Dear Parents and Carers

I very much hope that your children have been bringing home their own news of the many different learning experiences that they have worked hard on throughout this week, as described in this newsletter. The Christ Church School curriculum is a real strength and rightly recognised in the narrative of our recent Ofsted report. Perhaps most importantly, the curriculum serves to ensure that all children experience an engaging and challenging learning journey and our teachers are continuously considering both the content and context of what we teach.

This week we have introduced some new rewards for your children to ensure that their effort, attitude and commitment to giving their very best, continues to be recognised and celebrated. Value Points are now awarded to your children in recognition for the various ways in which they ‘live’ the school values of Respect, Responsibility, Kindness, Aspiration, Honesty and Cooperation. These earned points are collected on a personal chart and upon reaching their first fifty points, a special certificate will be awarded in our assemblies. As the children progress through the year, they can challenge themselves to attain the next goal moving to the one hundred point award and so on.

We will also be keeping the ‘House’ competition thriving with a weekly overall winning House team based on the number of value points achieved across the school. House teams are Ardman - red, Matthew - green, Concorde - yellow, Brunel – blue.

Alongside the weekly ‘Star of the Week’ awards, for which we invite parents and carers of the chosen children, to join our Friday assembly, we have introduced three new exciting termly awards – watch this space!

Thank you to those parents/carers who have made the requested annual voluntary contribution towards enrichment - trips, workshops and craft in school.  At Christ Church School we strongly believe that the ability to engage with our culture and local environment is crucial to helping children find their place in our community.  Whilst we work hard to find many free activities, there is inevitably a substantial cost to this enrichment which is not funded by the state, and therefore we rely on an annual parental contribution to make this happen.  Currently we have received less than half requested funds and this will sadly mean that unless we receive subsantially more contributions, we will not be able to proceed with events such as the Christmas performances at the Redgrave Theatre and the Beggar Bush activity centres trips as we simply don’t have the funds.    

If you are able to go on your ParentPay account and make this voluntary contribution we would very much appreciate it in order to enable us to make these bookings.  If your child is in receipt of Pupil Premium funding, this covers the annual contribution.  If you are not able to make the contribution in one instalment and would prefer to set up a monthly direct debut, please contact the school office to arrange this. 

Thank you for your support, we really do appreciate working together on this.

Kind regards

Mark Oldfield

Headteacher

Parking around school:

There have been a number of near misses around the school perimeter at drop off and pick up times where parents are parking on the pavement and in front of the school gates.  This is really unsafe and we are afraid that there will be an accident soon.  If you drive to school, please ensure you park in the appropriate zones and walk your children the rest of the way to the school gates.  School gates open at 8.40am and are shut by 8.55am.  Please leave sufficient time to arrive safely with your children and to have left the school premises by 8.55am.

Dogs and Bikes in Playground at Drop Off and Pick Up:

Please ensure that all bikes and scooters are stored in the bike and scooter racks and that adults and children dismount at the entrance to the school playground - it is dangerous for others if you scoot or cycle through the playground.

Dogs are not allowed on school site; the only exception would be a licensed support dog. Our reason for this flows from Health and Safety advice following cases across the country where unattended animals at school entrances can be spooked by the presence of other animals and/or the exuberance of children and behave unexpectedly, leading to children being bitten.

If you bring your dog to drop off or pick up, please ensure they are tied up OUTSIDE the school grounds whilst you come into the playground.  

Home School Agreement:

Thank you to those who have returned the Home School Agreement form.  This is a really important annual data gather for us so if you haven't yet filled in the form for your child(ren), please could you do this by return. Thank you.  

Home School Agreement 2024-25

HSA Google Form

Thank you

Over the next few weeks we are holding tours for parents/carers with children looking to start Reception in September 2025.  As an existing parent you are very welcome to join one of these tours - times as listed below.  If you are not joining a tour, it would help us to know if you have a sibling of your current child in school, looking to start in September 2025 - if so we would appreciate if you could fill in this google form - Sibling google form

Reception 2025 Tours - book on tour here

• Tuesday 9th October, 9.15am - full
• Friday 18th October, 9,15am - full
• Tuesday 22nd October, 9.15am
• Thursday 14th November, 9.15am
• Tuesday 24th November, 9.15am

Inset and Academy days for the rest of the year (these are days when school staff are in training involved in other school oepration - children are not in school on these days):

• Monday 6th January - Inset day
• Friday 23rd May - Academy day
• Monday 21st July - Inset day
• Tuesday 22nd July - Inset day

Pupil Premium Funding 

Do you think you might be eligible for Pupil Premium Funding for your child / children? Please see attached letter and if you think your child might qualify for this, please fill in the ‘Pupil Premium Funding Application Form’ located on our website https://christchurchps.schoolzineplus.co.uk/form/10 or on the ‘Forms and Documents’ tile on SZapp

Pupil Premium Funding letter

Thank you to everyone who came to the very successful Fun Run last weekend, we raised in the region of £1.5k which is simply awesome! It was such a beautiful day, and we couldn’t have made it that successful without the volunteers, sponsorships and donations.

We want to highlight the importance of the class rep role within the school community…there are some classes lacking a volunteer. If you would like to step up, please speak to your class teacher. 

There will be a secondhand school uniform sale at Mary’s Living and Giving on Friday 11th October 9-10am. 

Lastly, please save the date for the Christ Church Christmas Fair…

It’s been an awesome week of learning in Reception! We continued celebrating autumn, improving our listening skills, and following our routines. We also started joining the older children for morning play, meeting friends old and new. A highlight was seeing our Year 6 Buddies, who we were introduced to, when they visited our classrooms and read us a special letter, at the end of last week!

We read the delightful book "Rufus and the Blackberry Monster" by Lisa Stubbs. We made predictions about the story's events and shared our favourite parts. Tasting blackberries was a cause for delight, and most of us found them delicious! We also had an exciting time creating our own bramble pictures using pens, pastels, pencils, and painting with blackberry juice!

In phonics this week we have continued to learn 4 new phonemes g, o, c, k and are working really hard with our oral blending and blending to read words. We have enjoyed sorting everyday objects by their initial phoneme and had a really good go at writing the grapheme using the rhymes.

In maths we have been very busy exploring size, mass and capacity. We enjoyed ordering objects from smallest to largest. Then, to explore mass, we used the balance scales to compare what was ‘lighter than’ or what was ‘heavier than’ and we really enjoyed being human scales! At the end of the week, we were thoroughly engaged in exploring the capacity of various containers by filling them with water!

Wow! What a lot of lovely learning! Well done all!

Reception Team

This week in Year 1 we learned an autumn poem called The Autumn Leaves by Wes Magee in literacy. We learned to recite the poem off by heart using actions to help us and then wrote it into our books.

In maths we have been learning to compare numbers 1 to 10 represented with pictures and numerals by using the less than, greater than and equal to symbols.

In PSHE we explored friendships by discussing how a good friend behaves. We considered six qualities that are important in a friendship and, with a partner, put them in order starting with the one that we value most in a friend.

In PE this term we have been learning to defend, attack and shoot. We put our skills to the test this week by working with a partner to defend their hoop and also score points by shooting a ball into their opponents’ hoop!

Wow, what a jam packed week we have had in Year 2! 

In maths, we have begun our 'addition and subtraction' unit and got stuck into some practical learning - check out the photos! In Literacy, we have been writing our diary entries in role as the main character, Bernard.

Be sure to check out next week's newsletter where we will share with our homemade bunny diaries which will contain our published pieces of work.

To round off an already fantastic week, we headed outdoors on Friday morning to make our very own bird feeders are part of our Science work. 

Year 3 began preparing for their extended writing this week by using their senses to imagine what Max would have experienced on his forest walk.

They generated a fantastic word bank-we can’t wait to see the finished witing!

This week in Year 4 we were thrilled to welcome a special guest, an audiologist, to our classrooms! The children had the opportunity to learn about hearing health and the importance of taking care of our ears. The audiologist discussed how our ears work, common hearing problems and we learned some practical tips on protecting your hearing, such as lowering volume levels on headphones and avoiding loud noises. A huge thank you to Mr Brown for giving up his time for us. We encourage you to continue the conversation at home about the importance of hearing health.

We also began our History unit this week on the Romans and had a LOT of fun acting out and writing persuasive speeches from the perspective of Boudicca; queen of the Iceni tribe. Which character were you?!

Year 5 have had a very creative week. In Literacy we have started a short unit on poetry, which has really got going with a bang! The children have been thinking about techniques that performers use when performing poetry, such as changing the pace, using facial expression, gesticulating and many more. They have then thought about how they might make a poem come to life by reading it, using the various techniques to make it as impactful as possible. The groups performed the poem “Built in obsolescence” with careful consideration to the questions that addressed the audience.

In music we have been developing a keen ear for rhythm by listening carefully to a number of different rhythms and not clapping back the forbidden rhythm. We have been using our bodies to tap along to and we have been incredibly good at knowing which rhythm we should never copy. We have also been looking at action songs such as “My hat it has 3 corners” and singing them with certain words missing. It took a while but eventually the entire year group managed to remain silent on the word “hat”!

Our real highlight this week was receiving our Poetry Post. We loved reading our poems that other children across the school had written out. Some of the poems made us laugh, some made us confused and others were simply fun to read. We are going to make an effort to find the children who sent us their poems and say thank you to them as we really appreciated their hard work and the enjoyment the poems brought us.

Since our last newsletter, we have met with our new Reception buddies which was exciting! We are looking forward to spending more time with them in the coming weeks as we support them at playtimes.

In Literacy we have written and published our own retelling of the Harry Potter chapter, Halloween. We have thought about using carefully selected vocabulary and figurative language to help our reader picture the scene of the troll as he destroys the girls’ bathroom in front of Hermione, Ron and Harry. 

In Geography lessons we have continued to explore global trade, in particular ‘fair trade’ and its importance, especially in developing countries, to give producers better working and living conditions. We learned, through listening to first-hand experiences, how the fair-trade premium is reinvested, improving access to education, healthcare and the community. We created posters entitled ‘Fair Trade – Why Pay More?’

Finally, although there are 82 days till Christmas Day we have designed and created our own Christmas cards, with the opportunity to buy packs of these in Term 2.

To celebrate National Poetry Day on Thursday 3^rd October, children from Year 2 to Year 6 participated in Poetry Post. Every child published and illustrated a poem which was then randomly sent to a different child in the school. Everyone loved opening their secret post and finding out who published them. It was so much fun reading out all the poems in class and hearing poems from a range of poets, both old and new.

Thank you to all the Poetry Post Elves who helped with counting, labelling and distributing!