Spring Term Issue 16: 16th January 2026
Flourishing in the love of God, love of life, love of learning
Dear Families,
I hope your January has started well and that the new term is settling into a lovely rhythm for you all.
Last week, you will have received the term’s events dates letter, which also includes the term dates for the next academic year (2026–27). Please do take a moment to look through these and pop the key dates into your diaries.
In a couple of weeks’ time, we will be holding our parent café session focused on mobile phones and being online. We’re delighted that one of our parents, who works in mental health tech, will be leading the session: Growing Up Online: What Every Parent Should Know About Social Media and AI. Nina will also be reminding parents about the Mobile Phone Pact movement. It promises to be a really helpful and informative discussion, so please come along if you’re able to.
Wishing you all a wonderful weekend.
Alli
Reception
We have had a very exciting week in Reception exploring our new text, Little Red. We used inference skills to think about what the trees in the forest might be saying and even acted it out with some roleplay! We tasted some ginger beer in order to use some describing words to write an advert for it – the verdict was mostly fizzy and sweet! As always, we have enjoyed playing outside in rain and shine; the mud kitchen has been a busy café this week. We had out first PE lesson on Wednesday (please send children in in PE kit on this day) and practiced moving safely around a space by playing games and listening to instructions. In PSHE we have begun to think about goals to aim for. We discussed the fact that sometimes trying to achieve things is tricky. In order to test out how we might feel, we tried tying a piece of string around our shoe – surprisingly hard! We talked about how not achieving this straight away had made us feel frustrated, and how we needed to be resilient and keep practicing.
New phonemes: oo – zoom, oo – book, ar – dark, or – horn.
Year 1
We’ve had a really lovely and busy week in Year one, with lots of exciting learning taking place! In Maths, we have been continuing to develop our understanding of shape, and the children have loved exploring radiating patterns, tangrams, and tetromino and pentomino patterns. We especially loved seeing the children using this new vocabulary confidently and taking it into their choosing and learning time- it was so lovely to see them so proud of what they could do!
In English, we introduced time adverbs to help us organise our ideas and tell stories more clearly. We used the story of ‘Naughty Bus’ to practise sequencing events, and the children did a fantastic job retelling the story using words and phrases such as In the morning, then, next and after that. It’s been lovely to see how much their confidence in storytelling has grown.
Year 2
We have started our exciting new unit on World War I, with a special focus on Walter Tull. The children are already so enthusiastic about learning this important part of history!
This week, they looked closely at an image from WWI and came up with some fantastic inferences and historical questions that they want to find out more about. Their curiosity is driving our learning forward!
This week, the children travelled back in time to Prehistory as we explored chronological events of the Stone Age. The children learned about the Stone Age and discovered how life changed across the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. They explored what happened during each era and how humans adapted and developed over time. It was amazing to see how much humans have evolved over thousands of years!
Year 3
Year 5
This week, in Science, we have been learning about the difference between weight and mass. We learnt that weight is a measurement of how much gravitational pull there is on an object and mass is a measurement of how much matter something contains. We found it interesting to learn that our weight on Earth and the Moon would be different even though our mass would stay the same. We used Newton metres to find identify how many Newtons in took to either pick up or move a classroom object and measured the gravitational pull.
Year 6
Year 6 took a step back in time to the dramatic era of the Suffragette movement during an exciting workshop. Dressed as brave campaigners, we learned about key moments in the fight for women's right to vote and explored what came next. Linking to our big idea, Democracy, they tackled the enquiry question: when is it necessary to question the status quo? Through roleplay and powerful protest re-enactments, Banksy and Shonibare discovered the courage it takes to stand up for justice and how questioning unfairness can shape the world for the better.
News from the Art Studio…
This week in the art studio we are putting the final touches to our pieces for our Class Artists Exhibition.
Year 4 have sewn over their Monet tie-dye. I was so impressed with the creative support they gave each other. Lots of ideas and collaboration.
We hope you can join us to see all the wonderful work inspired by each class artist.
Music this week…
In Reception (Stik), children were introduced to the story of Peter and The Wolf. We were looking at the instruments which are played to represent Peter (the strings), his grandfather (bassoon), the cat (clarinet), the duck (oboe) and the bird (flute). You can click on the link below to listen to these themes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3cJNa6GKBE
Note for parents of children in Year 1; if you’re child plays an instrument and would like to show it to the class, they can use music lessons on a Tuesday morning as an opportunity to play and talk about their instrument.
Children in Year 2 were starting to learn the lyrics from Grandma’s Rap. They spent some time thinking about actions that we could use to accompany the song. You can find a link to the song below which has BSL actions. Ask your child to show you their own version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh-nwPZxSmY
In Year 6, the children were creating a Hip Hop beat using Garageband. Over the next few weeks, we will secure our knowledge of how to make backing tracks which we can then talk, rap or sing over. We will be using The Suffragettes as our input for thinking about Protest Lyrics.
Stars of the Week
See you next week!