News
Newsletter for the week ending 22nd January
We enter the weekend with another week under our belt as we continue to adapt to our new ‘normal’. A big well done to all of you in school and at home with your engagement of learning (and I certainly include all the adults at home!).
This week we say goodbye and a huge thank you to Ms Hodge, our Learning Mentor, who leaves us with our very best wishes after ten years of supporting all of us. Mrs Phillips will be our new Learning Mentor and she has been working alongside Ms Hodge to ensure a smooth transition.
This week school received delivery of COVID-19 testing kits for staff for twice weekly testing. Staff will self-test on a Sunday morning and a Wednesday evening. On these days please be extra vigilant for texts or emails from us because we may need to inform you of changes to school organisation for the following day should a staff test record a positive result. If you have changed your phone number or email address recently, please inform school by email on admin@appledoreprimary.co.uk
Please read on to find out what has been going on around the classes. And to add to a safe and successful week, my week has just been capped by a child telling me, ‘I’ve had an amazing week’. Small things like that make it all so worthwhile.
Have a safe and enjoyable weekend with your children.
Best wishes
From Jeremy Cooper and all the childlren and staff
AROUND TEH CLASSES
This we have learnt about another Superhero – Superworm. We compared him to Supertato to find out how they were similar and different. We have made collages of these Superheroes and printed worms and insects with different materials. In the story Superworm becomes different objects to save the insects so we thought of other things that he could become. Today we made a fact file about worms and went to The Jungle to look for worms and insects.
This week in Year 1 we have been writing stories about Bernard the robot. In our new stories, he loses his arm at the park and then goes on an adventure to find it. The children have shown great enthusiasm when writing their stories and we are investigating ways in which we can share these across the school and to parents at home. In maths, we have started learning about addition and subtraction using numbers to 20. In the afternoons the children have continued to build their rockets. These are now fully assembled and have been painted an array of bright colours. The children have also been using instruments in their music lessons to repeat different beats and rhythms.
It has been another great week for Lundy Puffins! They have been looking at a new book in English: Chinese New Year and have been learning about the different features of an information book. The children working at home wrote some brilliant questions about Chinese New Year and the children in school had to use the book to find the answers to these questions. Great work everyone! In Maths, they have continued to learn about money and have been finding totals and will begin to learn about giving change next week. The Great Fire of London topic has continued this week: children in school answered the question ‘How do we know about the Great Fire?’ by looking at diaries, newspaper articles and paintings. Children at home sequenced the events of the Great Fire. Next week we will be answering the question: How did the fire spread so quickly? It has been great to see how the children have been so inspired by this topic, with many children in school carrying on their learning at home.
Year 3 have continued to work hard this week, both at home and in school. In maths, they have done really well working with money, learning to convert pounds and pence. In English they have worked on speech rules, adverbs and prepositions, developing these skills ready for their own story writing. In addition to Maths and English, the children in school have enjoyed some PE personal best challenge practice, working on their jumping skills. They have also been coding on the computers, finding out about light and dark in science and, on Wednesday, had a great time in the woods doing a scavenger hunt. The children at home have sent in comments and pictures of some of the activities they have been doing at home; walks, art and cooking to name a few. Everyone is doing a great job- well done Year 3
Year 4 has had another successful week of learning both in school and remotely. Well done Year 4! The children have continued to learn methods to multiply 2 and 3 digit numbers, using the short written method and the expanded method, and have started looking at different methods for dividing. We have continued with our text ‘Until I met Dudley’ in English, where we have looked at the use of pronouns, present tense verbs and complex sentences in our writing. The children have enjoyed progressing their skills in Computing using ‘Scratch’. We have also carried out a Philosophy session focused on healthy eating where the children used their excellent explainer skills
Another busy week in Year 5! Maths, with multiplication and division as the main focus, is coming to an end this week – you’ll be pleased to know that we are moving to fractions next! Well done for working so hard and following the methods – please don’t forget the skills you have learnt! Literacy has been building to our story writing next week – I can’t wait to see how they all turn out. We have also done science (keep an eye on those potatoes) computing (some fantastic designs) and evaluated our moon buggies – plus grammar, spelling, art and reading. I’m not surprise we’re all worn out! Keep up the good work, have a lovely weekend and I’ll look forward to all your creativity next week
This week in maths Year 6 have just finished their decimals unit and have just started percentages. We looked at how to change fractions into decimals. We did an end of block assessment on decimals and did a start of unit assessment on percentages. In English we have finished doing the work on The Highwayman by Afred Noyes. We wrote out own story about another character from the book and then changed this story into a narrative poem. They are going to be displayed in the main school. We have just completed an elicitation task on diary writing. We had to do it on a day we really enjoyed. In art we are doing bird collages and we had to do a background. Most of it was a marbled background but some people chose a different one. In topic we have found out about two famous nurses. One of them was Florence Nightingale and the other was Mary Seacole. We created a leaflet and then answered some questions. We then evaluated their work to see if there changes to nursing are still relevant for us today. We are missing everyone who is remote learning. It was great catching up with some of them today on Google Meet. Reporter: Daisy
