sets of objects according to a sorting criteria. We have had fun spotting the odd one out –which does not belong in the set! We have had a great week and are looking forward to a rest over the weekend!
This week Year 1 have been exploring the wonders of the autumn season. We learned that Sunday was the autumn equinox, when day and night are of equal length. We took a walk outside to look for signs of autumn and were excited to find conkers, acorns, busy squirrels and colourful leaves. In Literacy we’ve been working on using adjectives to describe the season. Year 1 had lots of wonderful ideas, describing ‘crunchy leaves’, ‘juicy berries’ and ‘shiny conkers’. We’ve also been getting creative with some blackberry printing. Using fresh blackberries, Year 1 enjoyed squishing the berries to make different shades and created beautiful prints on paper.
Year 2 have had another fabulous week. The children have been busy writing their stories with the new characters they created based on ‘Be More Bernard’. They’ve worked really hard on these and are very proud of their wonderful writing.
In maths we have been continuing to recognise and order numbers up to 100. We have been using different ways of showing the numbers including base 10, tens frames, bead strings and the part-whole diagram.
This week we have started out science learning which is an introduction to classification. We are starting by identifying mammals and fish.
Year 3 LOVED their new Science project as they began to explore the human skeleton and how it helps us move. After matching bones to pictures, the children drew around each other and drew and labelled their diagrams. Did you know there are 206 bones in the human body!!!!
The children prepared for National Poetry Day by chosing and exploring a poem to read aloud with actions. They then published and illustrated it to send to another child in school.
This week, Year 4 have developed their unit on sound by exploring pitch and volume by creating their very own pan pipes. The children learned about the history of pan pipes and how their different lengths determine the pitch of each tube. They were so in tune with their measuring, cutting and decorating their pipes that some even tried to perform some pieces on them! Well done Year 4 - we have loved seeing your creativity flourish!
Year 5 have been working really hard this week at challenges some of them did not want to face! One Art task in particular seemed a little technical for the beginning of Year 5 but the children demonstrated amazing resilience and gave it a go. Mr Oldfield also came in with his artistic skills and helped out. The children’s perseverance paid off and they were incredibly proud of their finished articles. What great skills to see developing so early on in the year. Well done Year 5 – we’re already really proud of you!
On Tuesday morning, James from Ashton Park Sports Partnership came and spent time with the Year 5s who have chosen to be playleaders. He trained them in leading playground games so that they can work with the KS1 children at lunchtimes. Each Year 5 child who has done the training will have a rota’d day per week and will be a role model in the KS1 playground: chatting to the children, getting to know them and providing activities and games to keep them active. The children who did the training had a really fun morning and were so desperate to share their learning that we used some of their new games in our PE lesson this week. We’re sure they will all do a sterling job of looking after the younger children and encouraging them in their physical development.
In Science we had a great time thinking about how we could model the solar system with different objects and deciding whether or not they were or weren’t suitable. We concluded that buttons, although colourful, might look good but they aren’t actually spherical and would need to be all different sizes. We further decided that different size balls – tennis balls, golf balls, footballs, beach balls would be the best objects to use if we were going to make a 3d model. To finish off our Science lesson this week, we used oil pastels on black sugar paper and had a go at drawing each planet, taking care with the colour, size and distance from the sun. Have a look at our pictures – they’re brilliant!
This week Year 6 has been very busy! We have worked in our sketchbooks completing preparatory work for our wire bird sculptures. We look forward to researching the artists we have studied so far, then making our own sculptures.
We can’t wait to meet our new Reception buddies, and have been counting down the days till we all get together! (Each Reception child has been paired with a Year 6 buddy). We have written letters to our buddies and we will read these aloud and give these to our buddies on our first meeting.
In Geography we have been finding out about fair trade produce and how important it is to ensure that producers, especially in developing countries, receive fair wages and work under safe conditions. Using prices of fair trade and non-trade products, we rounded these to the nearest fifty pence, and then created dual bar charts to compare prices.
Finally, in preparation for National Poetry Day next week we have looked at and written out some favourite published poems including Mrs Williamson’s favourite - can you guess which one?