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- Message from Mrs Jones
- Message from the Queen
- World Book Day
- News from the PTA
- Reception 'People who help Us’
- Year 1 Bog Baby
- Year 2 Inspirational explorers
- Year 3 Geography of our planet, and the solar system!
- Year 4 superfragilistic World Book Day
- Year 5 Geographical and Art non-fiction
- Year 6 Music and Sport non fiction
- VegPower
Well a career first - I never thought I would feature before the Queen-read on to find out about it!
Welcome back to the start of term 4. It is a busy term ahead and curriculum newsletters have been shared so you can see the learning we have planned.
Parent/carer meetings with the class teachers was shared on Thursday via Szapp and parentpay. This is an opportunity midway through the school year to find out how your child is progressing and to ask any questions you may have. Please request an appointment via the online booking system and call the school office if you need help with this.
Thank you all so much for your engagement with our activities for World Book Day. The children’s costumes were so imaginative and clearly there had been much discussion about the characters that were chosen.
Our PTA are preparing for a quiz night on Friday 18th March in school at 7.30pm. Why not utilise those quizzing skills gained online during lockdown and join in with a face to face quiz event!
We are looking forward to a great term ahead but at the same time understand that for many reasons this remains a challenging time for many people especially those families touched by the conflict currently in Ukraine. The Diocese has shared a prayer below. We hope to show our support by joining the fundraising efforts, details to follow.
United Against Bullying pupil survey
Information and consent to participate in this really important project was sent on 15th February. You can find the information and form in the Sazpp feed on 15th February. We are aware this may have been missed at the end of term due to ‘windy’ Friday. Please read and return the online form if you haven’t done so already.
The streets around the school have become very congested at drop off and pick up with parents/carers parking outside the school entrances and on yellow or zig zag lines. These council parking restrictions are there to protect the safety of our children and all pedstrians in the community. We have also received complaints from local residents about the dangerous parking around the school. If you need to drive to school, please use the designated short term parking bays available on Landsdown Road and other roads nearby. Please do not park across school entrances or on the restricted yellow and zig zag lines. Thank you.
We had a message from the Queen this week!
As part of Cohen’s application to be a school councillor, Cohen had pledged to invite the Queen into school in this, her Platinum year.
Unfortunately she’s a bit busy but she has sent school a letter with her best wishes.
Well done Cohen.
On Thursday we celebrated the 25th anniversary of World Book Day and what a fantastic celebration we had. Our theme this year was vocabulary and what an amazing collection of words we had across the school. Each year group chose costumes, characters, famous people and props and we were wowed by the creativity!
Mr Campbell launched the day with an assembly where we used a book called ‘The Word Collector’ by Peter Hamilton. The book opened up a discussion about words and how we use them in our everyday lives. The children in their classes enjoyed time sharing books, talking about what different vocabulary meant and ended the day with stories from different teachers across the school.
We also were invited to take some children to Waterstones as part of the celebration of books and everyone reading. The children exchanged their book token for a book and enjoyed a story in the bookshop.
Thank you for your amazing support at home with costumes we can tell there must have been some research and lovely discussions had at home to support the choices of costume.
Quiz night - Friday 18th March
Come with your team or join one on the night!
Please sign up at the following link:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc8M4iQVFCY_clzf7Zy7NibI2csF9OZvWFnz0pjGg_KFUT64g/viewform
Upcoming dates:
- School Disco (children) Friday 1st April
- Mile of Pennies 20th May
- CampFest 9th & 10th July
Reception 'People who help Us’
Reception have made a great start to their learning about ‘people who help us’ and their enjoyment was evident during World Book Day as they all got to dress up as their chosen real-life hero! The week started by looking at non-fiction books such as ‘All through the night – people who work while we sleep’ by Polly Faber and Harriet Hobday and on World Book Day – ‘What do grown-ups do all day?’ by Virginie Morgand. This raised a lot of interesting discussion about what different adults got up to! The children were then asked to come up with a list of words to describe the person they had come dressed up as – these will be used as a whole school display in the near future.
‘I am a policeman so I am protecting and I get to catch the baddies’ ‘I brought a whisk today to show that I am a chef because I like making cakes and decorating them!’ ‘I like looking at the pictures of all the people who help us in our books today – I found a firefighter like me!’
Reception have enjoyed their learning so much that we will be continuing into next week as well!
Year 1 have had a fun-filled first week back! Our new story this term is ‘The Bog Baby’ by Jeanne Willis. We spent some time imagining what a bog baby might look like and thought about the sort of places they might live. Then we ventured out in the rain and found a little bog baby nestling in the corner of a damp flower bed! In Literacy, we have been focusing on using adjectives when writing descriptive bog baby guides. In Maths, we have been learning number bonds to 20. We used tens frames and counters to help us and thought about how the number bonds we know to ten can help us with learning bonds to 20. Year 1 had a fantastic World Book Day celebrating our theme of the natural world. We loved sharing our favourite books about nature and discussing interesting vocabulary from them.
Year 2 Inspirational explorers
Week one has been a week of discovery, intrigue, and laughter. The children did so well with their learning in maths, particularly during a tricker lesson where they were required to draw 2D shapes into their books. Both teachers were so impressed by their maturity and commitment to learning. In computing some of children even used their knowledge of shape and designed inventions with an input and an output.
In Literacy the children were introduced the 'Man on the Moon' as a whole class and created a 'role on the wall' which helped them to conquer detailed character descriptions of the main character, Bob. The children have been very proactive to learn and share new vocabulary and facts about space with their peers.
Of course, we couldn't end the week without a special mention to World Book Day. On Thursday, the children flew into the classroom eager to show their carefully crafted costumes. Teachers and peers were so impressed with the effort put in. We had such a variety of inspirational explorers, not limited to; Amelia Earheart, Ranulph Fiennes, Howard Carter, Buzz Aldrin and Jane Goodall!
During the day, we wrote about our favourite reading locations before listening to a crackling fire on the interactive whiteboard, learning our new vocabulary and snuggling down (without our shoes on) to read some of our favourite books. We loved our scavenger hunt and became aware of where to locate page numbers. We even managed to squeeze in a discussion about comprehension strategies.
Year 3 Geography of our planet, and the solar system!
World Book Day was an absolute blast (quite literally – we had a few space-themed costumes!). We loved seeing the children in their costumes and the wide variety of science-themed vocabulary was brilliant; we had words like ‘explorer’, ‘genius’, ‘electricity’ and ‘rocky’. Such a variety! We had many moments of ‘reading for pleasure’ and the children each shared the idea behind their costume. The children read ‘La chasse à l'ours’ (We’re going on a Bear Hunt) with Mme Maurier in the afternoon and loved having a visiting teacher from another year group sharing a story with them in the book swap.
In Geography, we have been learning all about megacities around the world. The children used maps to locate the top 10 megacities of the world and found out about the top 10 fastest-growing cities in the UK. They learnt about what makes a city a popular place to move to, specifically focusing on Milton Keynes (UK) and Brazilia (Brazil).
Year 4 superfragilistic World Book Day
Year 4 had a superfragilistic World Book Day. Our theme was historical non-fiction books and everyone came dressed up as historical character or word. It was so much fun seeing all your costumes and hearing the facts you had researched about your characters and the words you chose to describe them. Throughout the day we celebrated reading for pleasure, both trying new books and tucking into our old favourites. We are so proud of the amazing readers you all are! We also celebrated power of words and each class created a word wall to display the range of vocabulary we learnt during the day. Well done everyone for your energy and enthusiasm and we hope you all manage to get to a book shop to use your World Book Day tokens!
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.” Dr Zeuss.
Year 5 Geographical and Art non-fiction
Lights, camera, action! This week we have been immersing ourselves in the world of our new topic - Ancient Greece. Literacy has seen us learning about the features of play scripts before we put these into action by performing a play of the myth Theseus and the Minotaur. We are looking forward to starting our new Power of Reading book next week and putting our playwriting skills into practice later this term. In History, we thought about who the Ancient Greeks were; when their civilisation occurred in comparison to other civilisations we have previously learned about, and how we can use the physical geography of modern-day Greece to help us build up a picture of what life was like for the Ancient Greeks who lived thousands of years ago.
On Thursday for World Book Day, we saw such a range of amazingly creative costumes around our Geographical and Art non-fiction theme. WOW! We had a fantastic day celebrating reading and the love of new words. We found out about the artists Jackson Pollock and Pablo Picasso, then chose an artist of our choice and created a fact file about them and their work We looked at the book ‘Maps’ by Aleksandra and Daniel Mizielinska and created a map in the style of the book. We finished off our brilliant day with a story from Mrs. Abbot and Mrs. Petters during our teacher story swap.
Year 6 Music and Sport non fiction
Year 6 had a fantastic world book day.
They all made a real effort to dress up as characters from the non-fiction genres of music or sport. From Elton John to Mozart, Serena Williams to Joe Root-the costumes were fantastic. We shared and decorated our vocabulary words that celebrated our characters and shared books through our book exchange box. Then we settled down in front of a roaring fire for a drink, a biscuit and a good long read……
Carrots!
The first week of VegPower kicked off with a crunch - carrots were on the menu. Monday’s assembly was full of interesting facts about carrots, where we learned that they are not always orange, but come in a range of colours.
Carrots were available everyday for our school dinners. There was also a very special tasting table in the packed lunch hall. It was brilliant to see so many carrots in children’s lunchboxes. Let’s keep including this awesome vegetable!
Peppers:
Next week, peppers will be in the spotlight. The tasting table will return, for children to sample this Vitamin – packed vegetable.
Mr Campbell