Class Assemblies 

You are warmly invited to come along and watch the children lead collective worship on the dates below. All the assemblies take place straight after drop off, at 9am in the school hall:

Thursday, 23rd Mar - Year 1
Friday, 31st Mar - Year 4 leading Easter service at St Mary's Parish church
(Year 6 to follow next term)

Have a great weekend and don't forget that next Friday is an INSET day, when the school will be closed,

Matt White

Headteacher 

Weekly Curriculum updates
 

Year 1

In Year 1 in maths this week, we completed Unit 9, Numbers to 50 with some work on word problems.  In English we have been reading Lost and Found by Oliver Jeffers, studying the characters and discussing how their actions help us to understand their personalities.  We also chose Lost and Found as the theme for the World Book Day Door Decorating Competition!  In history we looked at the history of Transport and have been learning how to read dates and order key events, discoveries and inventions on a timeline.  In art we studied and discussed the work of Paul Klee, using space in our sketchbooks to draw pictures in response to his work.  In PE, on Monday, we enjoyed a new team game called Bench Ball and then finished the week, on Friday, having fun and building our strength by circuit training to music.  We have also been thinking about day length and seasons in science and, now that it is March and we are moving into spring, the children have been asked to notice when it starts to get light in the mornings and dark in the evenings.  They should make a note of the time, so that we can discuss and compare this to the observations they made in January.

Year 2

This week in Year 2, we have been looking at non-fiction texts and have been finding out about Mae Jemison, an American scientist and inventor. We have been writing about her in our own fact files. In maths, we have begun work on fractions, looking at parts and wholes of both shapes and numbers and how we turn them into fractions. In science, we have been learning about materials and their properties, finding out what different objects are made from and why. In geography, we have been studying signs and symbols on maps, including a map of our local area. In art, we have been looking at the work of Kandinsky, in preparation for creating our own artworks in this style. 

Year 3

World book day was a great success this week in Quito Class. It was lovely to see all children in their jammies and really engage in all the celebrations. We were all so excited to see that Amelie was one of our winners from the whole school extreme reading challenge! Well done Amelie!
This week in Quito Class, the children have been working extremely hard in maths at adding and taking away using money and working out some tricky problems solving questions. Children have learnt how to add totals of items in pounds and pence using column method and studiously putting the correct value under the correct place value heading. The children then worked out how much change they receive when giving shopkeepers their money! Money is a tricky topic and one that is becoming more and more difficult with society using cards more to pay rather than actual money, so please continue to expose your children to actual money, where possible, and get them to add totals and work out the change. In English, Quito Class have yet again completed a lot of work. They started the week off with finishing off their diary entries as Rhodopis, which included the all-important fronted adverbials and emotive language to really convey how the character was feeling. The children then created exciting comic strips about the beginning of Cinderella of the Nile, which have included speech bubbles. This was the first step to learning about how to accurately incorporate speech into stories, as children then moved onto writing their own version of the beginning of the Cinderella of the Nile story as they used their comic strips to help organise their paragraphs and include speech with inverted commas, from the speech bubbles within their comics into their story! In History, we have continued learning about the Ancient Egyptians,  studying what their everyday lives might have been like by using images that have been created from research and evidence curated by professional historians and archaeologists. We tried to deduce what tasks they may have been carrying out and the similarities and differences that they may have with our own everyday lives. Children have thoroughly enjoyed forest school again, where they have made their own nocturnal forest creatures out of clay. Some included hedgehogs, foxes and owls! They can't wait to take them home next week.

Year 4

We've had a busy week involving World Book Day and forest school! In maths, we started looking at solving problems by adding and subtracting fractions. We decorated the door in the style of Arthur and the Golden Rope on World Book Day. In our English sessions, we wrote a diary entry in role as Arthur and began planning a balanced argument about whether or not he should go on a quest. In RE, we started looking at the question:  how and why do Christians 'share' the Body and Blood of Jesus at Church and what do these symbols mean? In computing, we explored adding sounds, changing backgrounds and controlling sprites on Scratch. During PE, we created a circuit using beams, vaults, benches and apparatus working on our upper body strength and refining our jumps.

Year 5

This week in year five the children have been looking more closely at mountains. We had the atlases out to find different mountain ranges and then used chrome books to research these, comparing them with each other. In English, following on from our successful debate last week, children have been preparing to write a balanced argument over whether schools should use uniform or not. As part of book day, the children enjoyed listening to different stories and we decorated our door in the style of Charlotte’s Web. In maths, we continued to work through our fractions topic, adding and subtracting mixed numbers with different denominators. As part of our topic on Sikhism, the class found out about the different Gurus and their respective influences on Sikh thinking. In art, we continued learning about typography and making our own “self-portrait maps.“ Finally, in science the children continued to learn about life cycles of mammals and how these differ from other creatures on Earth.

Year 6

This week in English, Year 6 have started to write their own 'Just So Story' in the style of Kipling. We are already impressing Miss Rowlandson with our literary techniques, and pushing ourselves to reach the title of 'King of Kipling'. In maths, we have been learning all about metric and imperial measures, and how to convert between the two - a skill we previously found quite tricky but are improving day by day. In science, we used different 'beaks' of finches to pick up different 'food sources' on the Galapagos Islands to help us understand Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection. In art, we have started to develop our initial ideas for our own wallpaper design inspired by William Morris, thinking carefully about how to make our design symmetrical. For 'World Book Day', we worked as a team to decorate our classroom door to reflect the original, Victorian book cover design for Rudyard Kipling's 'Just So Stories'. At the end of the day, we 'speed dated' books to find our 'one true love' by first, rating our overall impressions of the front cover, secondly, having small talk (reading the blurb) and finally, having a deep discussion with the book (reading it for 5 minutes). We then decided if we would like a '2^nd date' with the book if we wanted to read on!

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