News
Newsletter for the week ending Friday 28th February
Welcome back and we hope you all had a good half term.
Some months ago the newsletter included information regarding a ‘Discovery Centre’ that we hope to build on our school site. This will provide a dedicated place for the children to engage with environmental studies, science, technology, engineering and maths learning for primary school children, their families and the wider community. You can see what we believe it could look like and find out more by clicking here. Our next stage is to get the plans through planning permission stage and we are hoping to raise this through fundraising led by parents association. Please see here for more information and if you are able to donate, and no donation is too small, that would be great please.
As a school we encourage a sense of belonging and strongly believe that every member of our community should be treated with respect and kindness. This is supported in many areas of curriculum, including one of our core PSHE values and areas of learning being Inclusive, and observance of days such as International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (21st March). We firmly believe that any form of disability, racial religion or belief, sexual orientation or gender based prejudice or hostility towards another person is unacceptable.
llsham National English Hub would like to invite you to attend a FREE session on Wednesday 5th March 2-3pm to support you with helping your child at home in their reading journey. During this free, hour-long session, The Ilsham National English hub team will be sharing videos and practical solutions to support practice at home. The focus will be on supporting your child to become an expressive fluent reader.
This session is targeted at families (including grandparents), carers, childminders and before/after school provision workers. It is designed to support children from pre school age up to the end of Key Stage One (Year 2). For booking a place please see here
Dates for the diary:
- World Book Day 2025 is Thursday 6th March. Turtles, Dolphins, Years 1 and 2 can come to school dressed in pyjamas for a bedtime story. Years 3, 4, 5 and 6 can dress in pyjamas or as a character from a book they have read
- 9.30am-12.30pm
- Wednesday 12th March Torridge Family Hub, Victoria Park, Bideford is holding a free drop-in for parents to chat to Speech and Language therapists and Special Educational Needs Advisors. See here for more information.
- Class photos will be taken on 18th March
- Sports Day Tuesday 17th June and reserve date is Tuesday 24th June
- Please keep an eye out for communication regarding forthcoming parents evenings
Wishing you all a super weekend
From Jeremy Cooper and all the children and staff
AROUND THE CLASSES
This week in Turtles and Dolphins we have moved further around the world to find out about houses in Mongolia. We looked at Mongolia on Google Earth and compared this to Appledore. We have compared yurts to stilt houses and to our own houses and we have made yurts using cardboard and playdough.
We have started a new book this week in year 1 called ‘What happens when..’ which uses questions to inspire imaginative thinking. For example: what could happen to a balloon that floats away? What happens to your shadow when it’s night time? We have really enjoyed reading it and predicting what might happen on the next page and coming up with our own fun ideas. In maths we are looking at numbers from 20-50. We have been learning to recognise, count and order these numbers. Using different resources we have explored making groups of tens to help us count larger number and working out how many tens and ones make up a number. This term we have a geography focus looking at the question ‘what happens when the land meets the sea?’ Our first lesson we looked at Google Earth and how it is a bird’s eye view. We looked at Appledore from above and located significant places using our local knowledge to help us.
Welcome back to a new half term year 2! This week they have been looking at a new book in English all about dinosaurs. They looked at the illustrations and asked questions about the pages. In Maths, they have learned the 5 and 10 times tables and have been dividing by 5 and 10. For Geography this half term, they will be comparing Appledore to a village in India so to start with they looked at world maps and named the seven continents. In PE, they have been practicing jumping in different ways with a focus on their landing.
Years 3-6 began new units in RE. Both years 4 and 6 are looking at the events of Holy Week from different perspectives while years 3 and 5 began second units on Hinduism. In music, year 3 are continuing with their spooky house soundtrack but have also started to learn Khatak, a style of classical Indian dance to support their studies in RE. Year 4 began to mix their cyclic pattern track and year 5 refined their ABAC melody.
Year 3 have had a great first week back. In Maths, we learnt all about unit, non-unit fractions and the whole. In English, we began reading Arthur and the Golden Rope. We used noun phrases to describe all of the mysterious objects found in the family’s vault that had been collected on their many adventures, and we wrote a character description of the main character from the story. In Science, we learnt about the seven different nutrients, and sorted a variety of food according to which nutrients they contained. We also discussed how it is important to have a balanced diet. In Geography, we began a new topic on how places change over time. We used google maps to explore the Olympic Park area in London and looked at how the land has changed over the past fifty years. In Values, we learnt how to help someone who is having difficulty breathing due to asthma
In year 4 this week, the children have begun learning about fractions in Maths, where we have spent some time recapping some previous learning from last year, for example defining what a fraction is and what a whole is. In English, we have started reading the text Until I Met Dudley which is an explanation text that we will be focusing on this half term. In Geography, we started our topic of earthquakes, where we looked at an earthquake that happened in 2011 in Christchurch, New Zealand and we will move on to seeing why New Zealand experiences so many earthquakes. In Science, we have started learning about living things and their habitats, where the children studied different owls and foxes to see how they have adapted to their environment. In Values, as part of our ‘Being Healthy’ value this half term, the children had some first aid training about bites and stings and how to treat it. In PE, we practised our skills of sending and receiving a ball and in gymnastics we looked at different jumps.
Welcome back year 5. This week we have started our new writing sequence based on explanation texts. We have written about a ‘teacher pleaser’ machine which delivers apples and hot tea (on order!) and about a ‘cat feeding’ machine. We have read a good text example about a ‘bedroom tinder’ machine (the class assure me none of them need one of these due to having very tidy bedrooms??) We have completed our unit on multiplication and division and ready to start our work on decimals and percentages. Our geography this half term will be looking at how volcanoes affect lives of people on Hiemaey. We have already started looking at the physical geography of the island and how volcanoes are formed. Science is learning more about animals, including humans; this week we have been finding out about the gestation period and comparing humans to other mammals. Props are being made for a visit to Petroc next week; well done to those who made additional ones over the half term holiday.
