News
Newsletter for the week ending 25th September
Another bust week, so please read the main body of text by clicking on the headline to find out what has been happening in and around the school this week…
Best wishes from
Jeremy Cooper and all the children and staff
AROUND THE VILLAGE AND BEYOND
During school closure a number of the children participated in the #devonvirtualgames and it is back again for the autumn term. To find out more please click here.
Ever though of becoming a primary teacher? If so, please click here for information on Devon Primary teacher training.
AROUND THE SCHOOL
End of week three and the children are becoming more immersed (and hopefully more engrossed!) in their learning, particulalry their topics. We continue to develop our curriculum and this half term children return to the whole school environment topic and already I have had children contacting me wanting to know what they can do to reduce the school’s carbon footprint. Please read the class entries below to find out more.
I know I’m sounding like a broken record, but thank you for once again supporting us with the necessary changes to school routines this week. It is appreciated. We are all trying our best in a challenging situation and by working together and all of us individually playing our part we will make school as safe as possible.
Thank you to those of you who have contacted the school by email or telephone with suggestions. I can assure you we do listen and consider their merits, making changes where possible that benefit without creating knock-on additional challenges. We are in no doubt that some of these changes will be frustrating, even in some cases appear unnecessary, but please don’t take your frustrations out on the staff who are on the frontline (eg on the gates) and certainly not in front of children present. Please email or call school.
We are required to maintain good ventillation in classrooms by opening the windows and with it getting colder, please ensure children come to school on colder days with school uniform typically worn in the winter months. This could be, for example, tights for girls instead of summer dresses and all wearing vests.
For years 1-6 we will be holding parent/teacher meetings by telephone this term during the weeks commencing 5th and 12th October. You will receive a text from school with a link for you to book a time and then communication nearer the time with connection details.
Mrs Stephens embarks on her maternity leave today. We would all like to thank her for all she has contributed to the school and not least for coming in these past few weeks (and in the very final stages of her pregnancy!) to do all she can to help the chlidren catch up on missed learning.
AROUND THE CLASSES
This week we have continued with our theme ‘Pets’ We want to say a big thank you to William’s Mummy for coming in and talking to us about her job as a vet. We have changed our role play areas into Veterinary Surgeries so that we can practise looking after our pets. We have been to The Jungle to build homes for our pet toys on a large and small scale. We enjoyed making pet shaped biscuits on Tuesday and at the end of the week we have started to make salt dough fish that we will decorate next week. We have also enjoyed talking to each other about our pets at home.
A week of discovery in the Sea Lions’ class this week. We have found out where polar bears live and why the Arctic looks different shapes on different maps. We have also learned about different animals which live within the Arctic Circle. The children were keen to find out more information about some of the Arctic animals we studied, particularly what the Narwhal uses its long horn for? I have encouraged the children to undertake some personal research at home. They can share any facts they find out next week. In our computing learning, the children have all logged onto our new Chromebooks and have started to use Google Docs to voice type stories.
Another busy week for Lundy Puffins! In Maths, they have continued to work on place value and have looked at different ways of representing two-digit numbers using different equipment such as bead strings, base 10 and numicon. In English, they have continued to experiment with different words and phrases for their stories about their miniature adventurer and have written an introduction. Everyone enjoyed using the Chromebooks again on Thursday and took part in an online quiz about polar bears which was very exciting! They’ve also been on a polar bear fact hunt and have started to put together the facts they discovered into a pop-up book
Seahunter have been working hard on teamwork and making good choices this week. They have been encouraging each other and started to really work on the school value for this half term; responsible. In Maths, we have been looking at place value; partitioning hundreds, tens and ones. In English, we have explored the use of speech marks and used the Chromebooks to sort sentence types; exclamations, questions, commands and statements. In philosophy this week, half the class listened to the story of ‘The Great Green Forest’, which tells the story of a man sent to cut down trees in the rainforest. The group created and discussed the question ‘Why did he listen to his boss if he knew there were animals, insects and birds living in those trees?’ The other half of the class enjoyed time in the art studio with Abby, creating pictures of rainforest creatures.
Year 4 have continued their work on place value this week where they have represented numbers up to 10,000 and placed them on a number line, as well as partitioning numbers. In English, we have been working on prepositional phrases and similes. For P4C, we read the story ‘Duffy’s Lucky Escape’ and discussed the questions ‘Is land pollution more common than sea pollution?’ and ‘Is plastic pollution a problem in every country?’. Our Science lessons have been focused on animals and their habitats and this week the children learnt how to use classification keys. The children have enjoyed continuing their learning on the Chrome books and have made their own slides about reducing, reusing and recycling!
Year 5 have been comparing and ordering numbers in maths, planning stories in literacy and thinking about scientific experiments to test materials in science. They have also begun finding out a bit more about plastic pollution and started their artwork in the Art Studio (an animal affected by plastics in the ocean). As part of our latest value, they have also been thinking about how they are responsible and why they need to be – I hope they are as helpful at home as they say they are!
From our very keen new Year 6 authors: this week we did a lot of stuff, solet us tell you more…in topic we learnt about climate change. On Tuesday, we wrote about what climate change is. In case you didn’t know climate change is a term used by scientists to describe the way that weather and climate are changing because of human and industrial activity. We learnt about the different ways we were affecting the climate and how we are trying to stop it. At the end we wrote about how we could help the problem of climate change. On Thursday we learnt about what was causing climate change and more on how humans were trying to stop it. We also learnt about who could stop it (eg international climate leaders, head of renewable energy company or the prime minister.) In literacy on Tuesday we started the week with an elicitation task about William Shakespeare. We had to describe from a picture what did or did not know about him.We found out that he was a writer and he wrote famous stories and one was called Macbeth. On Wednesday, we watched the first part of Macbeth and wrote it out in our books. Finally on Thursday we listened to a song about a battle from it and wrote a letter from Macbeth to the king. In maths this week, we learnt different ways to add and subtract like column addition. We did this through worksheets and word problems This week in science we did about the circulatory system. First we did about what we already knew about the circulatory system then we labeled diagrams of the heart,lungs and blood vessels. This week in Art we drew about one line in the middle of the page. On one side we did a good world on the other was a bad world. In ICT this week, we made slides/jamboards about saving our earth.
