We’re going on a bear hunt!
The children have explored the story of ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’ this week by Michael Rosen. The children have really enjoyed listening and joining in with key phrases throughout the story. They have also explored their senses and retold the story in our themed tuff-tray.
The children have continued to explore the seasonal changes in our garden area and discussed during our circle time some of the objects you might find on a walk. We also went for our ‘Wellie walk’ around our local area to see what objects we could find.
You could use some of your own conkers or leaves at home to see what patterns you can make!
The Nursery team
Numbots superstars
Well done to those children who have been using Numbots. Numbots is a fab way for the children to practise those vital maths skills that they need for their learning.
This week 29% of the class have been active on Numbots. Well done to Jig Kappaclone, Alloy Aquastar, Blue Autopod, Sunny Dataclone, Blaze Megamorph, Cruz Geigerdroid, and Crash Metastar.
It would be great if more children can be using Numbots. Have a go at using Numbots with your child for just 5 minutes a day and see how your child’s maths fluency improves.
Living and Learning: Protected Characteristics
Our Living and Learning statement last week was…
I respect others
Year 5 and 6 have been learning about equality and discrimination. We have looked at many scenarios where an individual (or group) was being discriminated against. We discussed what these reasons might be and what we would do to change the world if we could.
Then, we had a look at the Equality Act (2010) and our protected characteristics that we can’t be discriminated against. Pupils were mature, engaged and active in this learning, which resulted in some fantastic discussions and advice for others.
Here are the nine protected characteristics:
- sex
- sexual orientation
- gender reassignment
- disability
- marriage and civil partnership
- pregnancy and maternity
- religion or belief
- race
- age
We will continue to focus and test ourselves on these characteristics throughout the year.
Happy Harvest Festival!
Year 3 made me so proud at our Harvest Festival service on Thursday.
We sang some hymns and shared prayers and ideas about why it is important to make sure food is shared out fairly. The children agreed that we should only take what we need.
The children who read our poem did so beautifully and I was so impressed by how many children wanted to read. I wish I could have chosen everyone!
(click the link below to watch)
A big thank you to everyone who donated and those who came to support.
spellings 7th October 2022
Next week, we will practice dropping the y and adding i when we change the root word and add a suffix.
cry/ cried/ crying
carry/ carried/carrying
copy/copied/copying
worry/ worried/worrying
happen/happened/ happening
Harvest Festival
I felt so happy and proud yesterday during our Harvest Festival at church. The children read some lovely poems and prayers aloud and sang with enthusiasm. It was wonderful to see the church full of parents and carers to celebrate with us, too. Thank you to everybody who donated food which will go to St George’s Crypt in Leeds to help the homeless and vulnerable.
Challenges
Well done to our challenge champions this week!
Each week, we have different challenges set up in our classroom for the children to do. All the challenges are linked to our current learning.
History Topic – The Great Fire of London
This week, we have been learning about Samuel Pepys. We thought about why he was so important to the people of London during the fire. The children were all very enthusiastic and could explain their thoughts.
“He went to the king and asked him for help. The king ordered the houses to be pulled down. This helped save some of London.”
We also talked about why Samuel Pepys is important to people wanting to learn about The Great Fire of London.
“His diary helps us to know what happened!”
“His diary gave us lots of information about The Great Fire of London.”
“Told us what people had to do to get away from the fire.”
After, Year 1 and 2 worked together to read some different scenarios and they had to decide what they would do in each situation.
“I would get all my gold and dig a hole and bury it, then I would leave.”
“I would wake up my family up really quickly and go out of our house, hide our things and go to a new, safe place.”
“I would see if anyone needed my help to try and stop the fire.”
Challenge: Why not read a scenario to your child and see if they can tell you what they would do and why.
07.10.22 Spellings
Next week, we will be learning about suffixes – adding –ing and –ed to change the tense of words. Learn these words at home – maybe write some silly sentences or speed write them as many times as you can.
according
achieved
criticising
determined
embarrassing
developing
guaranteed
queued
Please practise these words ready for a spelling test on Friday 14th October.
This week’s message (Friday 07 October 2022)
It certainly feels like Autumn these days – as well as shorter days and autumn colours, another sign of Autumn is the excited children showing us their conkers collected on the way to school! This week’s message includes two important messages (about medical conditions and attendance), and two more parts (about communications and this week’s Watch Us While We Work).
Attendance update
In the last school year (2021-22), the national average was 95.4% attendance. Our school attendance was 93.1% – quite a bit below the national figure.
We all know that attendance matters – the more your child is in school, the more they learn and the more they develop social skills.
Attendance is even more important following the disruption in learning caused by Covid – we’re now starting to identify gaps in learning and working hard to address this, but we need your child at school.
Please remember we won’t authorise holidays in term-time absence. For some, we also expect to see evidence of illness before we authorise an absence.
Thank you to everyone who makes sure their child is in school as much as possible.
Medical conditions
When your child joins school, we always ask about any medical conditions so we can support your child in school. This includes letting us know about allergies. This is a reminder only: please do make sure you tell us about medical conditions, especially nut allergies and other food allergies. Based on what you tell us, we’ll make reasonable adaptations to meet your child’s needs.
A word about how we communicate
A small number of you told us in the Summer 2022 annual parent/carer survey that we send home too many communications. We’ve thought hard about the comments, but also considered other feedback that tells us you welcome how we communicate. In the end, we’ve decided that we’re getting it about right for most of you. However, we thought it might be useful to let you know the different ways that we communicate things with you.
Firstly, anything urgent (such as the cancellation of an after-school club) or a quick reminder about something (like the photographer being in school) is sent by text. If you have the School Gateway app, it may be useful to set it so you receive notifications of messages. Texts are automatically sent to your app, if you have it installed (it’s free for us to communicate with you this way).
The weekly Friday message contains important information (eg nuts, attendance and about things coming up, such as parent-teacher meetings) as well as other information that we think you might find useful (eg like this one). We usually use sub-headings to help you navigate the message so you can find the information you need.
Most letters are emailed out to you, too. We’re moving away from sending out hard copies of letters (it’s better for the environment to send things electronically and things sometimes don’t always get to you if they’re sent home in book bags). Please try to check your emails daily, so you don’t miss anything important.
For anything relevant to your child’s class, check out the Class News pages of our website (we recommend doing this at least once a week). Nursery and Reception tend to put reminders on their Class News page, as they don’t have a homework page.
Your child should bring home a hard copy of their weekly homework, but you’ll also find it on the Homework page of the website.
Finally, we do have Facebook and Twitter. These just provide additional little snippets, if you want them, but nothing urgent or important will be posted on social media as we realise that not everyone accesses these things.
Finally, a thank you…
…to everyone who attended this week’s Watch Us While We Work session. It was great to see so many of you in school, keen to get a flavour of school life (eg ‘Really nice to see class routines and how engaged the children were’) and to pick up some tips to help you continue to support your child at home (eg ‘Putting things in a bag and taking a few out to help counting’).
Look out for the next session: Thursday 26 January 2023.
Have a happy and healthy, awesome and autumnal weekend!