News
Newsletter for the week ending Friday 23rd June
We continue to strive for our attendance target of at least 96% that would keep us in line with national averages and government expectations. Please click here to find out about our current attendance levels and please do all you can to ensure your child only misses school for exceptional circumstances or if they are too ill to come to school. Because of the sequential nature of every unit of learning in each subject missing even one day immediately disadvantages the children.
Police and online safeguarding bodies are advising parents to be wary of the Y99 communication app that is being used as a tool for grooming young children. This week the Designated Safeguarding Lead (headteacher) and Learning Mentor attended the termly local authority safeguarding forum for updates and all staff safeguarding training this week was correct LGBTQ+ terminology.
Staff news – AOOSC manager Becky is leaving on Monday 26th June and we wish her every success with her new venture. From September Reception (Dolphins) – 6 class teachers and class teaching assistants is as follows: Reception: Mrs Bannister and Mrs Ley; Year 1 Mrs Wilkins and Mrs Monroe; Year 2 Mrs Stanbury, Mrs Stephens and Mrs Halloway; Year 3 Miss Wetz and Mrs Hughes-Whiffing; Year 4 Miss Ellis and Miss Child; Year 5 Mrs McMorine and Mrs L Evans and Mrs S Evans and Year 6 Mrs Mitchell, Mrs Evans and Mrs Carstairs. We are currently finalising staffing for Nursery/Turtles and will communicate this to you asap.
Wishing you all a lovely weekend
From Jeremy Cooper and all of the children and staff
AROUND THE CLASSES
This week in Turtles and Dolphins we have continued learning about Goldilocks and the three bears. We have designed and made baby bear a new chair. We have interviewed some of the characters and added some speech bubbles to the pictures in the story. On Tuesday we went to The Jungle to investigate big, medium and small.
In Year 1 we have had lots of excitement again as our dragon egg has grown even bigger! In our Writing lessons we have carried on using interesting adjectives to describe dragons and then we had a go at drawing some of our own dragons. We then thought about what our dragon might be like and wrote sentences about them. In Maths we have started looking at position and direction. We have been practising our left and right and we have been describing turns with the vocabulary: full turn, half turn, quarter turn. In our topic lesson we recalled all the features of a castle that we had learnt and then had a go at designing and labelling our own castle.
Year 3 have had a great week! We have started learning about time in Maths. We challenged ourselves to learn to tell the time to five minutes and played a fun time game to learn about duration of time. In Science, we used the data that we had collected from our outdoor learning about how things move differently on different surfaces to create a bar chart. We were then able to use the graph to explore our findings. In history, we looked at some artefacts from ancient Egypt and thought about what these could tell us about life at this time. In PE, we have been improving our fitness skills by focusing on our agility and we have loved learning how to play tag rugby. In guided reading, we have been reading all about Tutankhamun and the mummification process and we have been focusing on using our retrieval skills to answer questions and find out information.
Lundy Puffins (year 2) have been reading and writing poetry again this week in English. They learned how to use alliteration to write a poem about sea creatures. In Maths, they have been learning about position and direction and using the words left, right, clockwise and anticlockwise. For their History topic, they continued to learn about seaside holidays in the past and had a go at writing a postcard as if they were a Victorian child visiting the seaside for the first time. In Science, they used magnifying glasses to examine different seeds and bulbs. They are looking forward to their trip to Rosemoor next week to find out more about plants.
In music, year 3 used the fingering for the new notes they have learnt to play a more complicated piece on the recorder. Year 4, listened to Peter and the Wolf by Prokofiev and considered why particular instruments had been chosen for the different animals. Year 5 continued with their compositions using the pentatonic scale and year 6 drew detailed and labelled drawings of different orchestral instruments for an interactive display. In R.E., Year 3 drew cartoons to illustrate the golden rule, year 4 listed the different landmarks that punctuate a persons journey through life. Year 5 presented their slides about Christian organisations who are seeking to make the world a better place and year 6 looked at the story of Job and considered how faith can help a person in difficult times. In French, years 4,5 and 6 began their descriptions of their monsters and year 3 finished their smoothie recipes.
In HMS Echo (year 4) this week, the children have been learning about how sounds are made in Science, and they had a go at recreating their own sounds using the environment around them, which was loud but fun! In Geography, we have been learning about the different layers of the Earth and how this contributes to volcanoes and earthquakes. In Maths, we have been busy with shape, learning different angles, triangles and quadrilaterals. There’s lots of tricky vocabulary to be learnt, so it will be interesting to see if they can remember it all! In English, we are beginning to plan our own walk around in a fictional or real place of their choice to apply what they have learnt from ‘A Walk in London’ and ‘A Walk in Appledore’. In PE, we are continuing with football skills on the field. Finally, in our Values lessons, we are looking at inspirational environmentalists, and why they are an inspiration.
Year 5 have continued with their Appledore writing and this week the focus has been on places in the village. We have been finding out about both St Mary’s Church and Richmond Dry Dock. A group of children also helped with a heritage research project which also focused on the village. Next week we will be going on the ferry over to Instow. In maths we have been exploring efficient strategies to add and subject numbers using decimals. We have all planned our art for the final piece of work for the arts award; over the next two weeks we will have a whole day in the art studio to complete this.
Year 6 have been busy learning the play again this week. They have also started a statistics unit in maths and begun their own festival writing in literacy. We are hoping to have a great day on Lundy. Thank you for all the photos that have come in so far – please pass them in as soon as you can.
