Weekly Newsletter
Friday 2nd July 2021
This week in school
Here's the headlines
Surprise Surprise!
Having a field day
Mrs Osman
What a busy 'half in, half out' kind of week!
If you read the papers or listen to the news, you will have heard that across the whole country, a quarter of a million children learned at home because of coronavirus infections, self-isolation or school closures this month and this was the most disrupted week since schools fully reopened across the country in March.
We were in good company then. We will look forward to hearing how the guidelines change to stop this happening in the future.
We did miss the bubbles that were home learning this week. Although we are all separate at school, it's nice to know that they are there in their classroom and we can ring them on the internal phone or see them in virtual worship time. It was sad to see teachers sitting in their empty classrooms, on their laptops every minute of the day.
Hopefully, we won't have any more ........hopefully!
Thank you for your continued support - have a really lovely weekend.
Mrs R - Proud Headteacher
Whole School Attendance
That's well below target attendance. (This doesn't include the official SI children)
A fantastic 339 children had 100% attendance this week.
This week in classrooms
Stars
This week in Stars we have been keeping fit. We have spent lots of time on the Millennium Garden, walked on stilts, played skittles, chased after bubbles, done some Cosmic Yoga, completed an obstacle challenge, moved like animals, danced to our favourite songs and done lots of different exercises. We have been very busy!
In maths the children have been learning positional language and have practised recognising amounts on ten’s frames.
In phonics we have looked at the Phase 2 Set 5 sounds – h, b, f ff, l, ll, ss . We have practised hearing the initial sounds in words and looked at alliteration.
FS/Y1
This week has felt very strange in school with Moon and Venus accessing distance learning at home. Thank you to the children, parents and carers for your continued support. We have been very impressed with the children’s participation on Google Classrooms. Mercury have continued to learn in school and has made the most of the extra space on the field!
We have also been learning facts and information about our teeth and we also wrote a letter to the tooth fairy. As you can imagine, the children had lots of questions to ask. In maths we have been practising position and direction and Mercury have been completing their own stories based on the book ‘Halibut Jackson’. We had great fun listening to Haydn's Surprise Symphony during our whole school music afternoon. We used movement and instruments to explore his use of loud and quiet music in creating the "surprise" and we even composed our own Surprise Symphony!
Year 2
Year 3
Year 4
This week, the children enjoyed learning about the Austrian composer, Franz Joseph Haydn, and his sense of humour, both in life and in his Surprise Symphony. We still jumped listening to this symphony for a second time! Some of us expressed our feelings, listening to this piece of music in an artistic drawing. It was a therapeutic end to the day on Tuesday.
We are enjoying reading about the antics of some newly discovered, furry characters in our vocabulary-rich novel, The Wind in the Willows for guided reading. The children's knowledge of wildlife and our changing world is also expanding during discussions.
In English, we are planning an explanation text about The Water Cycle. Would you believe we are still using the same water the dinosaurs drank millions of years ago? We hope you noticed that rhetorical question, the like of which we will show in our explanation writing, along with other features of grammar and organisation in the coming days.
Year 5/6
Year 5 and 6 have had a different week to say the least! Well different in the sense that we were not expecting to have Home Learning commence again, however, we must say that you all did tremendously well and we are really impressed with the amount of work you were able to produce. In Maths we have been working through the order of operations (Mrs Zealand thought that her titles were hilarious, I mean really, 'Let's get down to BIDMAS (business) ?!?) and we have covered simplifying and ordering Fractions. In Guided Reading, our class text is reaching its climax. Will Stanley and Zero make it out of Camp Green Lake safely and with what they have found? In PSHCE we have begun to look at self reflection and target setting, in preparation for the new school year ahead. We enjoyed our Music afternoon, creating short narratives that could run alongside Haydn's surprise symphony and in RE we created a new Code of Living that Christians and Humanists would be proud of. Our English work has focussed on our Native American Creation stories: Planning and drafting, with the inclusion of complex dialogue. Who knew that's where the stars in the night sky came from?
Superstar Awards
Thea Platts, Mabel Waugh, Benjamin Turner, Esta Heslop, Benjamin Ingham, Aaliyah Lacey, Charlie Coltman, Frankie Phillips, Elliot Kelly, Harrison Abbott, George Elliot, Archie Birch, Joshua Snelling.
Honey Pot Prize Winners
Extra bee points
10 extra bee points go to:
Best attendance
Yellow 95%
No red slips
Red Hive
Hive with the most bee points so far this year
So far this year:
154075
Blue Hive
Well done! 5 weeks to go.....