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End of term

Well, what a busy term it has been! This culminated with our Easter production of The Time Lord, for which the children all worked very hard. Below are some of the finished plague masks we’ve been working on during our medicine topic.

I would like to say “Well done” to all Year 3 for a great term! Enjoy the holidays.

Homework Highlights

After a great curriculum week, here are some examples of the homework from Year 1.

Fruit surprise

The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch has been a popular book as part of our learning in English.  Today we created a fruit surprise for Mr Grinling.  We also learnt some facts about fruit and keeping healthy.  Did you know your 5 a day can be from fresh, dried, tinned or frozen fruit?  Peeling, chopping, scooping (using a melon baller) and using a lemon squeezer were some of the food technology skills we learnt, too.

We also thought about important table manners when we tasted the fruit surprise and as it was so delicious there wasn’t much left for Mr Grinling!

‘I loved it because the raspberries were so delicious.’

‘We learnt how to use a lemon squeezer and we made a nice salad.’

‘I think Mr Grinling would love it!’

‘We learnt to chop a banana and we put it in a bowl.’

27 March 2015

Year 2 will not have any spellings this week as we are doing mock SATs papers next week which will include a spelling test. To help at home you can practise spellings from previous weeks or see how your child does with common words that they haven’t necessarily had to learn.

Attendance matters

With just four days left of this half-term, we still have 146 pupils who have 100% since 23 February – and that’s despite a bad case of chicken pox spreading like wildfire amongst our younger children!

For the whole year so far, there are 48 pupils with 100% – almost a quarter. In alphabetical order of surnames, well done Farhaan, Owen, Isaac, Ben, Ethan, Henry, Bella, Jack, Will, Vijay, Sam, William, Faye, Alexandra, Mia, Hibba, Byron, Lewis, Albie, Edward, Grace, Sachpreet, Isabelle, Natasha, Phoebe, Musa, Umaimah, Manya, Nico, Oliver, Aisha, Ethan, Lucas, Isabelle, Finn, Zeewa, Georgie, Alexander, Neive, Alex, Grace, Megan, Ebonnie, Albert, Archie, Jorja, Noah and Ethan!

As for each class, here are the attendance rates (with last year’s figure for the same period in brackets):

• Reception: 96.7% (96.1%) …that’s a great increase, so well done!
• Year 1: 97.3% (97.1%) …well done!
• Year 2: 96.4% (98.0%) …please help us increase this year’s figure.
• Year 3: 98.3% (97.6%) …this year’s figure is amazing – just like the class last year as Year 2.
• Year 4: 97.3% (96.7%) …another increase – great! 
• Year 5: 96.1% (97.9%) …please help us increase this year’s figure.
• Year 6: 97.3% (97.0%) …well done – the fifth class to have a higher attendance rate than last year!

We’re really happy with the fact there are five classes with higher attendance rates than last year. For the whole school, our attendance rate is 97.1%. This is good, although last year was just a little better: 97.2%%.

Thank you to all parents who have tried so hard to ensure your child is happy and healthy and at school as much as they can be.

Some important news: from September 2015, attendance lower than 90% will be regarded as persistent absence. This means we would contact the local authority’s Attendance Team with regard to visiting to support and advise families where attendance is too low. This would include three children in Reception, one in Year 1, three in Year 2, three in Year 4 and one in Year 5 – eleven children in total. (Year 3 and Year 6 have no pupils where attendance is lower than 90%.)

27 March 2015

Group 1 – This week, the spellings are all words which have a doubled consonant after a short vowel sound. These words are all taken from the National Curriculum spelling list.

Group 2 – The spellings this week also contain a double consonant after a short vowel sound. These words also have an ed ending as they are in the past tense.

Fantastic feedback

Yesterday, we were visited by a headteacher and senior school leader from a school in Stoke. They came to find out more about our creative curriculum – how we plan our topics to ensure we have exciting topics that cover the National Curriculum. Here’s some lovely feedback…

I just wanted to thank you for the time you spent with us yesterday. The curriculum was everything we hoped it would be and is exactly what we need to help us move our provision to the next level. I appreciate the hard work you have obviously spent on this area and it is good to meet another team who are committed to ensuring learning is truly personalised to the pupils’ needs and are dedicated to working to achieve it.

As I said yesterday it was great to meet another head who has the same vision, enthusiasm and excitement for education that I feel I have… not to mention the same attention to detail!

Your school is an absolute credit to you and I hope that we will have opportunities to work together in the future.

27 March 2015

Here are this week’s spellings.  There will be a spelling test on Thursday 02 April.

All of Year 1 have got the same spellings this week – I think you can tell the theme quite easily!  Take care: these can be tricky…

• Monday sounds like Munday (perhaps talk about the origins of the word… Moon day)
• Tuesday is often pronounced ‘Chooseday’, so make a special effort to pronounce the ‘T’
• Wednesday has three syllables, but that middle one is often said lazily! Again, make a special effort to say ‘Wed – nes – day’
• It’s Saturday, not Saterday
• …and don’t forget to make sure your child is using capitals because they’re all proper nouns!

Variety is the spice of life!

If you ask your child what they’ve done today, you may be surprised!  From learning Mandarin to finding out about geysers, it was all going on.  All the children were mixed up for the morning and took part in four different lessons – there are eight different lessons altogether so there will be some more mixing up going on tomorrow.  These lessons have been part of our Enrichment Week where children have thought about a variety of subjects in lots of different ways.  Here are some photos to give you a taste of what has been happening: learning Urdu or Mandarin, art work, music, PE, geography, programming and DT.

A sentence looks like this.

This was one of the key messages from the theatre production today based around the Gruffalo story.  We, as the audience, helped to create a story by choosing the correct punctuation and looking at when to use it.  Some great adjectives, for characters and settings, were suggested to improve the writing.  We also learnt an important message about cheating – the best story rightly won in the end.

Hopefully this will inspire lots of budding story writers.