Weekly Newsletter
Friday 6th January 2023
This week in school
Happy New Year and welcome back to everyone in our school community, including new Nursery families and Mr Jake Warner who has taken over teaching Galaxy class. Spending time in classrooms this week, it has been amazing to see how quickly the children have slipped straight back into their routines: even on Wednesday the children in Year 5 and Year 6 were tackling some challenging maths work around fractions! Everyone has made a great start to the spring term.
Class Dojo This is a fantastic tool for sharing what is happening around school, and for communication between families and staff. Can we please just remind you that, as with emails, there is no expectation that staff will respond to messages outside their working day, so please bear this in mind.
We also need to ask that, if you are messaging about medical/dental appointments, you also let the school office know so that they can have your child ready for you to collect (or so that they don't bother you with a call/text if your child is arriving late!)
FINAL REMINDER Starting school in September 2023 If you have a child who turns 4 before 31.8.2023, you will need to apply for a school place in the Reception year from September 2023. Applications should be made online at www.northyorks.gov.uk/apply-place-primary-or-secondary-school
The deadline for applications is January 15 2023: applications after this are treated as 'late' which means they are considered after all the others and you may not get your preferred school.
Even if your child attends our Nursery, you still need to apply for a primary school place.
Term dates 2023-24 The term dates for the next school year are now on the school website at https://brayton-cofe-primary-school.secure-primarysite.net/term-dates/
Year 6 SATs tests 2023 Due to the additional bank holiday on Monday 8th May, the Y6 SATs Test week will run from Tuesday 9th May to Friday 12th May. Details about the timetable and which tests are taking place on which days will be shared by Mr Close and Miss Rushworth after Christmas.
Jewellery No necklaces, bracelets, rings or other jewellery should be worn to school. If your child has earrings, these must be removed for PE sessions, or earrings can be left at home on PE days. Earrings for school should be small stud types so they don't get caught and cause any injuries.
Leave of absence during term time & attendance Please can we gently remind you that, unless the circumstances are genuinely exceptional, holidays in term time will not be authorised. Lower prices are not an exceptional circumstance, and the guidance is very clear that Headteachers would not be expected to class any term time holiday as exceptional.
Where our replies to requests for holidays have included reference to Fixed Penalty Notices, the paperwork for these can only be sent through when you have returned from the holiday and after a certain number of weeks have passed. We send through summaries to North Yorkshire County Council who then make the decision around proceeding with fines.
Free School Meals
Free school meals: save up to £450 a year With so much in the news about the cost of living and now energy prices going up, you can check whether your child could be eligible for a free school meal, whatever school year they are in. All the information is on the NYCC website at https://www.northyorks.gov.uk/free-school-meals Some of this information may be out of date, especially around eligibility, so please get in touch if you are unsure.
If you would like any advice or support with this, please contact the school office. We treat these matters with complete confidentiality and are always happy to help if needed.
Thank you for your continued support.
Allyson Buckton (Headteacher) & Mel Walmsley (Deputy Headteacher)
Whole School Attendance
There was a huge drop in attendance at the end of last term in school and nationally, with illness and holidays having a massive impact. As we have come back after the holiday, with a chance for recovery and breaking the cycle of infection, we hope we are over this now...Attendance has been much more positive so far this week and we really do appreciate your support with this.
The legal duties around attendance for both schools and local authorities are being strengthened, and North Yorkshire have assigned us a designated Attendance Enforcement Officer who will be liaising with us where we have concerns around this area.
If your child's attendance is below 90% they will have missed at least 20 days over the year: this is like missing a whole month of school.
DIARY DATES
Monday 9 January - Girls' football training starts again
Sunday 15 January - Deadline for primary school applications for September 2023
Thursday 9 February - School closes for half term
Friday 10 February - STAR MAT training day at Tadcaster Grammar School (school closed to children)
Monday 20 February - School opens
Friday 31 March - School closes for Easter
Monday 17 April - School opens
Happy Birthdays!
Many many many many happy returns this week to.....
Khloe Lane
Willow Laverack
Esme Senior
Oscar-James Rushton
Sienna Mangan
Eden Kilmartin
This week in classrooms
Nursery - Stars
It has been a busy first week back in Stars, as we welcome our new starters and get settled back into the new term. The new children have all settled in really well and our existing children have welcomed them and shown them the ropes.
This week we have been enjoying the story of 'The Gingerbread Man' and joining in with the repeated refrains. The children have enjoyed making their own gingerbread men out of playdough and decorating gingerbread men using different materials in the creative area. We have acted out the story of 'The Gingerbread Man' in the small world area and counted gingerbread men in the maths area. We have also had fun mark making in flour.
In Phonics we have been singing lots of action songs and thinking about the sounds we can make using body percussion. In maths we have been practising identifying representations of 1,2,3 and making our own collection of 1,2,3 objects.
Our Star of the Week is Beau Wanless
Reception - Moon and Mercury
Happy New Year! We hope that you all had a fun-filled Christmas holiday. We have been looking forward to welcoming you and your children back into our school community this week.
We began by sharing our Christmas experiences and the children were so excited to talk and write about their family memories. We were amazed at how embedded their phonic knowledge really is. We have reviewed lots of previous taught graphemes this week and introduced oo - the book nook.
In Maths we started our new topic ‘Alive in 5’. This began with a session thinking about finding 1 less than an amount. We achieved this by singing ‘5 currant buns’ and we noticed that each time a bun was sold, there was 1 less. We have also been thinking about ‘zero’ and how it means there is nothing. Lastly we have been thinking about the composition of 5 and all the different ways that we can make 5.
In RE we have been thinking about how each one of us is unique and valuable. We read the story of The Ugly Duckling to highlight how we can all be different but that is what makes us unique. We then drew self-portraits to celebrate our diversities. Over the coming weeks we will be thinking about groups to which we belong and how some people belong to a number of faiths, including welcoming ceremonies from Christianity and Islam and Raksha Bandhan in Hinduism.
Everyone is looking forward to starting our new topic next week and learning all about ‘Amazing Animals’. We are very excited to teach the children all about the natural world, habitats, life cycles, wild animals and we’ll even be going on Safari, don’t forget your binoculars!
Star of the week:
Moon - Eden Kilmartin
Mercury - Mila Firth
Year 1 - Galaxy and Venus
Wishing you all a very Happy New Year; we hope you have had a lovely festive season, and are looking forward to the new year and its adventures.
This week in Year 1, we have enjoyed welcoming Mr Warner to the team. He has thoroughly enjoyed getting to know your children, who have impressed us so much with their brilliant learning attitudes.
Across the curriculum, we have reestablished positive working attitudes and relationships, in English we have focused on non-fiction writing, reflecting on our Christmases and creating new year resolutions. In maths we are working with numbers to 20, and have focused on teen numbers. In RE, we have been exploring the belief system of Muslim people, whilst in PE, we have begun our outside hockey lessons.
We are excited to launch our topic of ‘Skyline Explorers’ next week, further information will follow.
Thank you for your continued support.
Stars of the week:
Galaxy - Jaxson Acaster
Venus - Isla Sheldon
Year 2 - Earth and Mars
Happy New Year from Year 2! We have had such an exciting start back at school, discovering that a dragon had visited our classrooms and even left an egg. We are expectantly waiting for it to hatch. We created posters to put around school and we learnt the story of George and the Dragon. In English, we began our sentence stacking lessons on our new unit of George and the Dragon. In maths we finished off our work on 3D shapes and in Science we began our new topic of materials, identifying, sorting and grouping different items.
Star of the week-
Earth - Albie Cooper
Mars - Evie Priest
Year 3 - Jupiter and Saturn
Although we have only had a short first week back after the Christmas Holidays we have certainly been very busy. In English we have started our new class text ‘The Secret of Black Rock’ by Joe Todd Stanton. We have started developing our plot points and are impressed at how the children have been 'Deepen the Moment' in their writing which is when the children are independently drawing upon previously learnt skills and applying them to their writing during each plot point.
In Maths we have been focusing on our understanding of multiples of ten and thinking about our reasoning solving multiplication problems.
We have started our new topic ‘Achievers and Inventors’ and the children have already been discussing who they think has created the best invention. In history the children used a range of sources to research Christopher Columbus.
In RE we have begun to learn about Judaism and we learnt about the many aspects of Jewish life.
Finally, in computing we have started our new project ‘Programming with Scratch’ and this week the children wrote a simple program with text outputs and wait commands.
Star of the Week
Jupiter - Oscar Betteridge
Saturn - Sienna Stewart
Year 4 - Neptune and Meteor
Happy New Year to all! It may have only been a 3 day week but wow, everyone has thrown themselves back into action, it’s almost like they’ve not even been gone.
We have kick started our new unit of learning this week in History and Geography by exploring the Anglo-Saxons. We have looked at where the Angles, Saxons and Jutes came from. Then we looked at major events in Anglo-Saxon history before placing them on a timeline. The children took such care in how they placed them and the pictures they drew, their books look fabulous.
In Maths, we have started looking at factor pairs in our new unit Multiplication and Division. It took us a day or so to wrap our heads around it but the children are quickly dusting off their times table knowledge and getting much more confident at finding factors of numbers. In guided reading we began reading our new text, after the children tried to predict what our story would be about based on the cover we began reading our tale of Beowulf.
Star of the week
Meteor- Martha-Mae Barker
Neptune - Isabel Jakowyszyn
Year 5 - Asteroid and Pluto
Happy New Year to you all! Although it’s been a short week, the children have made a great start to the spring term with their enthusiasm and hard work.
We have started our new unit of learning centred around space. During Guided Reading, the children had great fun predicting what our class novel for this term was using clues from the book’s preface and front cover. We’ve now started to read the story ‘Cosmic’ which had the children wanting to read on to hear the (mis)adventures of the main character, Liam. Over the next few weeks in English, the children will write a biography about the brilliant mathematician, Katherine Johnson. They started the week fact-hunting and discovering why, although hidden initially, she is an important figure in space travel and exploration. Next week, the children now will practise and apply grammar skills that are featured in a biography, having started with fronted adverbials and possessive apostrophes. In Maths, we have continued our learning on fractions with a focus on subtracting fractions. The children have really impressed their teachers with their retention of fraction knowledge and skills from before the holidays, meaning they’ve been able to make links to this new unit effectively.
Stars of the week
Asteroid- James Thackery
Pluto- Luke Toone
Year 6 - Nebular and Constellation
Happy New Year everyone.
Wow! It may have been a short week but what a great start to the spring term. The children have returned enthusiastic and ready for action.
We've introduced our new theme of ‘Digging up Trouble’ based around the wonders and historical finds of Ancient Egypt. We’ve opened the first pages of our new class book Secrets of a Sun King by Emma Carroll with the very app opening line of ‘One filthy wet Wednesday morning…’ to discover a cursed package, a dead archaeologist and the untold story of a young pharaoh which is about to unfold.
In maths we have continued with addition and subtraction of fractions with different denominators and in French we have been recapping vocabulary for parts of the human body.
Star of the Week
Nebular - Sienna Gibson
Constellation - Oliver Spooner