Achievement Assembly

On Monday morning, we held our first live Achievement Assembly via Teams. With Mr Dove hosting on his device, all the classes were able to see one another on the large whiteboard screens in their own classrooms. Individual pupils then shared their personal achievements on the class webcam so that we could all see and hear! 
Well done to all the children who spoke about their achievements which ranged from reading, dance and equestrianism to skateboarding, paddle boarding and cheerleading. A special mention to Year 6’s Lucia who taught herself to use sign language over the summer and Bella who wrote her own 200 page novel. 

 Year 1’s Learning Garden  

In between embracing their new, busy timetable Year 1 have been enjoying exploring their learning garden in the sunshine. Our garden was created by Year 1 TA, Ms Adams, who had a mission to build a child’s garden that would be totally plastic free. The Year 1 aim is to help our children appreciate how recycling things and using natural materials will help our planet. The garden has been a huge success so far and some of the highlights are: the mud kitchen, the den, the rocky terrain, bug hotel, herb wall and the water cascades!

We are very proud that the children have taken ownership of their special area and were busy planting violas and buddleia this week.  Apparently this is just the beginning, a fairy garden and painted story stones are coming soon. 

‘My favourite area is the kitchen as we make food with acorns and gravel!’ 

2G The Great Fire of London

As a class 2G are really excited to have got underway with starting their first topic of the year. Topic work in Year 2 allows the children to become fully immersed in a theme and explore it from several different subject areas, true cross-curricular learning. So far they have found out about building material both modern and those used in Tudor times (science) and designed their own fantasy homes and traditional Tudor houses (D&T).

We are able to link their creative writing lessons with the topic and the children will focus on writing newspaper articles and become reporters and diaries over the coming weeks inspired by the works of Samuel Pepys. This week the focus has been on creating a timeline of events for the five days in early September 1666 as the fire rampaged across London. 

 

Reception 

Do you know what a phoneme or a grapheme is? If not: ask Reception! This is one the things we have been learning in our phonics lessons. We have made a fantastic start and have already looked at 10 letters and we now know the phoneme and the grapheme. We have practised each new phoneme by singing a song and listening to a story and then completing a page in our colourful phonics workbooks. Four days after we started our phonics lessons we were blending phonemes to make words and we love it when Mrs Bloxsom talks like a robot and we have to guess the word! We have played some rhyming games and practice writing each of the graphemes in the air as well as with a pencil. Yesterday we learnt that when consonants go together in a word they only make one sound. We really are becoming phonics wizards! 

Class 4S English – Grace Nichols 

In English this term, the children in 4S have been studying the poems of Grace Nichols. Born in Guyana, she uses her love of nature and the world to inspire her poems. We loved reading her poem "Morning" which talked about all the familiar sounds she could hear whilst snuggled in her bed. We used this as an inspiration to write our own poems about autumn. We took a walk around the beautiful school grounds looking for signs of autumn and together we created some amazing autumnal imagery to write in our poems. "Autumn comes with orange sun beaming", "Autumn comes with creepy spiders crawling", "Autumn comes with leaves dreamily spinning". What does autumn make you think of? 

Drama 

Drama classes across all year groups have been busy exploring a range of styles and genres this term, helping the children understand key concepts that are needed to produce meaningful and effective characters in a performance. Reception have been following the adventures of Wombat in 'Wombat Goes Walkabout'. They have all been very keen to help Wombat find his mummy by acting out the story together, using a range of theatrical skills such as use of gestures and facial expressions to enhance how Wombat is feeling on his journey. In the picture they are being sleepy wombats giving a big yawn and stretch in the morning!