Weekly Newsletter
Friday 21st April 2023
This week in school
Access to school A reminder that as the owners of the road, the Parish Council are installing a bollard on the road within the next few weeks. This bollard will be one which can be raised and lowered by the residents and the school. It will be in position at the times when vehicle access is restricted (8:30-9:15 and 2:45-3:30). We hope that this will put a stop to incidents where drivers have been causing a risk to pedestrians going to and from school.
SAVE THE DATE Summer Fair Our Summer Fair will be on Thursday 6 July, running straight after school from 3:30-5:30pm. We are planning for lots of stalls and activities, with each class taking charge of a stall, as well as visiting stalls, refreshments, bouncy castle/inflatable and the ice cream van.
Sport update This half term the children in Key Stage 2 are enjoying some sessions of cricket through the ECB 'Chance to Shine' programme. This has meant there have been some changes to PE days: please check on Dojo for any other changes in the future.
The football team got off to a winning start, with a 7-1 victory against Cawood. Next match is Thursday 4 May vs Monk Fryston.
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/
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.
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information is on the NYCC website at https://www.northyorks.gov.uk/free-school-meals Some of this information may be out of date, especially around eligibility, so please get in touch if you are unsure.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
Updated figures for attendance are not yet available due to the Easter break. We know that other local schools, particularly secondary, are struggling with attendance, so it is great for us to be in a positive place with this: thank you again for your support which is really making the difference for the children.
Next week we will be contacting families where we have attendance concerns for Attendance Panel Meetings. This involves setting targets over a 4-week monitoring period as the next step in the process.
DIARY DATES
Monday 1 May - May Day Bank Holiday (school closed)
Monday 8 May- Coronation Bank Holiday (school closed)
Tuesday 9 May - Friday 12 May - Y6 test week
Thursday 25 May - School closes for half term
Friday 26 May - Training day (school closed to children)
Monday 5 June - School opens
Thursday 6 July - School Summer Fair, 3:30-5:30pm
Tuesday 25 July - School closes for summer holiday
Happy Birthdays!
This week in classrooms
Nursery - Stars
First of all we would like to welcome everyone back and say hello to the new families that have joined us. We can’t quite believe we are at the beginning of the Summer term already.
It has been a very busy week in Nursery, as we start the new term and welcome our new starters. A big well done to our existing Stars who have really helped the new children settle in and learn our routines. This week we have looked at the story ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’ by Michael Rosen. We have been retelling the story in the tuff tray and outside. We had lots of fun creating our very own bear cave with the parachute. We have enjoyed lots of free painting in the creative area and counting and looking at patterns with the compare bears in the maths area.
In phonics we have looked at alliteration and we have played lots of games to help us listen to the initial sounds. In maths we have been focussing on the number 5. We have practised counting to 5 and finding 5 objects.
Star of the Week:
Elara Platts
Reception - Moon and Mercury
It has been lovely to welcome all the children back to school after Easter, we can’t believe how much they’ve grown! To introduce our theme for this half term ‘Ticket to Ride’, we began by sharing the story ‘The Way Back Home’ by Oliver Jeffers. We have sequenced the story, made paper aeroplanes, created rockets from box craft materials, designed Martian’s and wrapped the bikes and scooters in foil to create space buggies.
We also shared the story Man on the Moon by Simon Bartram and the children wrote a list of items which they would want to take to the moon. The lists were quite varied but their favourite teddies were high on all the lists. On Thursday we had our first Space Camp. The children completed a range of challenges to receive their Space Passport!
In phonics we are continuing to consolidate and improve their knowledge, while introducing trickier words with increased vocabulary. This week we have added the suffix –ed to words like mend/ed and paint/ed.
In Maths we have looked at numerals up to 20 and matched pictures to numerals. We also set up an estimation station for the children to estimate how many chocolates were in the tub. Surprisingly at the end of day there were still the same amount of chocolates left!
In RE, our big question this half term is What times/stories are special and why? We have made a class book of our special places and decided together upon a special place in class to keep it.
Stars:
Moon - Daisy Trotter
Mercury - Talisha Lowther
Year 1 - Galaxy and Venus
Welcome back! We have had a super first week with the launch of our new topic - ‘Nature Rocks’. We had an exciting first day back linking Art and Science together and completed some fantastic activities involving plants. In Science, we dissected a flower and looked at labelling the specific parts with the correct terminology. We also planted our own wildflower seeds and are eagerly awaiting for the results of these over the coming weeks. In Art, we looked at printing and used potatoes to experiment with the different types of printing to create a flower using paint. In English, we have focussed on writing a blurb for our book focus of the week, ‘Wildflower’. In Maths, we have started to look at multiplication and division and specifically counting in 2s, 5s and 10s. In Music, we have started to look at Graphic Notation and the children had a fantastic time thinking about the different ways music can be interpreted via images.
The children have had a fantastic first week back and we are really excited for this to continue over the coming term.
Stars of the week:
Galaxy - Lucas Armitage
Venus - Willow Laverack
Year 2 - Earth and Mars
Welcome back everyone! We have been so pleased how well everyone has settled straight back into the new term. This week we started our new topic of 'What's on Your Plate?’ We will be learning all about plants and how food is grown as well as comparing a location in the world to here. We have started by identifying China on a world map and labelling some of the main towns and rivers as well as looking at its flag.
In English we have begun our new book ‘Little Red Reading Hood.’ The children have already written some fantastic sentences in our sentence stacking lessons and we had fun thinking of all the different places we can read. In maths we have continued our work on fractions, finding fractions of amounts and working out the whole from a fraction. Our RE topic this half term is about Sacred Places and we started by looking at what might make a place special or sacred. In music, we had fun listening to some orchestral music, drawing what it made us think of and identifying all the instruments in an orchestra.
Stars of the Week:
Earth: Kobi Irving
Mars: Finlay Hoyle
Year 3 - Jupiter and Saturn
A brand new term and finally some nice weather has made us all happy this week in year 3. In English we have started our new class text ‘The Happy Prince’ by Oscar Wilde. We have started developing our plot points and are delighted at how the children have consistently been 'Deepen the Moment' in their writing. In Maths the children have been using their previous fractions knowledge to help them add and subtract fractions as well as partitioning the whole and understand unit fractions of a set of objects.
We had a great cricket session on Tuesday morning led by Dominic from the Yorkshire Cricket Board and the children really enjoyed learning lots of new skills. In Computing on Wednesday we started our new infographics project and the children began to understand what an infographic is and why we use them as well as searching for and adding suitable graphic elements.
Stars of the Week:
Jupiter - Conor Young
Saturn - Aurora Anderson
Year 4 - Neptune and Meteor
It’s another lovely start to the term, Year 4 is flying by! The children have come in with such a brilliant ready to learn attitude. We’ve launched into our newest unit of learning, Glorious Greeks! In Geography the children used laptops to research and compare ancient Greece to Modern day Greece. To further our general knowledge of Greece the children have been exploring a fact file of Greece. As we progress through the term we will be exploring a range of Greek Myths and legends offering us a great insight into the complex beliefs of the Ancient Greeks. Everyone has made a real effort to present their findings and are all quickly becoming mini-Greek experts. In R.E we began our newest unit “What kind of world did Jesus want?” The children explored how the word Gospel came from the old English phrase God (meaning good) and spell (meaning word) and how the disciples would need some very good news and ideas for them to leave their everyday lives.
Stars of the Week:
Meteor: Maya Prosser
Neptune: Valentina Smith
Year 5 - Asteroid and Pluto
This first week has gone quick! In Maths, we have moved on to statistics, which was a surprise to some of the parents at Parents’ Evening. The children have been learning about drawing, reading and interpreting line graphs, and using information within a table to answer questions. These skills can be quite difficult, but the children have been doing really well. This week we have been mixing and connecting our English and Guided Reading lessons. We revealed to the children that our new book is Holes, which a couple were thrilled with as they have already seen the film. We started with a hands-on activity on Monday where the children had to follow instructions to make sploosh, or in our case, peach salsa. The children enjoyed using their knife skills from our previous DT lesson to cut up various vegetables and peaches to mix together. It was a great way for the children to learn how to follow instructions, as there was minimal help from the adults in the room. We have read about Stanley Yelnats and that he is currently in Camp Green Lake, so we will have to see why he is there and what he has to do.
Stars of the Week:
Pluto: Zachary Foulger
Asteroid: Alex Robinson
Year 6 - Nebular and Constellation
Even with this being the first week back, the year 6 were back with a bang, and the hardwork started from the moment they walked through the door! Welcome back! This week we have been focussing on all things related to fractions, decimals and percentages: how to convert between them, how to represent them using place value models and how to order them. We have also been completing revision sessions focussing on 2D and 3D shapes and their properties. Our Fluent in 5 sessions are progressing excellently, with many of the children achieving 5 out of 5 each day. Our English sessions this week have taken a turn for the poetic! We have used a recount of life by the River Nile to create Blackout poetry, a variety of other poetic styles and will conclude by creating our own narrative poem using the experiences of our ‘daughter of the river’. On Tuesday we had the pleasure of having a cricket coach lead us in PE. The children thoroughly enjoyed the session - but maybe not as much as Mr Close did!
Stars of the Week:
Constellation: Isaac Martin
Nebular: Taylor Wanless