News
Newsletter for the week ending 27th September
This week has included for the children gig rowing, a beach clean (an astonishing 79kg of waste collected!), a trip to Quince Honey Farm to learn all about bees and classes participating in World Fitness Day. Add to this our weekly visit to Donnigton House care home and our weekly visit from Northam care Trust to work with our children in the art studio and a class from St Margaret’s School using our art space and art expertise. So not much then!
AROUND AND ABOUT THE VILLAGE
For children wanting to start a brass instrument
Appledore Band are offering a free starter group at St Mary’s church hall at 6pm on Wednesdays. Please contact Neil Hamilton on nemohamilton4@gmail.com if interested.
Glidden & Squire Cross Country Races
the first one is this Sunday. They are great fun races in great locations for children in Years 3-6 and good runners in Year 2. Visit https://northdevonxcleague.weebly.com/ to register and if you register as running for school please borrow one of our running vests. You’ll need to register before the race to run the first one, but if you can’t make it don’t worry because you can enter the others after the first race has happened.
Independent School Open Days
If your are considering independent school education for children in the future, now is the time local schools open days typically happen. For more information please please click here for Kingsley School, here for West Buckland School and here for Shebbear College.
AROUND AND ABOUT THE SCHOOL
Ear Rings
Please note that staff are no longer permitted to tape over a pupil’s ear rings during PE or other activities, so if a child attends school wearing ear rings that are not possible to remove any related injury is the responsibility of the parents / carers.
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 AND ABOUT THE CLASSES
This week in FSU we have carried on looking at the story of Elmer but focused more on where elephants live, looking at their habitats and their diets. We have compared African and Asian elephants and named the parts of the elephants. We have painted pictures of them and finished off our sculptures of Elmer. On Thursday we took part in a fitness morning with 1610 Torridge Pool as part of NAtional Fitness Week and today we made Elmer biscuits.
Year 1 had a fantastic day at the Quince Honey Farm on Wednesday. The children had a great time and behaved brilliantly. We learnt lots about bees (although they could answer lots of questions already) and got to taste honey, extract honey, take a tractor ride around the farm and make a bug hotel. We have written a recount of our trip and we have also continued our work on Dear Zoo by inventing our own version of the story and acting it out. In Maths we have been ordering groups of objects and ordering numbers. Our Philosophy session this week used the story ‘Tidy’ by Emily Gravett. We discussed the question ‘Why was the badger so selfish?’. It was a great discussion with lots of children joining in, we decided that the badger acted in a selfish way but he thought he was being helpful .
One highlight this week was the visit to Quince Honey Farm with year 1. They learned so much and had great fun. There were tractor rides, beekeeping demonstrations, honey tasting and bug hotel making; an action packed day! Another highlight was Joshua bringing in some beekeeping equipment to show the class. Our philosophy session this week used the book: Tidy by Emily Gravett. The question chosen for discussion is: why should we look after our world?
Seahunter have written some great ‘How to be a Scarecrow’ poems this week, focusing on their use of descriptive vocabulary and how to follow a pattern for the structure of the poem. They will be planning and writing their own ‘How to be a….’ poems next Wednesday dressed up as their chosen characters. We can’t wait to see what they have chosen. We are also visiting The Eden Project on Monday to learn more about tropical rainforests and train to be rainforest rangers. This will support our work about deforestation; the impact it has and how we can make a difference. It will be an exciting week!
This week in Maths, HMS Echo have been estimating numbers on number lines up to 10,000, and ordering numbers. Next week, we will be starting our new unit of Addition and Subtraction. In English, we have planned and written our own versions of ‘Meerkat Mail’ to publish into books to display in the corridor. In Topic, we have looked at the affects of waste on animals habitats and made posters to encourage people to recycle. We have continued to learn coding skills on Scratch in computing. As part of World Fitness Day, we had instructions in from Torridge Pool which took the class for a fitness session!
Y5 have been busy publishing their books based on the story of the Tear Thief. These will go on display in the corridor next week. In numeracy the class have been improving their skills on comparing and ordering numbers, using negative numbers and outdoor numeracy this week focused on finding the surface area of leaves. On Monday the class went to help with the Great British Beach Clean. A big thank you to all the parents who helped support this event, and Jules from the Marine Conservation Society for setting this up. The class were surprised by how much rubbish they found (79kg). A recount of the event was written in their topic books and they started to research the impact of micro-plastics in our lives. In our RE lesson we listened to Christian hymns and thought about the messages they were giving and our philosophy session was based on the story ‘Buddha and the swan’, a story about animal rights.
Year 6 have been very fortunate this week, experiencing a beach clean on Monday (along with Y5) and gig rowing on Tuesday. The weather, although not bright sunshine, was very kind and we didn’t have to cancel. On the beach clean they collected and categorised waste – being surprised by how much metal they found. We expected more plastic waste but plastic we did find was in tiny pieces and more difficult to spot. Gig rowing with Appledore Pilot Gig Club was amazing – I think it was harder than some children expected but it is great sport if any of them fancy joining the club. Look at the club website https://www.appledoregigclub.com/ for more details. They always welcome new members. We have also been working hard of course. In maths we have completed our place value unit and in Literacy we have been writing about climate change – we will publish this work after residential. Don’t forget we are on residential on Monday next week. Please make final payments before we go and label everything you take – you are much more likely to have it returned! Lastly, a huge thank you for all the cake donations and purchases. We’ll let you know how much money we raised for Macmillan shortly.
Have a wonderful weekend everybody.
From Jeremy Cooper and all the staff and children.
