Happy New Year and welcome back for the start of term 3. All classes have settled back to their learning really well and we are looking forward to the activities we have planned. The children coped with the soggy start to the week and we got outside at playtimes when we could. Some of the activities coming up; Year 3 have a 6-week block of Ukulele lessons provided by Bristol plays Music, Year 2 have three more Yoga sessions before Year One begin their sessions. There is a Year 5/6 football league starting with an Early bird club on Fridays, Year 4 have four weeks of tennis coaching. There is a lot more planned- please see the curriculum newsletters for further information and the dates section within this newsletter and on the website calendar.

This weekend, Twelfth Night is a Christian festival that takes place on the last night of the Twelve Days of Christmas, marking the coming of the feast of Epiphany when Christians celebrate the visit to Jesus by the Magi - commonly known as the Three kings, or Wise Men.

BBC newsround has more information about the beliefs and traditions around twelfth night.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/67652442 

Inset and Academy Days:

Monday 22nd July - INSET day, children not in school

Tuesday 23rd July - INSET day, children not in school 

Monday 2nd September - INSET day, children not in school 

Tuesday 3rd September - INSET day, children not in school 

Happy New Year! It has been a short week for the children easing them gently back into their daily routines and enjoying seeing the familiar faces of friends and staff in Reception. It has been lovely to hear about the different holiday experiences the children enjoyed and sharing them so enthusiastically with their classmates. This has also helped their communication, listening and turn taking skills as an added bonus!

The children have been exchanging facts and also asking searching questions about the season of ‘Winter’ as this will be their topic for the next few weeks.

To enhance their learning about Winter, Reception will be immersed in both fiction and non-fiction books. This week was no exception with the children hearing ‘Snow’ by Sam Usher and ‘Winter’.

Some of the children rose to the challenge using their fine motor skills to build an igloo solely from sugar cubes and others enjoyed creating snowy scenes using chalk and white crayons and making their own, individual snowflake cut-outs.

In maths the children have been introduced to the importance of zero and further subitising using objects and dot patterns to 5. (Recognising not counting).

Reception were introduced to the customs and traditions of New Year celebrations and even made their own New Year Resolutions for 2024 like riding their bikes without stabilisers, diving and swimming underwater and listening more to adults in school and at home.

Let’s hope they stick to them!!

This week has been brief but certainly no less busy! We have started our new book for this term’s topic, One Day On Our Blue Planet… In The Savannah. It follows the story of a lion cub who lives in the Savannah and enjoys exploring the diverse and wonderful wildlife that this vast stretch of grassland has to offer. To immerse ourselves into our new next, we donned our safari hats and went searching for a wide variety of wildlife. We then wrote down some of the amazing animals we saw, like playful elephants and cheeky hyenas.

In geography we have been learning the seven continents of the world by labelling them on a map. We then used our atlases to create our very own world map, complete with the typical wildlife for each continent.

Well done on a super first week back Year 1!

We began this term's learning with a discussion about the weather. We spoke about our favourite weather conditions and explained why we preferred them. Unsurprisingly most of us enjoyed the sunshine and the snow! We then imagined what it would be like if it never rained and we spoke about how this would impact us and our environment. We then looked at an illustration from our new book (to be revealed next week, watch this space!) and made notes of what we could see. We came to the conclusion that the story will be set in Africa.  

We then drew an outline of Africa and wrote everything we already know about the continent and some questions to represent what we would like to find out. Then we looked at different photographs of African tribes and artwork. We identified what we could see and then we added adjectives to describe the images in more detail. We were asked to think carefully about the colours of the landscapes and the patterns in the people’s clothing. We continued with this activity by annotating a range of photographs showing African landscapes. By saying full sentences aloud to each other and thinking carefully about using adjectives to create noun phrases we were able to improve upon our ideas by working together.  

Welcome back to term 3! We hope you had a fun but restful break and Happy New Year! The children were extremely excited when they came back to school on Wednesday and had a lot of catching up with their peers to do. Following this however, we all got stuck in and It felt like we never left. The children retained so much knowledge from term 2 and were super focused. We began with a maths carousel on multiplication and as you can see from the pictures, they were amazing! We have also introduced our new History and English learning this week. As you may have already gathered, our History topic is ‘The Stone Age’ and are English text is ‘Stone Age Boy’. Even after 3 days, we can tell that the children are engaged and ready to make this an unforgettable term!

Year 4 have had a fantastic start to 2024! In Literacy, we've started reading The Great Kapok Tree to introduce us to learning about the rainforest. We've researched facts about the Amazon rainforest and the animals and plants that you can find there. In R.E., we are diving into the enquiry 'Why do some people think that life is a journey?'. We reflected upon our own achievements and future goals and have started to look at significant religious events which form part of a journey for people with a faith. 

Year 5 made a fantastic start to their Literacy learning this week, exploring their new book, "Ice Trap". They played detectives, finding examples of figurative language: alliteration; similes and metaphors; onomatopoeia; assonance and personification. They then used their own examples to write some emotive poems about Shackleton's boat The Endurance being stuck in the ice.

We have had a fantastic three days back. In Literacy, we loved writing our twisted fairy tales and look forward to sharing these with our Reception buddies later this term. We also wrote blackout poems as a launch to our new Literacy text this term – Survivors. The book contains 23 different real-life survival stories and we will focus on six of these over the six-week term. We read the start of the first story: ‘The Girl Who Fell From The Sky’. In Art we learned more about the proportions of the human face and drew our self-portraits – this was tricky but we think you’ll agree how fantastic our results are. In music, our new topic is film music, and we identified how different styles of music contribute to the feel of a film. In our discussions, we identified differences in styles of pitch, tempo, and dynamics as contributing factors. 

Our wonderful Year 6 Sports Team lead an energising Tabata workout today in assembly. this was a super way to end out first week back at school, and get the blood pumping, the lungs working and the body moving.