Weekly Newsletter
27th January 2023

The Athletics Team competed brilliantly against the North West independent schools (AJIS) this week. Congratulations to Max, Lucy, Jack, Sadie, Amelia and Austin for their outstanding individual medal performances, and to the girls' relay team for winning a bronze medal. All children's teamwork skills and support for each other should be commended.

The children pitched their extremely creative suggestions to the PTA Committee today in the style of 'Dragon's Den.' They presented their numerous ideas so eloquently as to how to spend the PTA funds for the benefit of all the children. We eagerly await the results!

Finally, the Senior School Drama students should be commended on their stunning interpretation of 'Chicago.' If you have managed to get tickets, you are in for an amazing treat.

Nursery

This week, Pre School have been exploring the great outdoors! We used chalk to draw around our friends' bodies, and then we added identifying facial features such as eyes, ears and nose. We also continued to practise our chopping skills by cutting our snack and giving it to our friends.

The Nursery Team

Reception

This week, we have continued to develop our reading skills by reading with a partner. The children take it in turns to read each page, whilst their partner points to each word. They help each other to sound out a word if they are unsure. Very good progress is being made with this new skill! We have also been focussing on capital letters which we are starting to use in our writing sessions.

Many of the children have taken up Judo as a new co-curricular club this term. They have been learning to follow the instructions to help them with each new move and throw. We are looking forward to watching next week's lesson when a series of moves and throws will be combined together. 

Miss Allen and Mrs Walsh

Year 1

This week has been particularly full of Maths learning. The children have been working on place value, beginning to understand ones (units), tens and hundreds. Through games, they are learning about exchanging ten ones for a ten and working together as a team to complete their game, counting up to 100.

I am so delighted with the children’s handwriting this week- their letter shapes and use of the lines is much more careful and neater, well done children! 

This week in Maths, we have continued our topic of multiplication and division, focusing on our 2, 3, 4, and 8 times tables. We have been using BBC 'Supermovers' songs to help us remember our times tables.  

In Computing, we have been begun to explore databases and will be creating our own as our final task. We have started by looking at how we can use yes or no questions in order to group pieces of data and we have applied this to items we use daily in our classrooms.  

Finally, in our Art lessons we have continued to make our own Egyptian cartouches out of clay. We have also been exploring different styles of Egyptian jewellery and drawing our own versions.

Mrs Blinston and Mr Worthington

At the moment, Year 4 are looking at measuring temperature. Firstly, we learnt how to use and read a thermometer correctly and studied the scale. We then checked the room temperature before putting our thermometers into hot water. We were amazed as the liquid in the tube rose rapidly. We then timed every minute for ten minutes and took the temperature at each interval. We noticed the temperature decreasing each time. Lastly, we drew a line graph to show our results. We really enjoyed this investigation in Science!

In other news, we have finished our beautiful jungle dioramas and they are amazing, just in time for us to start our topic on Tropical Rainforests.

Lots of practising of our songs for our show in March- we have learnt almost all of the song words now. 

Mrs Briggs

In Maths, the children have been learning how to calculate the percentage of quantities using bar models to support and structure their understanding. Well done to Brody and Freddie for creating excellent bar diagrams to interpret known and unknown quantities.  

Linked to their Geography study, the children have been busy mapping the school during Outdoor Learning. Well done to Will and Lucy for creating scaled drawings of key buildings and plotting them on grid paper numerating the X and Y axis. 

In RE, the children have continued to learn about Christianity, whilst exploring the parables of Jesus and the underlying lessons they contained. Well done Scarlett and Henry for their explanation of what a parable is and identifying a range of moral attitudes and religious principles that Jesus shared with his disciples.  

The School Council members have been busy collecting information to support the whole school's carbon neutral plan. For example, how we travel to school, how we deal with litter and waste, how efficient we are with energy, how we are doing as global citizens and how much biodiversity there is on our site, amongst other things. They have shared this work with the classes around school and will look at our findings to help decide a good way forward for AKS. This is not an easy task, and if you would like to be involved as a parent or friend of our school, your help would be much appreciated, especially in the school garden!

As you can see from the photographs, the children are enjoying their work and many of them have also been busy preparing bids for the PTA Dragons’ Den this morning, where they planned to ask for help towards supplying equipment which will make us an increasingly greener school!