Friday 10 May 2013

Issue 30 2012-13

Newsletter Issue 30

Friday  10th May 2013


Dear Parent/Carer,
Another fantastic week of enriching learning; I particularly enjoyed watching our Indian dancer visitor (Annapurna) showing Year 3/ 4 some traditional dance moves. The performance triggered me to reflect on how much multicultural learning takes place at Robin Hood. Our displays celebrate different cultures from every angle; from the Japanese kimonos and koiniboro that hang up in the mall, to the South American artwork in the library, to the beautiful Ancient Egyptian masks on display in the Year 3/ 4 corridor. Our children receive quality experiences influenced by every corner of the globe during their time at our school.

Recycle for Schools
We recently asked for donations of old mobile phones amongst other technical devices to raise money through the O2 Recycle for Schools scheme. Thanks to all of your donations, we managed to raise £379. My thanks to the PTA for promoting this across school and thank you to Andy Armstrong and Katie Secretan who both approached me with this great fund raising idea.

Swedish visitors
We will soon be welcoming back some of our Swedish colleagues and friends as part of our continued involvement in the WHISE project. We will receive a visit from three of the team on the 21st May, who will spend a day in our school to see how we approach teaching and learning, especially around our children with Special Educational Needs. We are building some very positive links with schools in Scandinavia and sharing what we do so well.

Numeracy workshops
We have had several requests for help from parents recently, who feel that they would like to know ways that they can best support their children with their Numeracy home learning. We have taken this on board and Miss Gascoigne and Miss Thackeray have planned several Numeracy workshops for parents of Key Stage 2 children to attend. The first two workshops will take place on 21st May and 12th June, both between 4:30 p.m. and 5:15 p.m. These sessions will provide you with extremely valuable information around the strategies that we teach in school to solve addition, subtraction and multiplication problems to children attaining between Level 3 and Level 6. We appreciate that not everyone can attend so we are aiming to film the sessions and post them onto our website.

School calendar
We are continually updating our school calendar on the website so please do make sure that you check it regularly if you are unsure about a date or time. Our aim is for the school calendar to be an accurate and helpful resource. For easy access, we will soon be moving the calendar link to the front page of our website.

Parentview
Your voice is important to us so please let us know how we are doing by posting your views on Parentview. Feedback helps to form evaluations on what we can do better and already we are working hard to improve communication between school and parents as a result of feedback given. Of course, it is also lovely to hear about the things we are doing very well. http://parentview.ofsted.gov.uk/

PTA NEWS
Good luck to all those parents and children who are attending the Family Quiz tonight. We are sure you are all masterminds and the scores will be extremely high.
We would like to say a huge thank you to all the teachers who have already pledged their free time to help at our Summer Fayre on 29th June. If any parents or carers are able to help out before during or after the event please contact us via robinhoodprimarypta@gmail.com.


Next week will see our fabulous and brilliant Year 6’s completing their Sats. The hard work and effort that has come from each and every Year 6 child this year has been nothing short of phenomenal so if your child is about to take their Sats, make sure they get plenty of rest and lots of hugs; we couldn’t be more proud of them.
Year 4 will also be getting excited about their residential trip to East Barnby next week. I can’t wait to report back on the fun the children have had next week.
Have a great weekend.

Mrs Dale
Nursery newsletter
NEWS ROUND UP
What a beautiful start to the week. The weather was fabulous and we really took full advantage of our outdoor area. The children have loved the story of the Queen’s Knickers this week and our classroom is now full of lots of brightly decorated knickers that we designed for the Queen.
THIS WEEK
In literacy we have designed and labelled some knickers for the Queen and then in topic we made them using fabric paints. The children really enjoyed this activity and we think the Queen would love to wear them. In numeracy the children learnt that anything can be counted and loved watching Mrs Steel’s daughter performing her hops and jumps. The children then went and did their own jumps and counted them. In phonics this week we have learnt the sound of the letter ‘m’. The children are amazing at spotting the letters that we have learnt so far (s, a, t, p, i, n) their next step is to be able to write the letters when asked.  We have continued to play phonics games concentrating on blending the words. The children have really enjoyed playing ‘What’s in the bag?’ and are doing really well at sound talking without our sound talk toy.
NEXT WEEK
Next week we are focusing on the story ‘Rapunzel’. In literacy we will be acting out the story and answering questions about it to ensure that we understand it.  Our literacy outcome this week will be a lovely picture of Rapunzel and they will write a super sentence below. This will give the children a chance to show us all how fantastic their pencil control is and how well they can write the letters they have learnt so far. In topic we will be finding out who can build the tallest tower for Rapunzel to live in and we will be making a Rapunzel display. Please remember you are welcome to pop into nursery at any time to have a look at your child’s wonderful learning. To support the children’s learning of Rapunzel we will be watching the Disney film ‘Tangled’ which is a PG. If you are not happy for your child to watch the film please fill in the form attached to the home learning. If you do not fill in this form we will assume that you are happy for your child to watch it.  This week in numeracy we will be focusing on counting; as most children can now count to 10 and back confidently we will now be pushing onto counting to and from 20 so that they are ready for Reception. The children will be taking part in two exciting maths activities the first will involve the children building towers and then counting how many blocks they have used and in the second activity they will use paint to print a tower and count how many prints they have used.   In phonics our sounds of the week the week are ‘n’ and ‘g’. We will be continuing with blending and segmenting in phonics but we will be focusing on how many phonemes (sounds) a word has in it for example the word ‘at’ has two phonemes and the word ‘cat’ has 3 phonemes.
A WARM WELCOME
We would like to welcome Miss Watson to our nursery who is a first year student from Leeds Trinity University. She is currently studying towards her Primary Education degree with a specialism in early years. She is a valuable addition to our team and the children are really enjoying the exciting activities she is planning for them alongside Mrs Steel.
A QUICK REMINDER
Please remember on sunny days to send your child with a sun hat and/or sun cream. Those children who come to school without these may not be allowed to play out in the afternoon. Please remember you are welcome to leave the sun cream with us at nursery.

Have an amazing weekend and fingers crossed for more sunshine.
Mrs Steel, Mrs Chin & Miss Fox
Reception newsletter
NEWS ROUND UP
The only way to describe how this week has gone is dramatic. On Tuesday the children discovered that a burglar had burgled our classroom and taken the Queen’s favourite knickers. We obviously immediately contacted the police and PCSO Niko came to show the children the CCTV of the burglar the police had found and then informed us what the police would be doing next. The children took it upon themselves to go and collect evidence using our brand new metal detectors and they made wonderful independent posters to inform people of the missing knickers.
THIS WEEK
As mentioned above we have read the story The Queen’s knickers and following this immersive learning experience the outcome was a letter written to the Queen to tell her about what had happened to her knickers. In topic this week the children made some amazing knickers for the Queen and I can’t express how wonderful they were. The children had used really delicate patterns to decorate them and the knickers really showed just how much the children’s motor skills have developed over the year. If the Queen has to cope without her favourite knickers for a while I’m sure she won’t mind wearing the ones the children made. They also made some scrumptious jam tarts because we heard someone stole those once too. In numeracy we have been introducing the children to the different coins and then they used the coins to buy some things for the Queen. In phonics we have read the words; ran, bear, can’t, know, again and cat and learnt to read and write the long e sounds; ea in heat and the split digraph e_e in here and eve.
NEXT WEEK
Next week the story we will be learning about will be Rapunzel. The children will start the week by performing the story of Rapunzel on our outside stage with other children as the audience. Our focus will be on the use of time connectives next week, so we will be playing lots of games with time connectives in and we will be encouraging the children to use them in their start write on Thursday. To support the children’s learning of Rapunzel we will be watching the Disney film ‘Tangled’ which is a PG. If you are not happy for your child to watch the film please fill in the form attached to the home learning. If you do not fill in this form we will assume that you are happy for your child to watch it. Our topic activities will have a science focus this week and we will be thinking about which material will be the strongest to use for Rapunzel’s hair and we will be designing a ladder to rescue Rapunzel from the tower. In numeracy we will be thinking about measuring and we will give the children a chance to use a ruler to measure the length of Rapunzel’s hair. In phonics we will be learning to read the words; long, things, new, after, wanted and eat and we will be learning to read and write the long e sounds; ie (piece, field), y (happy) and ey (monkey, keys).
A QUICK REMINDER
Please remember on sunny days to send your child with a sun hat and/or sun cream. Those children who come to school without these may not be allowed to play out in the afternoon. Please remember you are welcome to leave the sun cream in your child’s locker.

Have an amazing weekend and fingers crossed for more sunshine.
Miss Pyatt, Miss Lambert and the Reception Team.
Key Stage 1


Home Learning:

As the year has progressed you might have noticed that the spellings have become progressively more difficult and therefore require time to be dedicated to learning them and sometimes understanding their meaning. In order to do this, we ask you support your child by explaining their meaning before applying the word into a sentence to give it a context alongside the description.
For this week’s home learning please support your child in learning their spellings from across the half term. This can be a progressive journey throughout the week; starting from reading and then writing them whilst still looking at them, leading onto reading them and covering them up to spell them before finally you saying the word for them to spell.. Once they have learnt the spellings and meanings please encourage your child to select at least 10 that they would like to use in a sentence. This can be done in their home learning books (pictures are always welcome too!).



News:

It’s HOT!
Fingers crossed we are getting into the start of summer now and the sunshine will remain to be a daily feature. On days when the sun is shining the children spend their lunch times on the field, which is the cause of delight and almost a whole hour of running around and playing. As you can imagine, when they come back inside for their afternoon lessons they are thirsty and warm. With this in mind, it is imperative that every child should bring with them to school a water bottle, sun hat and sun cream (or at the very least have some sun cream put on their faces, legs and arms before school). Heat generated from the sun and exercise can cause headaches and lack of concentration, so your support around this would be very much appreciated. Please make it clear to your child that:
·         Water bottles must be taken home, washed out and refilled on a daily basis.
·         Sun cream in school is to be kept in their book bag and ONLY put on their own skin. This is important for everyone’s safety, as some children have allergies or sensitivities to certain ingredients.
·         Staff CAN NOT put sun cream on for them.

Literacy:
We are now into the 5th week of our adventure stories, having swapped the focus books (Rainbow Fish, Hugless Douglas and Don’t Wake the Beastie) between the classes again. The children are continuing to expand their understanding of textual features such as speech marks, verbs and adverbs, adding description through the use of adjectives and using time connectives to order events. We have started to really encourage the children to paint the picture of how they envisage their stories with their words, so that their reader can also see the picture from their imagination. The results of this detailed description have been truly magnificent! The reading the children do at home coupled with the power of their creativity bear exciting and engaging writing from all. Our next star write will take place this Friday and will be done in their very own booklets.

Numeracy:
Our numeracy learning for the rest of the term has moved on from measurement and has taken a more tailored focus to meet the needs of the children in each class. The units we have opted to focus on are those that the children have recurrently slipped up on, based on our in class assessments from throughout the year and the half termly assessment we carry out. This week our main teach has been around ‘find the difference’ questions in their many varied forms (i.e. how many more? How much longer? etc). We began by looking at the different ways these problems can be solved, for instance if there is a small gap between numbers – like what’s the difference between 24 and 27, we can count on from 24 to 27 and see how many fingers we count on, or if there is a big gap – like 49 and 1, we would count back and see which number we land on.  Alongside the consolidation of this we have revisited the Malteser system, for partitioning and taking away two 2 digit numbers as well as sneaking in a few addition, division and multiplication problems to ensure the children are becoming better equipped with reading word problems and extracting the functions and key information from the questions.

Topic:
Next week the children will move onto their two week block on Art, focusing on the work of Andy Warhol and his use of bold colours to create four contrasting colours of the same image.  Thank you to every one for providing your child with a white t-shirt to draw their own Andy Warhol style image on the front using a chosen musical instrument.  Your children will be wearing their t-shirt in Celebration Assembly on Friday 24th May; we look forward to seeing you there!

Lower Key Stage 2 Newsletter
LKS2 had an exciting visit on Tuesday afternoon from a Bollywood dancer, who not only taught the children different Indian style dances, but also told us all some fascinating Indian mythical stories and performed some traditional Indian songs. A reporter from the Rothwell Record came to snap a picture of the children performing an Indian dance routine and we are looking forward to reading the article when it’s out next month!
Literacy
The children have had lots of fun during literacy this week becoming real life news reporters. We started the week hot seating various eye witnesses from different news articles, asking them to tell us the events of the story from their own perspective. We then rewrote our News articles from the previous week in the form of a script including lots of fantastic adjectives to describe. The children then worked super hard practicing acting these and even brought in props to further enhance their performances. The final news reports were truly brilliant and the children really impressed us with their clear and confident performances.
Numeracy
In numeracy this week the children have been learning all about the relationship between fractions, decimals and percentages and how to convert between the three. They have also learnt how to convert improper fractions into mixed numbers. Why not ask your child to demonstrate this to you? Next week we are going to be revisiting time, learning how to successfully read a 24 hour clock and how to read and navigate around a calendar.
Topic
After the children had a great time with our Indian dancer on Tuesday we then researched even more styles of Indian dance and the children have been busy practicing their own Indian dance routine. We have continued to practice our knowledge of the 7 continents and looked at the locations of the different countries.  
Residential
Can all year 4 children who are going on the residential ensure they meet in the school hall on Wednesday 15th at 8:45 a.m. Can everyone be dressed in their own clothes and bring a water bottle so they can have a drink on the journey. Can we also ensure all clothes are clearly labelled so we can return any lost property to the rightful owners.
.Spellings to be tested on Monday 20th May (the children already have their spellings for this Monday)
Please support your child in practicing their spellings every day to help them to achieve 10/10 in their spelling test every week.
Group One
Group Two
Friday
Wrong
Saturday
Wrinkle
Sunday
Wrist
May
Wreck
June
Wrapper
July
Write
August
Wrote
September
Wrap
October
Necessary
November
Especially

Reminders
·         Please ensure your child’s PE kit is kept in school from Monday-Friday every week.
·         As the weather is getting warmer please make sure your child is bringing a water bottle to school every day.
Have a lovely weekend!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             
Team 3/4
UKS2 News Roundup:

·         Next week sees our year 6 pupils take their final SAT’s assessments. We would encourage all pupils to have a great night’s sleep and a healthy breakfast to provide vital brain power for each assessment. All pupils should have confidence coming into this week, as their efforts leading up to the SAT’s have been fantastic!
·         This week’s achievers are Caison and Charlie in 5/6B. The boys have been given the achiever this week for their fantastic contributions to our 5/6 blog. The boys always offer their free time to help update our blog and their fantastic contribution is recognised and greatly appreciated. Well done boys!
·         As a result of feedback from some parents we will be holding ‘Numeracy Workshops’, where sessions will be delivered to demonstrate the key concepts taught in Numeracy sessions. Your child should have received further information regarding these sessions from their class teacher.
·         Dates for your diary:
·         13th May: SATS week. The breakdown for the week is as follows:
Monday 13th May- Reading paper
Tuesday 14th May- Spelling, punctuation and grammar test.
Wednesday 15th May- Numeracy paper A and mental maths test. 
Thursday 15th May AM- Numeracy paper B. PM- Level 6 numeracy papers.
·         17th May- Any pupils who have been given a rising stars grammar and punctuation book, please return this by the required date.
·         21st May- Addition and Subtraction parent workshop (4.30pm- 5.15pm).
·         5th- 7th June- Year 6 residential to Robin Wood.
·         12th June- Multiplication parent workshop (4.30pm- 5.15pm).  

Numeracy:
·         This week year 6 pupils have been coached around strategies from their previous SAT’s and mental maths papers. The year 5 pupils have consolidating their knowledge of time and been investigating world time zones.  Next week pupils will be creating their very own lunar theme park, which requires designing the park and calculating the profits/costs.
·         This terms times tables challenge will be held on the last Friday of term, 24th May. We encourage all pupils to practice as much as possible as the current champions are certainly proving tough to beat!

Literacy:
·         This week pupils have been continuing to develop their writing of discursive texts. Pupils have developed further ideas for arguments for and against space exploration and have taken part in a whole class debate at the end of week.
·         Next week pupils will be learning how to write explanation texts and applying this into a context for their own alien creature.
Spellings: Next week pupils will be tested on the following spellings; attitude, develop, purpose, success, interrupt, serious, curious, organise, future, atmosphere.

Other areas of the curriculum:
·         This week in ICT the children have continued inputting procedures to program robots to manoeuvre over canyons, which the children have made. These models aim to replicate the surface of Mars.
·         This week in Spanish, pupils have created a class fact file of the planets in our solar system.
·         In PE this week pupils have been continuing to learn the Big Dance routine that will be performed by the whole school. Children have still to finish refining the whole section of the dance. The video resource is available online if pupils search Big Dance 2013.
·         In our TOPIC sessions pupils have continued their learning about space. This week pupils have been researching various space disasters. Pupils have applied their research into a newspaper article reporting and commemorating on these events.
·         In Music, 5/6M have continued to learn the Yellow Submarine by the Beatles on the recorder. Pupils have now combined different sections of the piece and performed a variety of notes effectively. 5/6G are continuing to explore several percussion instruments; including xylophones, and have continued to develop learning twinkle twinkle little star. 5/6 B have continued to develop their compositions on garage band. Pupils have been introduced to changing the dynamics in the track to affect the mood of the film.


 

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