News
Newsletter for the week ending 2nd October
A wet and windy end to the week for the weekend (great!), but before it starts please read on to find out what has been going on in and around the school, including vocuhers for free sport and activity sessions in the area.
Have a lovely (albeit wet) weekend
With best wishes from Jeremy Cooper and all the children and staff
AROUND THE SCHOOL
Parents evening will not be conducted face-to-face for years 1 to 6 this year. Instead it will either be by telephone or Zoom call. If you haven’t received communication from school about booking a slot, please contact us. Details on how to make or receive the call will follow nearer the time. It’ll be a new (and hopefully temporary) way of doing this via Zoom, so pleas ebear with us if there are teething problems.
AROUND THE CLASSES
This week in Turtles and Dolphins our animal focus has been on the farm. We have made a list of all the animals that we know live on a farm and we have talked about the produce that we get from these animals. We enjoyed reading the book, ‘Farmyard Hullabaloo’ and in groups we acted out an animal from the story and the children had to guess which animal it was. We also had a go at ‘hot seating’ some animals, we asked them questions to find out what it was like to live on a farm. We have changed role play areas into tractors and made model tractors from tubes. We have used various materials to make farm animals and found a farm game on Cbeebies to play.
I cannot believe that we already at the end of the fourth week of this term! Year one have been absolute stars this week. I am so very proud of all of you. It has been a rather different week as the children experienced remote teaching on Tuesday. I was so impressed with the learning produced by the children and the quality of their learning behaviours. All of the children can now logon to our new Chromebooks independently and this week have produced a labelled polar bear using Google Jamboard. In our topic learning, we have been learning about differences between mammals and birds and applying this knowledge to animals found within the Arctic Circle. Today we discovered how large a polar bear’s footprint is and compared this with our own feet sizes. We found out that polar bears have very large feet!
Lundy Puffins have been writing stories of the adventures their little person went on and have tried hard to remember the skills they have been taught such as interesting vocabulary and accurate punctuation. In Maths, they have continued to investigate 2-digit numbers and have used place value charts and part whole models to demonstrate their understanding. They found out about different animals that live alongside polar bears in the Arctic and created a fact sheet about them. In computing, they have used ‘Jamboard’ and everyone successfully added sticky notes and pictures to a slide – well done! In Science, they sorted things that are living, things that are no longer alive and things that have never been alive. In the Art Studio with Abby, they have created backgrounds for their polar bear pictures.
Seahunter have been discovering more about the rainforests this week in our topic work as well as in their art studio time with Abby. They have found out about the 4 layers of the rainforest and learnt actions to remember them. They wrote beautiful haiku poems based on a film clip of the rainforest, using descriptive vocabulary such as humid and emerging to describe the sights and sounds. In art, they have started to explore rainforest animal, which they will draw and colour using oil pastels. In R.E. with Mrs Smale, they are looking at creation stories and have started to link how people care for the planet to our topic work. In P.E. this week, the children recorded times for a 1km run as part of the whole school personal best challenge. We will practise over the next 3 weeks then record them again to see how much improvement they have made. They worked really cooperatively in pairs to record each other’s times and did a great job of cheering each other on.
In Year 4, we have almost come to the end of our place value unit in Maths and should be ready to start on addition and subtraction towards the end of next week. The children quickly understood how to read negative numbers and have enjoyed learning how to read and write Roman numerals. In English, we have been recapping previous skills that we have looked at in order to secure our learning. The children are more able to independently use speech skills in their writing. During computing, the children have learnt how to access google classroom to complete work assigned to them, and have also logged on to Times Table Rockstars to further practise their times tables. I have already seen an improvement in the children’s understanding and speed of their times tables from practising in class. Well done HMS Echo!
Year 5 have published their Hope stories this week in Literacy, used negative numbers and Roman Numerals in Maths and have tried an experiment to see which material is the best insulator for a new lunch box in Science. They have also been discovering the rules about -ible and -able spellings – I wonder if they will be able to explain it to you? I have had to speak to the class about the importance of listening and not chatting in lessons – if you could also remind them about how important this is I would be very grateful. Thank you to those who have tried Google classroom – we are gradually becoming more used to it. If you haven’t, please have a go and ask if unsure and I will do my best to help.
This week in year six we have been doing lots of important work. In maths we have been doing integers; an integer is a whole number. Our work in Mrs. Phillips’ lesson has involved inverse calculations (inverse calculations are when you add a number you would then subtract it instead). During science we have been learning about the human circulatory system and what a balanced diet is. We know we need to eat more fruit and vegetables to get healthy! For English we have been learning more about Macbeth and writing about the story of his life. We have developed our work on direct speech. For topic we have been looking further at climate change and how we can reduced our carbon footprint. We have enjoyed our art session in the art studio. For P.E we have been doing three runs a week around anchor park. We all like learning these things as they are fun and educational. Reported by Kitty and Anthony.
