Spring term Issue 16: 12th January 2024
Dear Parents,
Happy New Year - It has been fantastic to welcome everyone back to school this week.
We would like to officially welcome Beth Allen, Teacher of the Deaf, who has been working alongside Jo Buck last term and is now working at SJSC fulltime. A warm welcome to Marie Myers, who started with us this week and is our new School Business Manager.
There are lots of wonderful learning and exciting events planned for this term – thank you for the positive support for OPAL. Please take a look at the parent event dates email circulated at the end of Autumn term for a variety of opportunities to come into school over the Spring term.
Have a great weekend.
Alli and Joe
Upcoming Diary Dates
Reception
Welcome back! We have been so proud of the children this week… They have settled back into school life brilliantly-with smiles all round! Especially when we attended our first ever whole school assembly they were so sensible and well behaved. We hope you all had a lovely and restful break.
This week we have been writing our new year’s resolutions. The children have really enjoyed telling us about their dreams and goals; “My resolution is to ride my bike”.
In Phonics, we have also started learning our new digraphs that make long vowel sounds ai, ee, igh. The children were very eager to show us how they have been still practising their phonics and writing over Christmas, we were so proud of their tricky word skills!
In Maths we are developing our conceptual subitising skills, subitising up to 5.
Himid class had their first PE lesson and were superstars! Excellent listening and following instructions lead to a really fun agility lesson.
Please remember to bring in Phonics Practise books every Monday to Thursday as the children love to show you how proud they are of their new digraphs!
Year 1
This week, we have been reminding ourselves of the names and properties of 2D and 3D shapes. We were curious to find that the faces of our 3D shapes are made from 2D shapes. We discovered this by drawing around as many 3D shapes as possible to reveal which 2D shapes were hiding in plain sight!
Year 2
We arrived at school on Wednesday to find a basket of interesting and mysterious objects! We excitedly discussed what this basket could be and realised it was a treasure chest of memories between ‘Grandpa’ and his grandson Finn. We have begun reading our new book, Ocean Meets Sky, and are so excited to explore the adventures Finn and his Grandpa will go on!
Year 3
Year 3 have begun their learning about rocks and fossils using chocolate, yes CHOCOLATE!
Rocks have many different properties and so we used different chocolates to represent these properties. We will never look at chocolate in the same way again!
KitKats represent layers, Wispas represent air bubbles, Maltesers represent glossy surfaces, Bounties represents crystals and the Cadbury chocolate imprint represents fossils.
Over the term we will be investigating and research how rocks are made and more about their properties. For example, are rocks permeable?
Year 4
In religious education, we began learning about the Old Testament. We spoke about King Soloman, the king of the Israelites, and how the story of judgement can impact Christians today. We asked ourselves, ‘If we could have anything in the world, what it would be and what would we give a person who had everything?’ We then learnt that Solomon was asked the same question by God. Instead of choosing materialistic items, Solomon asked to be given a discerning heart to govern his people and to be able to distinguish between right and wrong. This pleased the Lord that Solomon had asked for this and God granted him his wish as well as a long prosperous life. We then finished the lesson by revisiting our original questions to see whether we had changed our mind after hearing the story of Solomon.
In Kapoor class, we created a timeline of events for Shackleton’s exploration then created short drama scenes to show what happened to the crew on their trip.
Year 5
This week in Yr 5, we launched our new English text 'Anne Frank'. On Wednesday, a suitcase arrived in Walker & Lichtenstein classrooms containing images on Anne Frank's diary and other important artefacts. We used a range of resources to develop questions and are looking forward to writing out first diary entry.
Year 6
Year 6 have been learning all about an ancient Mayan game: Pok-A-Tok. As part of our history learning on The Mayan Civilization, we have been being doing lots of research in order to write instructions on how to play this game (it’s the oldest recorded ball game dating back to 2000 BCE!). We are excited to play our own version of Pok-A-Tok in P.E at the end of the week.
Stars of the week
Stars are celebrated because they have demonstrated the school values, or gone above and beyond.
Well done to all our stars this week …
Have a wonderful weekend - see you next week!