News
Newsletter for the week ending 17th December
Such an exciting week for all and the highlight has to be the return of Father Christmas circling the school in the ‘Big Yellow Bird’. We hope you enjoyed the recordings of the various nativities and carols. Coordination of these with fluctuating attendance was not without its challenges, so in the true spirit of the show must go on the children and staff launched themselves into it with great gusto!
This week we say goodbye and thank you to Mr Lewis as he leaves us for promotion at another school and welcome Miss Gray who will be our new year 1 teacher in the new year.
The Department for Education has asked that we signpost parents to a publication by Children’s Commissioner regarding online sexual harassment, particularly with many children getting a new phone or other internet devices for Christmas. Please click here to access the link to the parent guide.
Please be aware of the following guidance regarding contact and isolation: From 14 December, a new national approach to daily testing for contacts of COVID-19 has been introduced. All adults who are fully vaccinated and children aged 5 to18 years and 6 months, identified as a contact of someone with COVID-19 – whether Omicron or not – should take an LFD test every day for 7 days instead of self-isolating. Children under five years old do not need to take part in daily testing for contacts of COVID-19 and do not need to isolate. Once notified by Test and Trace as a close contact, all eligible staff, pupils and students are strongly recommended to take a LFD each day for 7 days and report the results through the online reporting system and to their setting. If they test negative, they can continue to attend their education setting. Outside of the education setting, they should continue to follow national guidance. This approach should also be adopted over the Christmas holiday and on return in January.
Thank you for all of your support as we try our very best to keep all the children and staff safe. We wish you all a very happy and healthy Christmas and look forward to welcoming you all back on Wednesday 5th January, 2022
From Jeremy Cooper and all of the children and staff
AROUND THE CLASSES
This week in Turtles and Dolphins we have been making Christmas cards and Christmas decorations. We had great fun dressing up in our costumes and performing the songs from the Christmas Play. We hope that you have enjoyed watching it. We had our Christmas Party on Tuesday and Father Christmas visited us. We went to The Jungle on Thursday to decorate the trees for the woodland creatures. We wish you all a Merry Christmas and we will see you in January.
This week we have embraced Christmas in Year 1. In writing, we have continued using The Bear and The Hare to inspire our writing. The children have created their own stories and produced a little booklet. In maths, we have continued to learn about 2D and 3D shapes. The children have used their shape knowledge to create wrapping paper with a repeated pattern. The children enjoyed watching themselves in the Christmas play on Wednesday. We hope you enjoyed watching it at home. If you haven’t seen it yet, you need to log in to your child’s Google account and access Google Classroom. Finally, this is my last newsletter contribution at Appledore. Thank you for your kind words and well wishes this week. Have a lovely Christmas and I wish you and your children every success in the future.
This week Lundy Puffins have been learning about the Christmas story, making and describing arrays in Maths and copying their brilliant stories into mini books, as well as sharing their brilliant Christmas play with you all! They should be really proud of themselves for how hard they have worked all term and how determined they have been to improve. The homework completed was really great and they enjoyed sharing it with others. Mrs Stephens, Mrs Halloway and I (Mrs Stanbury) would like to thank you all for your support over the past term and for all the gifts and cards. We wish you and your families a very Merry Christmas and look forward to welcoming you back in the New Year
Across Key Stage 2 the children have been learning to sing Jingle Bells in French and have also designed a French Christmas card. In R.E all classes looked at the Christmas story and compared how it is told by Matthew and Luke in their gospels. But we were all most excited about completing the filming for our Christmas performance at St. Mary’s church. The children coped brilliantly with the demands of filming and were very patient with the retakes and changes of camera angles. The final film is being edited and we hope you all enjoy watching it when it is made available on Friday!
This week year 3 have been leaning about different types of rocks in science and about St Lucia in our topic. Maths has included multiplication and division and we have been writing about Mog’s Christmas Calamity.
HMS Echo have been amazing historians this week, finding out about the many ways The Romans changed Britain and discovering the legacy they left behind. They did a great job identifying the countries they conquered to create their empire and suggesting why they may have done this. Finally, they wrote postcards to send back in time to an emperor to tell them about the ways they changed Britain. We are looking forward to our woodland Christmas party on Friday morning, drinking hot chocolate round the fire and making fake snow and we wish everyone a very merry Christmas.
Beechcroft have been very busy finishing off their Viking sagas. They now know the story of Iduna and how Loki managed to get the giants to take her back to Jotunheim, but this did not turn out well! We have completed assessment in numeracy and have shown our new skills through Christmas based challenges. We went down to the church to record our part in the KS2 Christmas production; we are looking forward to seeing this. We also did our class assembly on determination which was also shared with the rest of the school. Year 5 have worked very hard this term and deserve a well earned restful break. We hope that you have a very enjoyable Christmas with your families and will see you safely back in January.
Year 6 have had a busy time learning and rehearsing their Christmas performances which they have really enjoyed. In Maths, they have been working hard to refine skills with fractions and had fun with Christmas co-ordinates. In Literacy, they have been writing a biographical piece about Harry Clement as a final piece of work on our WW2 topic. Most children are very close to completing their final piece of art towards their Arts Award – we will look forward to sharing these in the New Year. It has been a very busy term and the children have all worked really hard – they are ready for a break over Christmas (no homework but they have been shown things to do if they have spare time). We hope you all have a lovely Christmas and will look forward to getting into the swing of things again in the New Year
