News
Newsletter for the week ending 15th January
A busy week of in-school and remote learning for our pupils and staff and thank you for your enagagement. Please read on to find out more about: remote learning; the free school meals for our Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 children; what has been happening in and around the classes; the ‘3i’s’ and the cancellation of nationally set tests for your children.
We have worked hard to improve our remote learning since our first offer as a result of the first lockdown, including significant investment in technology infrastructure and training of staff and children in the use of Google Classroom.
We are pleased the level of pupil engagement has risen significantly and thank you for your support. If you are experiencing problems, please do contact your class teacher via Google Classroom and if this isn’t possible please call school. Whilst it is very new to us all, we are so pleased with how quickly the children, staff and parents in our community have adapted.
Children are expected to complete all remote learning activities set and if they don’t they will fall behind further than others and this will be significantly detrimental to their development. Again, if you are having porblems with your child engaging with remote learning please do contact us. Staff are able to monitor engagement levels and contact will be made with children not meeting this expectation.
The Department for Education has recently announced that nationally set tests for pupils will be cancelled this year. This includes the Year 1 phonics test, Year 2 SATs, Year 4 Times Tables Check and Year 6 SATs.
For the past 1 8months we have been reshaping our curriculum to make it broader, richer and more relevant to our pupils’ lives. For more information on what is know as the ‘3i’s‘, (our curriculum intent, how we implementation our intent and then how we measure the impact of our implementation) please click here.
At short notice, coupled with the challenge of significantly reduced staff, our Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 universal free school meals provider have been able to continue to provide for us. We are in dialogue with them this week regarding the menu and expect changes to be made early next week that we will communicate with you as soon as we are able.
AROUND THE CLASSES
This week in Turtles and Dolphins we have started our new topic ‘Superheroes’ and we have kicked it off by learning about the story ‘Supertato’. The Evil Peas have been in school hiding our numbers and we’ve had to work out which ones they have taken. We have made Supertato using different vegetables and painted our own Supertato. On Thursday we went to The Jungle and found that the Super Veggies had been tied up so we had to rescue them, this led us to going back to The Jungle today to set traps for The Evil Peas.
It has been an interesting start to the Spring Term. In school, Year 1 are continuing as normal with our maths, writing, reading, and phonics. In maths, we have been learning about the place value of numbers between 10 and 20. In our writing learning, we have been using the story No Bot The Robot With No Bottom as inspiration for story writing. The children have spent this week engaging with the story and remembering the patterns to help them with their own writing. In the afternoons the children have enjoyed art and design. They have started the build their own rockets out of cardboard. We have also designed superhero logos and used collage techniques to add colour.
Well done Lundy Puffins! You have all worked incredibly hard this week – whether that is in home or at school and should be very proud of yourselves. Mrs Smale, Mrs O’Shea and I (Mrs Stanbury) are incredibly proud of you all too! Everyone (both in school and at home) has written an amazing ‘Baboon on the Moon’ story. I have been very impressed by how well you have taken on board everything we have learned to make your writing really interesting. We look forward to sharing the finished stories with you all soon. In Maths, they have been learning about money. First, they identified all coins and notes and then they had to count different amounts and choose the right coins and notes to pay for different items. They have started their topic for this half term ‘The Great Fire of London’ and first asked lots of questions about what they wanted to find out. They will then use their skills as brilliant ‘gatherers’ to find out lots of information.
Seahunter have done an amazing job completing their first full week of lockdown learning. The children in school have adjusted well to being a smaller group. They miss their classmates but have enjoyed seeing their comments on Google Classroom and knowing that they are doing the same work at home. The children at home have been amazing at logging on every day, taking part in all the activities and sharing photos and videos as well as their work in slides and docs. In school, the children have produced some lovely pastel artwork of Meerkats as well as pictures of the characters they have created for their English work. We have also been trying to stay active with plenty of BBC supermovers. In addition, we have started learning some dances on GoNoodle. The children definitely pick these up quicker than the adults! This is helping us to work on our new value, Being Healthy
This week in Year 4, in Maths, the children have been learning how to multiply both 2 and 3-digit numbers using written methods. In English, we have been looking at the skills needed to be successful at writing an explanation text. In Science, we have experimented how to make sound by using rubber bands to create vibrations. For Computing, the children have begun to look at coding on a programme called ‘Scratch’. The class picked the skills up really quickly and enjoyed playing around with the codes to see what they could come up with!
Year 5 have had a very busy week in maths learning the skills required for long multiplication. I have been very impressed with what I’ve seen. In literacy, whilst enjoying the Viking Sagas, we have been refining skills with parenthesis, relative clauses and using colons and semi-colons. There have been some great sentences and if these skills can be used when we write other things, it will be fantastic. Science has looked into parts of a flower and how they reproduce and we have also been thinking about how we keep healthy. It has been encouraging to see how brilliant everyone has been engaging in remote learning – and in school, the children have enjoyed working to share some of what they have been doing with you. Keep working hard everyone!
Y6: In maths we have been learning how to multiply and divide decimals. In English we have been writing narrative poems. Our main poem was The Highwayman. We have been finding the poetic devices used by Alfred Noyse in the poem.In art we are making collages which link with a poem. We used lots of different materials. In topic we were learning about Edward Jenner, the creator of the smallpox vaccine. We are using our evaluator skills to think was this discovery is so important for us today. We hope everyone at home is managing the remote learning and keeping safe.Reporters: Ellie-May and Amy
