Dear Parents and Carers,

As a flourishing school, we know how important it is to reflect on your views and feedback. When we evaluate our work and the quality of provision at Christ Church, we seek both concrete evidence such as the progress children make, and equally the views and experiences of our children, parents/carers and our staff/governors.

From this evidence base, we can more accurately set out our improvement aims and strengths and would therefore be very grateful if you would complete our parent survey sent out this week. Parent/Carer Survey

Visits and Trips – Our year 6 children enjoyed using their creative talents this week, taking part in an etching workshop at Clifton College. They had a fantastic time and you will be able to see some of their work in the Y6 newsletter piece.

Collective Worship – The value of compassion has been the focus of the children’s thinking this week. In our class collective worship, we talked about the life of Ellie Goldstein, the Strictly Come Dancing contestant and how she helps us to learn from people who prove others wrong. The learning from this week has been that we all need to be compassionate to others and to accept our differences. We even thought about the meaning of the famous quote from Oscar Wilde ‘Be yourself, everyone else is already taken’!

Please join us on Thursday 23^rd October at 10am for our Harvest Celebration at the Church. Refreshments will be available. The sounds of singing across the school this week has been lovely and we are grateful to the teachers for the time they are giving to prepare the children for the service. We are really looking forward to coming together as a school community for this lovely occasion.

Parents Evening – Our bookings are now open for our parents evenings on November 12^th and 13^th. Please ensure that you sign up for your appointments as soon as possible and we look forward to this first opportunity to share your children’s progress and achievements with you.

Supporting the school – We continue to receive kind offers of support from our parents and carers, following our recent appeal for volunteers to help the children, especially in their reading. Mrs Richardson is busy setting up this hugely valuable network of support; if you would be able to join the volunteer group, please do email or call in to the school office.

New Reception places 2026 - We have now held our third ‘tour and talk’ for parents and carers considering enrolling their children into the next 2026 Reception cohort. Thank you if you have shared the social media posts that we have sent out and helped us to spread the word.

Voluntary Contributions – I would like to sincerely thank those parents/carers that have been able to provide a voluntary contribution to our school, with a 66% total received so far. If you are able to, please do complete your contribution as soon as possible.

Notices:

New Reception Places 2026 – Our next tour and talk for parents and carers considering applying to our school for a Reception place in 2026 will take place on Tuesday 4^th November at 9:30am.

Toys in school – please ensure that your children do not bring toys from home into school. The rule is in place for several reasons, namely that toys get lost, broken, cause arguments, distract children from learning and unfortunately often leave other children feeling a sense of inequality.

Allergies – Many children in school suffer the challenge of living with both mild and severe allergies. We manage this carefully and robustly and would ask for your help to ensure that this continues. It is often tempting for children to share their snacks or packed lunches, often an act of kindness but we do not allow this due to the risk of allergic reactions. Please remind your children to avoid sharing food when at school – thank you.

I wish you all a restful weekend ahead and look forward to another busy week of learning to come.

Warmest wishes

Mark Oldfield

Headteacher

Term 2

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) 

This week we found out why and how harvest is celebrated and what happens at this time of year.

We listened to The Little Red Hen and enjoyed activities linked to the story including acting out the main events and rolling “bread” using playdough.

We also learnt how bread is made and what ingredients are used to make it rise! We talked about bread from around the world and enjoyed making our own harvest-inspired salt dough creations.

We really enjoyed being busy making scarecrows, decorating pumpkins and scooping, stirring and mixing to make autumn pumpkin soup in the outside area!

In maths we started exploring the numbers 1, 2 and 3! We matched the numbers to pictures and hunted for them around our classrooms!

Well done everyone! Another wonderful week!

We’ve had another week of amazing learning in year 1 this week. We have loved learning facts about jellyfish and sea turtles as we have continued to look at The Big Book of Blue in our Literacy lessons.

We have also been learning about different types of words which are found in sentences and have enjoyed spotting nouns and verbs in our reading.

In Geography, we have been spotting human and physical features in 2 different beaches and have been trying to decide which we would prefer to visit and why.

Maths has seen us looking at ordering numbers from greatest to smallest and smallest to greatest! We have been using ordinal numbers to describe the positions of different objects in a line. We’re really good at knowing how to write them too!

We’ve had an exciting week in art as we’ve started to make our sea creature collages in the style of Eric Carle. We have already painted our backgrounds and made the colourful paper that we need so it’s great to be at the stage of creating our sea creature. We can’t wait to show you our finished collages.

What a week!

In Science this week, we continued to explore our enquiry question ‘What do animals need for survival?’. We looked at different types of birds and talked about their different features; some can swim, some can fly and some are flightless. We recognised that birds need air, food, water and shelter to survive.

We then made our own bird feeders. We added lard and bird feed to our paper cups and took the finished bird feeders home to place in our gardens and local parks.

Year 3 are presenting their speeches to be considered for School Council this week. We have been considering what makes a great school council representative-being able to listen and having respect for others came out on top.

In collective worship we continued this theme by considering the UN. We talked about how the desire for peace is shown across all religions and within Humanism too. We explored the bible and reflected on the verse:

Year 4 have had another busy week full of learning and creativity! One of the highlights has been using the Chromebooks to design our very own rainforest-themed websites using Google Sites. The children worked hard to research fascinating facts about the rainforest and then used their findings to create four-page websites, complete with images and carefully chosen layouts. It was wonderful to see their enthusiasm as they explored how to make their pages both informative and visually appealing.

In maths, we have been continuing to focus on subtraction and exploring different methods to solve problems efficiently. The children have practised the column method, including multiple exchanges, and have also used number lines to count on to find the difference. We have been discussing how to make tricky calculations easier by adjusting numbers before subtracting, which has really helped broaden their skills and flexibility with numbers.

Our geography lessons have taken us deeper into the topic of climate and how it affects living things. Using climate graphs, the children have been identifying patterns and discussing how plants and animals have adapted to survive in their particular environments. They have shown great curiosity when comparing different climates around the world and linking this to their rainforest research.

Finally, we have been preparing for our Harvest Service at church next week. The children have been working hard to learn their poem, practising with energy and expression. We are all looking forward to sharing their performance and celebrating together.

In Computing this week, we learnt about the Mars Rover. On Monday we used non-standard units of measurement to calculate how many of these things we could put together to get to Mars. We started by calculating the distance to Mars and then found out the height or length of our objects. We were certainly handling some very large numbers! Here are our findings:

Distance to Mars = 357.76 billion metres which is the same as 37,266,666,667 Big Bens, 1084121212 Clifton Suspension Bridges and 265,007,407,407 London Eyes.

Later in the unit, we learnt how Binary Code is used to transfer data and we played a really fun game working out how to identify and create numbers using binary “bits”. Lucy and Aston got all the way to Level 6 which was really impressive!

This week, Year 6 enjoyed an exciting visit to Clifton College for an Etching Workshop. It was a fantastic opportunity to explore a new artistic technique and to experience what it feels like to work in a dedicated art studio. We were guided by specialist art teachers and three adults from the sixth form.

First, we learned how to scratch an image of a fish on to an etching ‘plate’. This step required real concentration and patience! Then came the inking process — a messy but satisfying stage where we spread thick, sticky ink across the plate before carefully wiping it away to leave the ink only in the etched lines. The next part was the most exciting: placing our plates and dampened paper into the printing press. With a little help from the adults, we turned the large wheel and watched as the rollers pressed everything together. The moment we peeled back the paper to reveal our prints was pure magic.

It was a brilliant afternoon, huge thanks to everyone involved – the Clifton College staff, Sixth Form students and our parent helpers who accompanied us.

In other news – our Literacy display of work linked to our Harry Potter book is finished. We are all very proud of our completed work. Everyone has at least two pieces of their work displayed in our classroom.

Our school rugby team put on an incredible performance in the latest round of matches in our inter-school rugby league. The team showed brilliant teamwork, determination, and sportsmanship throughout the day, winning two of their games, drawing one, and narrowly losing another.

Every player gave their all, and their hard work really paid off with some impressive play across the pitch.

A special mention goes to Lucy and Neave, who both scored fantastic tries and showed great skill and confidence. We are so proud of the whole team for their effort and enthusiasm.