Weekly Newsletter
Friday 13th January 2023
This week in school
Job vacancy We are looking for a new teaching assistant (full time) to join our team. Full details are at https://www.braytonprimary.com/vacancies/
Winter illnesses update from the DFE UKHSA advice remains clear that children can continue to attend as normal unless they are unwell and have a high temperature. Further information on when a child is too ill for school or nursery is available. There is no requirement to be absent from school on a precautionary basis. Schools should continue to maintain their high expectations for face-to-face attendance.
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!)
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 at the Y6 SATs evening on Wednesday 18 January.
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
A massive rise in attendance for last week for us, putting our attendance well about the national and regional picture. This is really positive and makes a huge difference to how settled the children are. We do appreciate that it's a hard decision if you child is saying they do not feel well, but we would always contact you if they were struggling at school.
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
Sunday 15 January - Deadline for primary school applications for September 2023
Wednesday 18 January - Y6 SATS information evening for families
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!
This week in classrooms
Nursery - Stars
This week in Nursery has been all about pigs; we have read the story of The Three Little Pigs. Through sensory play, we have built a brick house for the third little pig with bricks and shaving foam and explored the materials the other pigs used to build their houses too. Through role play we have retold the traditional stories we have looked at so far. We have loved singing songs linked to the stories too.
In Maths, we have made arrangements with shapes, particularly focussing on the circle shape. We have also looked at different ways of making number 1. In Phonics we have been looking at body percussion and remembering patterns of sound. We are becoming increasingly interested in mark making; with the children having a go at writing their names- this is wonderful!
We have continued to sing a variety of different nursery rhymes adding a new one to our repertoire each week. This week’s nursery rhyme is ‘This Little Piggy’.
Star of the Week Seth Fisk
Reception - Moon and Mercury
This week we began by asking the children what they already know about penguins. It was really interesting to hear some weird and wonderful facts. We then shared the story of The Emperor’s Egg by Martin Jenkins and we soon discovered that Emperor penguins are amazing! Even though the book was a story it was full of so much information! We feel like we know lots more about penguins now.
In phonics we introduced the new graphemes and digraphs ar, ur, oo and or. We have practised how to form the letters correctly using the mnemonics and we have been blending and segmenting words containing these sounds. Look out for the new books on Oxford Owl later today.
In Maths we have continued subitising, comparing numbers to 5, looking at equal and unequal groups through sharing food out in an equal way and finding out how many passengers are on the bus, how many people were at the bus stop and how many altogether.
In RE we discussed how well the children know each other and that it’s easy to tell who is who by looking at their hair colour, length and height. We then discovered that lots of Christians believe God would have known these answers straight away, without even having to find them out. This is because God knows everyone so very well and everyone is so very special to God.
And finally, we are hoping the special delivery of a penguin egg will hatch very soon!
Star of the week:
Moon - Norah Acaster
Mercury - Ada Parker-Houlden
Year 1 - Galaxy and Venus
We have had an out of this world experience this week in Year 1, studying the text of ‘The Queen’s Lift Off!’ by Steve Antony. We have explored the materials and their properties of space crafts , and designed and built our own rocket ships. We have created retells and diary entries, whilst developing our comprehension skills in English, writing in the first person narrative.
In maths, we have continued exploring numbers to 20, focusing on teen numbers, and in geography we have explored Google Earth, zooming from outer space to the United Kingdom, and its four countries.
The children continue to work hard with their phonics, and in using and applying this knowledge to read and write, and are making real progress across the curriculum.
Stars of the week:
Venus- Cooper Glover
Galaxy-Ramsey Snedker
Year 2 - Earth and Mars
We are proud of the Year 2 children this week as they have really settled into the Spring term with maturity and enthusiasm. In English, we have continued to write some exciting sentences about George and the Dragon full of powerful verbs, adjectives and onomatopoeia. We have also begun another story called ‘The Egg’ in guided reading where a dragon hatched and a boy had to look after it; we have added words such as damsel, sizzling and chirrup to our vocabulary. In Maths, we have been working hard at adding pounds and pence in our money unit. It has been tricky but the children have persevered.
Our RE lesson taught us that Jesus is a friend to everyone, even people who are not kind like Matthew the tax collector because they need him more. In Science, we have continued to study materials and their properties and in Geography we learnt about the basic compass points. We were really impressed by the children’s hockey skills and creative dancing in PE. In dance, the children moved like dragons, in Music they thought of an instrumental sound for a dragon egg hatching and in Art they carefully sketched different parts of a dragon. What an energetic but enjoyable week!
Star of the Week
Earth- Ashleigh Bramhald
Mars-Alia Mirzakhel
Year 3 - Jupiter and Saturn
Another jam packed week of learning in Year 3! As the Legend of Black Rock unfolds, it continues to cause great excitement and intrigue amongst the children. Drama has been a big focus in English this week and has helped the children to experience the sudden, erratic events and inner turmoil of the main character ‘Erin’ as she falls overboard and finally comes face to face with Black Rock. In Maths, the children applied their understanding of partitioning a number into tens and ones to represent and solve multiplication problems, and made links between division and multiplication in preparation for our division lessons next week. Our Science lesson taught us that forces are just pushes and pulls in a particular direction, caused when two objects make contact. The children enjoyed investigating the direction of a force on different items in and around the classroom. In PE, the children learnt and performed the first section of a street dance and in Music they compared Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Storm by Benjamin Britten. In French, we practised counting to ten and also learnt how to read the associated number words. Continuing with our topic of ‘Achievers and Inventors’, in History we learnt about Amy Johnson, a pioneering English pilot who was the first woman to fly solo from London to Australia. In Computing, the children practised writing executable program scripts in Scratch and explored the turning and repeat commands of the programming palette. Keep up the good work.
Stars of the week: Amelia Rowley
Saturn: Sophie Howell
Jupiter: Amelia Rowley
Year 4 - Neptune and Meteor
What haven’t we done this week?! We started the week familiarising ourselves with the website TinkerCAD, the children were given free reign to explore the software and create any 3D design they wanted. What was more lovely was to hear cries of joy at completing a tricky part of their design or sharing their newfound knowledge and skills with people nearby. We’ve had a very Scientific week as well, we’ve crashed into our newest unit of learning, sound. The children began by grouping different instruments before trying to explore how each instrument made sound. After watching some slow motion videos of drums and observing violins being plucked we agreed that each instrument had one form of vibration that caused the sound. Then the following day we learned about how sound travels in waves towards the ear which is a very complex part of the body. The children were particularly interested in the 3D model of each which showed each part. After some fabulous questions from certain children even the adults learned that the eardrum is actually 1/10th of a mm thick!
Stars of the week:
Meteor: Maya Prosser
Neptune: Matthew Ward
Year 5 - Asteroid and Pluto
We are definitely in the full swing of things now in Year 5. Our first full week of 2023 has been filled with some fantastic work. We have finally finished our work on fractions in Maths. However, we will now be seeing their multiplication skills again next week, when we start multiplying numbers by 2-digits. In English, we have been looking at parenthesis and relative clauses - adding information within sentences. The children have been working towards writing a biography about Katherine Johnson. We are really excited to see their work, due to all the hard work they have been doing. The children have been enjoying our new book, Cosmic. We do not know who or how they got into space. Will they ever see the Earth again? In Science, we had to use the majority of the school field to see how far away the planets were from each other. There was quite a bit of walking, but safe to say they all returned from their space walk.
Stars of the week:
Pluto: Freddie Wilson
Asteroid: George Waugh
Year 6 - Nebular and Constellation
Well, the children thought that last week’s 3 day week went quickly, but this full week seems to have gone even quicker somehow! It’s just a testament to the hard work that is going on each day in year 6. In maths this week we have continued to build our understanding of fractions: adding and subtracting improper and mixed number, then testing our understanding with problem solving. The children have done fantastically, especially with so many steps to complete. In English we have completed our non-chronological texts about ancient Egyptian writing and have moved on to a descriptive piece based on our new class text - Secrets of a Son King. The recall of grammar content to make this piece the best of the year so far was fantastic to see. In our guided reading, we are quickly establishing our plot and understanding where our characters will need to go to bring the curse to an end - but how they do it is for another day! In Science we have concluded our Electricity work, with children investigating all that they have learnt so far, again showing their understanding in full! In PSHCE we looked at current affairs and how in Britiain’s history, we have claimed many a historical artefact as our own, even though they belong to countries thousands of miles away. Should these artefacts be returned to their rightful owners, or remain in our museums. Some thought provoking discussions were definitely had! Well done everybody; let’s have more next week!
Stars:
Nebular: Jacob Triffit
Constellation: Ethan Lyons