On Thursday, we had a special visitor in assembly – Laura Harris from The Diocese of Bristol. She came in to present school with The Gold WIRE Award (Widening Inclusivity in Religious Education). After being awarded the basic WIRE Award, it was clear we do so much more here at Christ Church School, and the next natural step was to go for gold. The evidence was gathered, which demonstrated that extra level of engagement, with pupils, parents and the wider community. This is a superb recognition of all the amazing work we do here at Christ Church in R.E. Well done to all the team here at school for making this happen, but special mentions to the Worship Council and to Mrs Petters for their extra work to achieve this award. The certificate now joins the rest of our awards in the main entrance area. 

The weather was kind to us on Tuesday for our final day of Winter Workshops with Milly, where 1SB, Year 5 and Year 6 had their opportunity to do some great activities in our Outdoor Classroom. We will hopefully see Milly back at school again in the future, to lead more exciting activities. 

As I write this newsletter piece, our Y5/6 choir are currently at The Bristol Beacon, rehearsing for a special concert - ‘The Bristol Schools Winter Sing’. They will then return this evening to perform at this special and historic venue, which has just been meticulously refurbished. What an amazing opportunity for our children, following in the footsteps of some truly phenomenal musicians, such as Ella Fitzgerald and The Rolling Stones. Thanks to Mrs Brown and Mrs Duquemin for the extra time they have put into this event. Stay tuned for next week’s newsletter for more news and photos of this evening’s event.   Mrs Brown has sent a sneak preview of the performers on stage - it looks magical.

And finally, on Sunday (26^th November), our wonderful PTA will be holding our Christmas Fair here at school. The event will be running from 1pm – 4pm. There will be lots and lots of fun and exciting things to do, plus countless prizes to be won. The PTA have worked super hard today in preparation for Sunday – a huge well done and thank you to them.   

Christmas Fair this Sunday 26th November,

1-4pm at School

Please enter through the Woodland Gate on Royal Park

We have some wonderful raffle prizes - see below.  Please bring cash for any raffle ticket purchases on the day as these have to be through cash rather than card.

If there are any last minute donations, please drop these to the school hall door by 11am on Sunday.

Thank you and we look forward to seeing you there!

We blasted into this week with our learning all about amazing astronauts! We enjoyed learning how they live and work in Space and how they go about fundamental everyday activities like eating and going to the toilet!

Before we read the gorgeous book Field Trip to the Moon, by John Hare and Jeanne Willis, we looked at the illustrations and shared our super ideas about what we thought was happening in the story. We all really loved this book! We also thought of things we would take on our own mission and worked together to write a list using our sounds.

We loved learning about some famous astronauts and watched footage of them in space and on the moon! Wow!

There have been lots of space and astronaut inspired creative activities to do! Many of us enjoyed making a paper astronaut, creating a loose parts space picture and designing an astronaut’s space helmet!

On Tuesday Mrs Richardson led an assembly all about respect! We shared ideas about what respect means and thought about the importance of being respectful. With the help of Chris Haughton’s great book ‘Oh No, George!’ we thought of ways in which we can show respect to others.

In phonics we have been continuing to learn our sounds, this week it was the digraphs sh, th, ng and nk and in maths we have been recognising and exploring the numbers 4 and 5!

What a supersonic week! We hope you all have a great weekend!

Miss B, Mrs Petters, Mrs Richardson and all the Reception team.

P.S. We have started to learn our songs for our Christmas show and are beginning to get very excited!

This week Year 1 have been exploring the story One Snowy Night by Nick Butterworth. We started the week in the outdoor classroom, where we noticed many of the leaves have fallen from the trees. We discussed what animals will be doing as the weather gets colder and then listened to the tale of Percy the park keeper who helps the animals in the park one cold winter’s night. Year 1 stepped into the shoes of the character of Percy and wrote speech bubbles as him - we were very impressed with their creative ideas! We have also been learning to retell the story with actions. Year 1 drew beautiful story maps which we will use next week to help with our story writing.  

1 SB enjoyed their outdoor workshop with Milly where they created hibernating animals with fallen leaves and cooked popcorn over the fire. It has been an all-singing-and-dancing week as we practise the songs for the upcoming Christmas performance. In RE, we learned about why Christians celebrate Christmas and looked at the story of the first Christmas. Well done for all your super work this week Year 1!

The excitement has been building this week as we have started our rehearsals for ‘Christmas With the Aliens’. The children have been incredible at learning their lines and remembering when they need to be on stage. The Year 2 Team are so proud of how well they are doing, we know it’s going to be a wonderful performance – make sure you’ve got your tickets! 

It’s not all been rehearsals though. We’ve managed to fit in writing innovated stories based on The Magic Porridge Pot. Our stories were brilliantly imaginative with all sorts of delicious treats emerging from the magic pot, including cupcakes, popcorn, chocolate and candyfloss! 

We are also continuing to enjoy our yoga sessions with Carolyn. We have been impressing her with our ability to balance and hold a yoga pose for longer.

We have so much to talk about in this newsletter, it has been a busy week in year 3. We firstly want to celebrate the focus, hard work and joy that year 3 have brought to this week! We have thoroughly enjoyed it and have felt extremely productive. We have continued our ‘Forces’ topic in science this week and started to look at magnetic force. This was very hands on, explorative and loud! We did many experiments on what objects are magnetics, poles and exploring the classroom to prove our theories.

In maths we have also been hands on with learning our times tables. This time of year we really focus on the children’s recall and fluency so we have been chanting, singing and outside learning our 2, 3, 4 and 5 times tables.

Finally, the writing…wow. The children have been so inspired by our book ‘Escape from Pompeii’ and we used all of our knowledge so far to produce a newspaper report. These have been such high quality and we have seen so much progress since the start of the year, we may have some future journalists in our midst!

As part of the Anti-Bullying Week message 'Make a Noise about Bullying', Year 4 have continued to look at what bullying is and what to do if we see or experience bullying. We discussed how we can stay safe in school and we came up with helpful sentence stems and vocabulary to help as speak up about bullying. The children have created 'Bantometers', which have helped them to understand when banter is not appropriate and they have all designed their own Anti-Bullying posters. 

This week the children were lucky enough to participate in a winter outdoor classroom experience, led by some local woodland experts. The children made a Christmas tree decoration by sawing wood then hand drilling a hole through it. They also learnt about local wildlife and were able to practise this through an explorative game. 

We also got to make popcorn by the fire which was a real treat! 

Some children in Year 5 put themselves forward to become Play Leaders this year, whereby they spend time in the KS1 playground teaching the younger children and helping them with games. James, from Ashton Park Sports Partnership, came in on Wednesday morning and worked with the Year 5, training them in how to be good leaders in the playground. They had great fun and are looking forward to starting their duties soon! 

Year 6 showed fantastic co -operation skills as they worked together in the outdoor classroom this week. They sawed, drilled and decorated Christmas decorations beautifully. It was particularly lovely to watch them being so kind and helping each other with the equipment.

They also identified lots of leaves in the school grounds and sent time playing a winter game and eating popcorn from the fire.

On Tuesday, our basketballers performed in the third session of the competition, again displaying great progress in their skills. As always, there was some super teamwork on display. Mr Curry was really pleased to see so many children at the Early Bird Session this morning (Friday) – thanks to him for running this club. We look forward to hearing how the teams get on in the final session next Tuesday. Thanks to Mrs Brown for supporting our teams on Tuesday at the event, and thank you to our parents for working together to plan transport to the basketball.

Year 5-6 Choir are very excited for tonight's performance alongside 500 children from schools across Bristol at the newly-refurbished Bristol Beacon Concert Hall. After many lunchtime rehearsals, they have learnt an amazing repertoire of songs off-by-heart. They sound fantastic and we can't wait to see the performance later!