News
Newsletter for the week ending Friday 14th October
This week was the turn of years 1 & 2 to host a harvest festival and they did very well. It was year 3-6 last week and next week is our Turtles and Dolphins harvest festival at 2.30pm Tuesday 18th October in the hall. Thank you for your contributions to our harvest collection of non perishables and we will keep collecting on the front desk until Friday 21st when we will take it to a local charity supporting the homeless.
Also this week children have been out and about with year 1 visiting Exmoor Zoo and year 5 returning from their three day residential – children and teachers shattered! Thank you to the teachers for volunteering their time to take the children and to you for your messages of gratitude. Next week it is the turn of year 3 and year 4 for a trip out.
This week staff safeguarding training has focussed on how to raise concerns regarding concerns about adults working with children. If you have any concerns, no matter how small or potentially insignificant they appear, please do contact the school and ask to speak to the Designated Safeguarding Lead (Mr Cooper) or another member of the safeguarding team (Mrs McMorine, Mrs bannister or Mrs Phillips).
Interested in becoming a primary teacher or know someone who is? If so, next Wednesday there is an open evening at Roundswell. For more information please click here and here.
Please click on more to find out more information of upcoming events and what has been happening in all of the classes.
We wish you all a lovely weekend.
From Jeremy Cooper and all the children and staff
Sports Day for Dolphins and years 1-6 is scheduled for Tuesday 23rd May. Save the date and fingers crossed for the weather! More details to follow much nearer the time.
Shebbear College have a Year 7 Taster Day on Friday 11th November and please click here for more information.
AROUND THE CLASSES
This week in Turtles and Dolphins we have focused our learning around Autumn and Harvest. We found out what Harvest means and why we celebrate it. We loved finding out about how a combine harvester works. We have painted pictures of them and made models of them. On Tuesday we went to the Jungle to look for creatures that live in our woodland area. On Wednesday Dr Brummitt came to talk to us about his role as a Doctor which was linked to last week’s story Zog. We have also been busy practising our Harvest Festival which we are looking forward to performing to you next week. Please come and share our Learning Journey’s with us afterwards back in the classrooms.
Year 1 have had a very exciting week this week as we had our trip to Exmoor Zoo! We had a great time seeing the different animals and using the map to find our way around. We had a talk from one of the zoo rangers where we got to hold some animals! We held a snake, a stick insect and were able to stroke a Giant African Land Snail. After that we had some time in the play area before we looked around the zoo again and went home. Everyone showed great behaviour and great listening, well done Sea Lions! In Maths we have been looking at the part-whole model and have enjoyed using counters to show our working. In writing we have created a story map of our trip to the zoo and included our favourite animals.
Lundy Puffins have had a great week reading and completing activities related to their new book ‘How to Wash a Woolly Mammoth’. They put pictures from the book in order and washed some woolly mammoths. In Maths, they have been practising number bonds and simple addition and subtraction. There are some games on Google Classroom to help with this if you have time to take a look at home. In our topic work they have found out about different types of bees and where they live, whilst in science they have looked at different animal habitats. Harvest Festival practice is underway and they are excited to show you their songs.
In RE, Year 3 thought about a treasured possession they own and why it is important to them and how they keep it safe. This linked to their work on creation and how Christians believe God created the world and asked us to look after it. Year 4 annotated a huge outline of a mosque with lots of detailed information about how the building is used and designed. They remembered a lot of information about this place of worship which they recorded accurately. Year 6 thought about a time that they needed to ask for forgiveness and linked this to their study of the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur. They also created a whole class storyboard for the story of Moses. All the ideas, thoughts and reflections from our work in RE is being recorded collaboratively in our large floor books which are beginning to look really special.
Year 3 have had a wonderful week. We have enjoyed learning all about why rainforests are important and then we compared rainforests with plantation land and described the similarities and differences between the two. In maths, we have been revising our number bonds to 10, 20 and 100 using lots of different resources to help us, including numicon and bead strings. We finished writing our own stories in English and then edited our work for both corrections and improvements before publishing them. We were then very excited to use our illustrating knowledge that we gained from the author’s visit last week to design our own front covers for our stories.
In HMS Echo this week, the children had a fantastic afternoon with Sarah as part of our Eco Afternoon – they learnt about the ‘biosphere’ and how we are a small part of it in relation to the wider world, and how we can look after our environment for the future. The children enjoyed getting messy with finding particular insects and then had to make their own piece of art using only the resources from outdoors. We had a life size child entirely made of sticks! As well as this, the children have been learning about e-safety and how to keep themselves safe online, such as when they play games. In Maths, we are coming to the end of Place Value and are looking forward to beginning Addition and Subtraction. In English, the children are writing their own stories in the style of Meerkat Mail, where they have to choose their own animal that goes on holiday to some very peculiar destinations – I can’t wait to read them!
Year 5 had a fantastic residential this week at St George’s House. They took part in fencing, archery, surfing and bodyboarding at Putsborough, rock scrambling at Baggy Point and rock pooling at Lee Bay. All enjoyed the amazing home cooked food and working with the staff at the centre. We have learnt some new skills of making our beds (putting on duvet covers was very amusing), learning to prepare our own lunch, washing up dishes (and drying them), cleaning bedrooms and keeping the house tidy. I am sure many will want to continue these skills at home!!! Thank you parents for supporting this event and to the staff for helping it run both smoothly and safely. There are a few unclaimed clothes (new green minecraft t-shirt, black sweatshirt (made for adventure), green camouflage trainers size 2 and some black socks. Please call into the classroom if you think these could belong to your child.
Year 6 have completed their Climate Change writing and have published it for the wall. They are now working on traditional tales using a full range of punctuation and using speech to advance the action. In science, they have been using closed questions to classify animals and in art have been sketching dragon’s eyes. Maths has moved to the four operations with skills using factors, multiples, prime, squared and cubed numbers. In PE we had a session on handball and hope to try small -sided games with our skills next lesson.
