News
Newsletter for the week ending 13th September 2019
And the sun greets us with its return as the end of a busy and successful week. The children have settled well to their new classess, teachers and routines and the school is buzzing with their energy.
AROUND AND ABOUT THE SCHOOL
Communication
As always, please ensure we have the current email and mobile number of the primary contact because this is to whom messages will be sent.
AROUND THE CLASSES
This week in FSU we have started out topic ‘Our Favourite Stories’ We started off with Miss Olliffes story ‘Percy the Park Keeper’ We have painted pictures of Percy, make models of the animals from the story and worked out the tools that Percy would need to make sure the park is kept tidy. Today Percy sent us a letter, we went on a hunt around the school and ended up in The Jungle where Percy wanted us to make some homes for the animals. We have had a discussion about our favourite stories, if your child has a favourite story they would like to bring and share with us, they are more than welcome.
This week in year 1 we have been very busy. We have written what we liked about the story Dear Zoo and made puppets so we can act out the story. In Maths we have sorted objects and explained how we sorted them, we counted mini-beasts and represented numbers on dominos. We finished our drawing of a bee and coloured them in during our time in the Art Studio. We have also started Funky Fingers; activities that we do to prepare ourselves for handwriting.
Lundy Puffins have had another great week. They have been making two digit numbers with different equipment and saying how many tens and ones there were. The book ‘Traction Man’ has been read and will be used to support writing over the next couple of weeks. They answered the question: Why are bees so important to us? and created some brilliant pop-up books. In the Art Studio, they used watercolour pencils to paint their bees.
Seahunter have been busy working on Place Value in Maths this week and have done a great job finding different ways to partition three digit numbers using Base Ten to support their learning. In English they have been working on the poem, ‘How to be a Pirate’, exploring descriptive vocabulary and the structure of the poem. They are currently working hard to memorise parts of it using actions to perform to Year 1. In our topic work, we read the beginning of ‘The Great Green Forest’ by Paul Geraghty, in which a treemouse loses her home as the tree is cut down. The children wrote thoughts and questions from the persepective of the treemouse and had some great ideas for us to explore further; considering how and why trees are cut down and what happens to the animals who rely on them.
This week in Maths, HMS Echo have been learning how to round numbers to the nearest 10, 100 and 1000, and how to write Roman numerals up to 100. We have also been practising our reasoning skills. For Literacy, we have been learning key skills from our text ‘Meerkat Mail’ and have been focusing on how to write postcards. For Topic, we have been started learning about our new unit ‘Eco’ and thought about how we can reduce, reuse and recycle more. In P.E, we have been learning some key tag rugby skills.
Y5 have been very busy. They have continued to write about their new ‘tear thief’ character, using a range of interesting vocabulary and sentence structures. The class are listening to Holes and have just completed the work of chapter 7. Spelling assessments have now been completed for the Y3/4 words. Any words not yet being spelt correctly have been set for homework. In maths we have been looking at using numbers up to 100,000 and rounding numbers to the nearest 10, 100 and 1000. Our topic work has looked at the uses of plastic and how we can start to think about using less of the ‘single use plastic’. Some amazing posters have been completed. We are planning to take part in the Great British Beach clean on Monday 23rd September but need parents to help support in this event. If you are able to work with us in the morning please let Mrs McMorine know. Well done to the newly appointed vice-house captains and house sports leaders.
Year 6 have widened their knowledge of the greenhouse effect this week and taken on the challenge of trying to write an informative text about it – I have been really impressed with their responses. In maths we have studied place value and numbers up to ten million. Science has been more about classification and The Linnaean System and in as part of our Keeping safe online work, they have had a play to watch about Virtual Reality. I am trying to help children to build up a bank of resources and help sheets as we work this year so that they can refer back to things – if there is anything they are struggling with, we’ve asked them to ask straight away so that we can try and help them. So far they should be collecting spellings and a SPAG (grammar) sheet. It would be helpful if they could put things in a place where they can see them or get at them easily. Thank you for the quick response to SOE3s and be aware that the last residential payment is due on 27th September.
Have a wonderful weekend everybody.
From Jeremy Cooper and all the staff and children.
