Dear Parents and Carers

I am happy to say that the children of Christ Church have again given us much to proudly report.

Firstly, our year five children have been making a huge difference in their work as Play Leaders. It has been heart-warming to see the children’s care, compassion and patience as they support our youngest pupils to enjoy their play together. The training that Year 5 undertook, organised by the wonderful Miss Barsby our sport and PE leader, has been evident in the guidance and it is clearly something that all of the children enjoy.

Last week I wrote a little about our House system as part of our rewards in school. As a crucial part of organising the many different functions of the Houses, we have this week completed the voting in of our Year 6 House Captains, with every child casting their own vote throughout the school. As I am sure you will agree, it takes courage to put yourself forward in a role such as this and we congratulate all of the children who offered to stand as House Captains. Well done to everyone and we look forward to working with our eight new captains - Aardman - Lawton and Eva, Brunel - Cecily and Sebastian, Concorde - Kosi and Florence and Matthew - Belle and Zach.  

As you may know, October is Black History Month and we have started the various celebrations and learning with an assembly together. We have been discussing with the children some of the history of the Civil Rights movement in the US and comparing the life experiences of Rosa Parks to some local stories recounted by families who have lived through the Bristol Bus Boycott. We would welcome any support that you may be able to offer in our work to celebrate this important month. If you missed our newsletter last week, we have put some suggestions for learning in our Reading Newsletter.

On the morning of 24^th October, we will come together as a school community to celebrate Harvest, gathering at Christ Church. I am looking forward to hearing the children sing and present their various chosen pieces to parents, families and staff and hope that you can join us on the day. We will be collecting for the foodbank again this year and a shopping list will be shared with you next week. We will welcome contributions from Monday 21^st October – please send these in with your child.

Kind regards

Mark Oldfield

Headteacher

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

The PTA and Christ Church C E Primary school are excited to start the prep for our 2024 Christmas Fair which will be held on Sunday 24th November - please save the date!

There will be games, crafts, Santa’s Grotto, sweet treats, refreshments and much more! It is a brilliant, action packed festive event that all the kids absolutely love.

We will be releasing more information soon and as always, we will rely on donations and volunteers to make this a successful, community event.

We can’t wait to see you all there!

It has been another very busy week in Reception. In maths we have been looking at patterns, types of pattern like spotty or stripy and repeating patterns. We have had a go at finding them, continuing them and creating some ourselves using all kinds of objects around the classroom!

In phonics we are continuing to learn our phonemes and this week we did ck, e, u and r. We are continuing to oral blend and have been introduced to the tricky words – I and is.

This week we introduced one of our school values, Kindness. We met the kindness kangaroo and thought of different ways we could be kind. Our discussion developed when we read ‘Kind’ by Alison Green and Axel Scheffler. We were really interested by the book’s idea of a kindness jar so now we have one in each of our classrooms to fill up with kindness! We also found out that some of our favourite stories have the theme of ‘kindness’ running through them such as Room on the Broom and The Smartest Giant by Julia Donaldson!

October is Black History Month and we have been learning about black history heroes. We started with a video introducing lots of people that have done brave and wonderful things. We looked into some of these people more closely and read the ‘Big Dreams Little People’ books on Simone Biles and Marcus Rashford. We enjoyed listening to ‘Coming to England’ by Floella Benjamin which is a beautiful book that celebrate different cultures and inspired some lovely discussions. We also loved listening to music by various artists like Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Marley and Miles Davis.

What a fantastic week! Well done everyone! You did not let the rain dampen your spirits or hinder your enthusiasm for learning!

Mrs Petters, Miss B and Mrs Castle and all the Reception team.

This week, Year 1 have been learning all about seahorses! We explored fascinating facts, like how male sea horses look after the eggs and how all  seahorses have a unique crown called a coronet. Year 1 shared their favourite facts in their writing. In Art, we took inspiration from author and illustrator of Mr Seahorse and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle. We used white wax crayons and Brusho paint to create collages of fish and seahorses. The vibrant colours and textures helped bring the sea creatures to life, just like in Eric Carle’s books.

This week in our PSHE lesson children were asked to think about when manners are needed and to discuss scenarios where different levels of courtesy are required. In literacy children made bunny diaries in which they published an entry as Bernard from our story 'Be More Bernard'. In maths children used their knowledge of number bonds to 10 to add numbers within 20. Children are familiar with using the counting on method for calculations that cross a 10, and in this lesson, they worked towards improving both efficiency and accuracy using number bonds. Children partitioned numbers into two parts in order to use number bonds to 10 to simplify a calculation. Different representations were also used to support understanding.

Year 3 really enjoyed learning about the festival of Rosh Hashanah which is a celebration of Jewish New Year.

A big thank you to Jess who came in and explained all about the rituals that are followed at this special time of year including the blowing of the shofar and the eating of pomegranates, apples and honey. They even sang in Hebrew!

This week in Year 4 we’ve been diving into the world of storytelling! The children have begun writing their own narratives based on the events of Joseph Coelho’s Zombierella. We have been so impressed with many of their language choices and extravagant ideas. We have been equally as ambitious in Maths; tackling the column addition method to add together numbers of 2,3 and 4 digits. We’re so proud of how well they have grasped this concept and look forward to exploring more challenging maths in the next few weeks. Well done Year 4!

Year 5 have had a fantastic week working on poetry performance. They blew us away with their renditions of dramatic and meaningful poems about climate change. They worked in groups and pairs to perform with various poetic techniques including, pitch, dynamics, facial expression, eye contact, body language, pauses and actions. #

In Maths, we have been consolidating addition and subtraction. The children have been very resilient while tackling column methods with multiple exchanges and big numbers. 

The week has flown by since our last newsletter. On Wednesday, we had the excitement of House Captain voting - well done to everyone who put themselves forward for this role. We are so proud of you all. We now have eight new House Captains, we are sure they will represent their House well and look forward to seeing them motivating their house members to do their best and work together.

In Science this week we used props to investigate the following questions:

• Why do we have day and night?
• Why are the days longer in the summer and shorter in the winter here in the northern hemisphere?
• Why do we have seasons?

We used a lamp and a globe to explain this and found out the answers lie in how the Earth spins on its axis and how it orbits the sun once every 365.25 days. It's all to do with the Earth's tilt of 23 degrees! We found out that in the summer when the North Pole is pointing towards the sun, we get very short nights and very long days. In contrast, in the winter, (when the Earth is halfway around its orbit) the North Pole gets no sun at all. We get short days, a little bit of sunlight, and very long nights.

To celebrate Black History Month and its importance, we read the story of Martin Luther King and watched an animation. We found out that as a child Martin grew up in a world that was deeply divided. We learned how he used words to touch people’s hearts with love and justice, rather than hatred and violence, and how these words made a change for the better.

This week we have also begun to plan our Harvest performance at the church. We hope you can join us to celebrate on the 24th.

The members are selected by Pastor Ruthy, Mrs Petters and the out-going Worship Council. The newly appointed councillors are Gabrielle, Henry, Bonnie (Y3), Elena, Hannah, Molly, Sophie (Y4) and Annabelle, Louis and Alice (Y5).  

As a Church school we want everyone to enjoy and participate in Collective worship.    

This is what we do:

• Help to lead worship and prayer.
• Monitor and evaluate collective worship with classes.
• Create and update displays linked to values and collective worship.
• Attend termly meetings with local church representative and adults linked with collective worship
• Maintain and monitor ‘reflection areas’ in school.
• Help to select new worship council members.

The Worship Council will decide on a project that they will undertake throughout the year to enhance or improve the Christian distinctiveness for the pupils of Christ Church. Their first task will be to lead prayers for our Harvest celebration in the church at the end of term.

Shine Holiday Clubs are running this October Half Term!  Based locally with locations in Clifton, Henleaze and Westbury on Trym, we have loads of different activities running including Gymnastics with Circus skills, Little Steppers dancing to Michael Jacksons ‘Thriller’ with face painting, Creative Extravaganza, Play in a Day, Aqua Multi with Swimming, Football Fundays, Mega & Mini Mash-ups and more, offering loads of Halloween games and fun! 

Running from 09:00-3:30pm with early and late hours if you need them, we look forward to seeing your children and their friends for lots of October fun.

With the reassurance of a 48 hour cancellation period, you can book knowing if your plans change, you can cancel your booking. 

Click Holiday Clubs – click here to see what’s on. See you at Half Term!