Dear Parents and Carers,

The children have continued their excellent start to the school year and teachers are enjoying getting to know them, their strengths, their personalities and building the all-important understanding of how to help them to feel safe, supported, challenged and inspired. Our youngest children in Reception have just had their first two full days in school and we have been hugely impressed with their confidence and ability to step into a new world.

Thank you to those parents and carers that were able to join us for our meet the teacher meetings so far. We hope that this has been a helpful and welcoming opportunity to learn about the year ahead and to ask any questions that you may have and we look forward to continuing these in the coming week.

Our Collective Worship focus this week has been about the value of Justice. The children talked in their class collective worship about learning how to speak up and speak out, what is difficult about this and what it feels like to need the bravery to do so. The children also thought about the balance of the idea of lowering the voting age to 16 and what this current topic could mean to young people. In our whole school collective worship, Pastor Ruthy asked the children to think about times when we need bravery to make the right decisions and the faith to do so.

The children have been working together to discuss and consider what they feel are their most important values and how we should include these in our everyday thoughts, behaviour and beliefs. We have collected their outcomes and are now working with staff and Governors to establish what our shared vision is for our school in the coming years and what our chosen values will be that underpin that vision. We will of course share this with you in the coming weeks.

Happily, we begin the first of many trips, visits and experiences this week with years 2, 3 & 4 enjoying a visit to Clifton College to hear the author Alan King talk about their work, their life as a writer and much more. The children returned to school sharing their thoughts on the experience:-

“ I really enjoyed listening to the author talk about how he got his ideas for his book”

“ He read some of his book and it was really funny to listen to”

“ The characters in the book were very funny!"

You may have seen our advertising banners and social media posts, encouraging new parents to visit us as they decide on a school for their children, starting in Reception in September 2026. We welcomed several families on Monday to our school talk and tour and it was lovely to be able to tell the story of our children, school and community. Please help us to spread the word in any way you can in the coming weeks – thank you.

Our wonderful PTA are already working hard and next Saturday 27^th September, kicks off their fundraising year with the brilliant ‘fun run’. It will be fantastic to see as many of our community there running or supporting this lovely family day. If the weather forecast is to be relied upon, it even looks sunny and hot!

I wish you all a great weekend ahead and look forward to another happy (and sunny) week to come.

Warmest wishes

Mark Oldfield

Headteacher

Term dates 2025-26:

• Term 1 Tuesday 2nd September 2025 to Friday 24th October 2025 (Inset days Tues 2nd and Weds 3rd Sept, children not in school)
• Term 2 Monday 3rd November 2025 to Friday 19th December 2025
• Term 3 Monday 5th January 2026 to Friday 13th February 2026 (Inset day Mon 5th Jan children not in school) 
• Term 4 Monday 23rd February 2026 to Thursday 2nd April 2026
• Term 5 Monday 20th April 2026 to Friday 22nd May 2026 (Academy day Fri 22nd May children not in school) 
• Term 6 Monday 1st June 2026 to Wednesday 22nd July 2026 (Inset days Mon 20th, Tues 21st and Academy day Weds 22nd July, children not in school) 

We’ve had another fantastic week in Reception. This week we started phonics lessons, focusing on sounds s, a, t, and p. We have been learning how to produce the pure sounds correctly and how to form the letters in sand and on paper.

We have been drawing self portraits this week to go up on display. We used photos of ourselves to study carefully and complete observational drawings - it’s clear we have a few artists in Reception! We can’t wait for you to see them when they go up on display.

It has been a big week for Reception this week as we finally merged the morning and afternoon groups and stayed for lunch. The children took it all in their stride and we look forward to learning new routines as a whole class.

We have had another great week in year 1. Monday saw us learning about different parts of the human body before we tried to answer the question, “Do the oldest children have the largest feet?” There was some fantastic team work on show as we carefully drew around our feet and some brilliant discussions to try and work out how we should order our feet.

In Geography, we’ve been learning about what makes the seaside special. We loved hearing about everyone’s experiences of the seaside and how it is different to the city.

In RE, we have begun thinking about who is a Christian and what do they believe.

In English, we’ve been exploring our feelings about what we read through group discussions based on The Squirrels Who Squabbled. Using prompts, children shared their thoughts on the characters and events in the story.

We also looked at rhyming words in the text and explored the definitions of unfamiliar vocabulary, helping us to better understand the story and expand our word knowledge.

In Maths, we’ve been working with numbers to 100. The children have been learning how to write numbers as words, partition them into tens and ones, and place them accurately on a number line. They've shown great enthusiasm and growing confidence in their number work!

This week in Maths, Year 3 have continued to explore place value, focusing on numbers up to 1000. We've been learning how to find 1, 10, and 100 more or less than a given number, and have used number lines to estimate where numbers belong. We're really impressed with the children's growing number knowledge and increasing confidence!

In History, we've also enjoyed watching our River Nile grass crops grow. We flooded the river again this week and were excited to observe how well the crops are developing.

This week in Literacy, Year 4 have been busy planning their rainforest setting descriptions. We have been gathering exciting ideas to make our writing more detailed and engaging. Our lessons have focused on using expanded noun phrases, prepositional phrases and personification, and the children have been practising these in preparation for their final pieces. We are now beginning to apply all this learning to our writing, and the results are already looking fantastic.

In Maths, the children have been working with numbers up to 10,000. They have been practising how to partition numbers in different ways, use number lines to show place value, and find 1, 10, 100 and 1000 more or less. This has given us a deeper understanding of how numbers are built and related to each other, and the class have enjoyed challenging themselves with tricky reasoning questions.

Our curriculum lessons have been full of energy and creativity. In Music, we started our new topic on body percussion and watched a fascinating video of a choir using only their bodies to create the sound of a rainstorm. We then had a go ourselves, with some very effective results! In PE, we have continued our basketball lessons, revisiting dribbling in one-on-one and two-on-two games. We have also introduced the chest pass and have been practising this skill in small team activities.

This week in Literacy, Year 5 have been working really hard to incorporate last week’s learning in to their writing. They wrote a diary entry, imagining themselves as Shaun and used expanded noun phrases, similes and metaphors. And just to challenge them even further, they learnt how subordinate clauses can go at the beginning of a sentence and popped these in to their writing too! There is so much to think about as a writer but the children have all really impressed us with their efforts. Later in the week the children were learning about modal verbs and then they drew their own “Lost Thing” creature and explained how to look after it, using as many modal verbs as they could in their instructions. Top effort Year 5 – you’ve started this year brilliantly!

Their favourite warm up game in Literacy this week was “Fastest finger first” whereby the children had dictionaries, they were given a word to find and the first person to put their finger on the word would be the winner. This was a great game to practise dictionary skills and again, the children demonstrated full engagement.

What do other religions say when life gets hard? / What should I do when I’m older?

This week, Year 6 have started our new RE unit: What do religions say to us when life gets hard? To begin, we explored some of life’s biggest and most thought-provoking questions. The children were fantastic at sharing their ideas, showing great curiosity and imagination. Some of the questions we came up with included: What happens when you die? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Where does the universe end? Is life a dream, or is a dream life? Which should you put first, family or friends? and even If God(s) created the world, who created God(s)? We are excited to discover how different religions and worldviews respond to these kinds of questions.

In Literacy, we have been focusing on editing skills in our writing, learning how to refine and improve our ideas to make them even more effective. In Maths, we have come to the end of our unit on place value, showing excellent understanding and confidence as we move on to new challenges.

In Art, we have begun our unit on still life. So far, we have been developing our observation and sketching skills, and we are looking forward to experimenting with painting techniques later this term.