Newsletter Issue 16
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Friday 11th January 2013
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Dear Parent/Carer,
HAPPY NEW YEAR to each and every one of you. I really hope that everybody had a lovely break and enough rest to face the New Year with enthusiasm! We enjoyed a training day on Monday, which gave the teaching staff the opportunity to reflect on last term’s successes and plan ways to implement further improvements going forward for the next term.
Great learning
The children arrived back in school with huge smiles on their faces this week and the brilliant home learning that has taken place reminded me once more why I love leading this school so much.
I must mention the amazing learning that I had the pleasure of watching in Year 3/ 4 this week. As a way of teaching and embedding geographical facts about Egypt
Reading focus day
Thank you to all of you who managed to pull together a costume for your child today. The community was brought together once more with the reading breakfast, which took place before school. This gave children and parents the opportunity to enjoy some quality reading time together so many thanks to all who supported the event. It was fantastic to see so many children dressed up as their favourite book characters and enjoying the learning opportunities in class. Miss Hinton and Miss Lambert did a fabulous job of organising this brilliant day. We are huge book lovers at Robin Hood and feel that it is extremely important to highlight the enjoyment that can be gained from reading and sharing texts.
The fun doesn’t end there for some. Tonight Miss Hinton, Miss Lambert and Miss Pyatt will be spending the night in school with a number of children as part of an exciting Reading Club launch. There will be fantastic reading opportunities, which will take place for real life purposes and the chance to watch a great film. We are so lucky to have teachers who are willing to go that extra mile to organise and be part of the most innovative events, which will undoubtedly impact on the children’s enthusiasm for reading.
School Council
This week, the school launched its first Class Council sessions, which are designed to give the children a voice on various aspects of the running of school. Class representatives will join me next Wednesday lunchtime for our first School Council session, where we will be discussing the best ways to spend the funds raised by the PTA.
Comenius Regio
This year, the school is involved in two Comenius projects funded by the British Council. We will be making links and forging partnerships with schools and institutions in Finland and Sweden Developing Outstanding Schools Sweden
Sickness bugs
Please be reminded that if your child is sick, they need to stay at home for 48 hours following the last bout of sickness. Thanks.
Clubs
Your child should now be aware of the extra curricular club they are to attend this next term. Please be aware that after school clubs will commence next Thursday (17th) from 3:15- 4:15.
Have a really great weekend!
Mrs Dale
Nursery newsletter
NEWS ROUND UP
Wow what an explosive first week back! The children are very excited about our new topic superheroes. They have had a lot of fun this week engaging in superhero drama activities and have really started to think about what powers they would have if they were a superhero. It was a delight to see the children’s excitement as they came in dressed up as their favourite superhero/book character and have produced some fantastic poster advertising their powers. If at any point in the near future you need a superhero to solve a problem you know exactly where to come!
THIS WEEK
In literacy this week we have been designing our very own superhero and thinking about what super powers they would have. We have also been using drama techniques to think about what and how superheroes do! This week in phonics we have been thinking about words that rhyme e.g. cat and hat. The children are really beginning to grasp this concept so please help them practise this at home at any opportunity. In numeracy we have been continuing to recognise numbers up to 10 and comparing the numbers so they are able to say which number is the biggest.
NEXT WEEK
In literacy we will continue to develop our drama techniques and will be using lots of speaking and listening to develop the children’s understanding. In phonics we will continue with our rhyming and will play a game called ‘alphabet soup’ which will make rhyming even more fun! In numeracy we will be sequencing items by size from tallest to smallest
HOW YOU CAN HELP US
· Please listen to your child’s fabulous reading once a day and comment in their reading record. Please feel free to drop in and change their books when you pick them up.
· Please practice counting to 10 and beyond with your child at any opportunity. Please also practise writing and recognising the numbers 1-6 with them. If your child can do both of these then please help them go even further.
· Please practise writing the first letter of your Child’s name and if they can do this try going even further with them.
Mrs Steel and the Nursery team
Reception newsletter
NEWS ROUND UP
Wow what an explosive first week back! The children are very excited about our new topic superheroes. They have had a lot of fun this week engaging in superhero drama activities and have really started to think about what powers they would have if they were a superhero. It was a delight to see the children’s excitement today as they came in dressed up as their favourite superhero/book character and they have produced some fantastic posters advertising their powers. If at any point in the near future you need a superhero to solve a problem you know exactly where to come!
THIS WEEK
In literacy this week we have been designing our very own superhero and thinking about what super powers they would have. The children have produced some fantastic superhero collages and labelled all of their powers using their super phonics knowledge. This half term in phonics we are revisiting all the digraphs (two letters that make one sound) we learnt last half term. This week we have reviewed the sounds, ch, sh, th and ng and the key words were it’s, went, help, from, just and children. In numeracy we have been using positional language and left and right to direct our superhero friends to rescue their friend from the baddies.
NEXT WEEK
Yet again next week will be very fun and action packed just like a superheroes. In literacy the children will be building up to writing their very own superhero book with a beginning, middle and end. In numeracy we will be measuring things using a non-standard measure (Unifix cubes). We will be starting by comparing the heights of superheroes and then we will measure with Unifix cubes how tall each superhero is. In phonics the sounds we will be learning are; ai, ee, igh, oa. The words we will be learning to read are the tricky words; said, have, like, so, do, some and come.
HOW YOU CAN HELP US
· Please help your child practise their letter formation. This half term we will be really pushing the children’s handwriting and presentation so please also encourage them to write beautiful letters at home.
· Please support your child in accessing the bug club website. There are a few children who have not accessed it yet, if this is your child and you need any help or support please do not hesitate to come and ask us. The bug club is a fantastic way to support your child’s reading and for those children who are engaging with it we have seen real progress.
· Please read with your child as often as possible and comment in their reading record to let us know how they are doing at home.
We hope you had a fantastic Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Miss Lambert, Miss Pyatt and the Reception Team
Home Learning:
This week we have been learning all about the features of 2D shapes in numeracy and will be moving onto 3D shapes next week. As part of the home learning we would like the children to go on a shape discovery mission! This can be around their home, at the park or whilst in the car. Get your child to talk to you about the names of different 2D and 3D shapes and the features and properties that each shape has. They can then present this in whichever way they would like: they could photograph shapes you find when walking the dog, they could build a 3D shapes model and draw 2D shapes on it or they could do a portrait of you using 2D shapes as body features. Be creative and fun with it! Just make sure that your child labels their invention with the appropriate language (shape name, number of edges or corners/vertices, number of faces – for 3D only, properties of the shape – i.e. a curved edge, a right-angle).
FYI: Circle – one curved edge, no corners, round.
Triangle – three edges, three corners.
Square – Four edges all equal length, four corners, 4 right-angles, is a quadrilateral.
Rectangle – four edges (2 long, 2 short), four corners, four right-angles, is a quadrilateral.
Pentagon – five edges, five corners.
Hexagon – six edges, six corners.
Octagon – eight edges, eight corners- think of an octopus!
Trapezium – quadrilateral (four edges/four corners), 2 edges the same length, one longer and one shorter.
Rhombus – a parallelogram, like a squashed square.
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News:
Happy New Year and welcome back!
Key Stage 1 expedition:
Next Monday the 14th the whole Key Stage will be departing on a voyage of discovery to the end of the playground to look at the building site. This ties into our literacy focus - recounting events. We want to make sure all the children stay warm and clean so please can we ask that you send your child to school with wellies (in their bag), a warm coat, gloves, hats and a scarf. We will be outside for at least 30 minutes.
I am learning usernames and passwords:
Within Key Stage One we are going to start promoting the ICT learning software ‘I am learning’ as a rich, interactive and relevant learning aid. Just like Bug Club, this is a resource that will have activities hand-picked by your child’s teacher to suit their individual needs in numeracy, literacy and phonics. You can access it from your home computer and will undoubtedly find that it’s a fab way for you to interact with your child about what they have learnt in school each week. The class teacher can monitor children’s success and sticking points for every activity. We will put your child’s username and password for this resource on the inside cover of their reading record (next to their Bug club login details) on Monday with a view to launching it within class from next week. Please ensure that your child has their reading record to hand in every Monday
Bug Club:
We have all been so impressed by all of the reading that the children have been doing over the holidays and hope that you have found this to be helpful in engaging and motivating your child to read. We are aware that some of the children are enjoying Bug Club so much that they have read all of the books available within their book band though. Whilst this is great we have been monitoring every child’s correct and incorrect answers and have noticed that many of them are only answering the questions correctly on the 3rd attempt. This suggests that whilst they may have read the book they haven’t fully comprehended the contents, which is vital. It would be imprudent of us to allocate the next book band to these children before they are comfortable within their current level. Please encourage your child to read the books at least twice and answer the questions with care.
Literacy:
We have learnt all about what a fabulously happy holidays you have all spent together within our recounts unit. The children have written all about their favourite part of the holidays for Miss Hinton using past tense and the first person. We have really focussed on using our connectives (so, but, because, and) as well as introducing more sophisticated connectives (whilst, however, even though, when) and time connectives to link the ideas up to develop well-rounded, detailed sentences within each paragraph.
Numeracy:
This week has seen us all share and further our knowledge about the names and features of 2D shapes. We have extended our knowledge from basic features about shapes, like corners and edges, to thinking about quadrilaterals, rhombuses, right-angles within shapes and looking at and naming irregular shapes. Addition and subtraction skills is running alongside this in our mental warm ups.
Lower Key Stage 2 Newsletter
It has been lovely to see the children return to school after the Christmas break with such enthusiasm and excitement for our new topic, Ancient Egypt. For the third time since September, we have been absolutely blown away with the quality of the home learning that took place over the school holidays. There are incredible pyramids, paintings on canvasses, poster displays, presentations and even some model mummies too! Our thanks to you all for supporting your children with this. We are very much looking forward to the half term ahead!
Literacy
This week has seen us kick start our narrative unit for this half term. We are looking at writing our own adventure and mystery stories and this week our focus has been on different settings. The children have enjoyed developing their use of effective adjectives to describe different places. We have incorporated some drama into our lessons so the children can really think about the five senses as they imagined themselves in a certain place (a tropical island, a boat in a storm, a forest). Why not ask your child what fantastic adjectives they wrote in their new ‘magpie book’ this week? Next week, we will be continuing to focus on adjectives but looking at how we can use them to effectively describe different characters in a story.
Numeracy
In numeracy, the children have been learning about how to measure length. They now know the appropriate conversions from millimetres to centimetres, centimetres to metres and metres to kilometres. We have also been practicing how to use a ruler to measure accurately and then combining this to work out the perimeter of different shapes. Next week, the children will be using their knowledge of length and applying it to worded addition and subtraction problems.
Topic
Our topic got off to a ‘flying start’ this week as we went on an imaginary flight to Egypt to learn about what Egypt Africa is in and enjoyed using an atlas to find out what countries surround it. Why not see how many of the world’s continents your child can remember?
Spellings to be tested on Monday 21st January (the children already have their spellings for this Monday)
Group One
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Group Two
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see
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army
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bee
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armies
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deep
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berry
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keep
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berries
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queen
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city
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teeth
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cities
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cheek
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fly
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fifteen
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flies
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weekend
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witch
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cheerful
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witches
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Reminders
· Year 4 swimming will restart next week, the 18th January.
· PE this half term is invasion games, please ensure your child brings their PE kit into school on a Monday and keeps it in school until Friday.
Have a lovely weekend!
Team 3/4
· Welcome back to everybody – we hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year.
· This week, our achiever is Macy in Mrs Brook’s class. Macy took time out to visit the Dogs Trust and interview members of staff about the work they do as part of her home learning. The quality of Macy’s questioning was truly wonderful. Calendar news were even there at the same time, so watch this space – we may see Macy in the newsroom very soon. Well done.
· Thank you to all parents and carers of Year 6 who have supported their child with their SAT revision packs over the holidays. We really do appreciate the time that you give to ensuring these tasks are completed. We have seen some fantastic improvements in success rates already and hope this will continue over the next few weeks. All papers should be in school for the Splat the SAT sessions every Tuesday.
· Well done to all of our Year 5 (and some Year 6) children who completed their home learning task over the Christmas break. The children were asked to research a particular charity that they have had some involvement with or have supported over the years. We were overwhelmed by the amount of time spent as well as the detail given for so many different charities.
· We enjoyed a wonderful day on Friday with our Superhero/Book character day. We watched clips of Batman and mimed his actions. This helped us to write the beginning to a story which will be on the Blog very soon. We also looked at some of the gadgets used by Inspector Gadget and wrote a review of how useful they were. It was a ‘super’ day.
Numeracy:
· This week, the children have been practising their mental skills and strategies for addition and subtraction. They have also been using doubling and trebling skills to work our scores in darts as well as calculating the darts needed for 3 dart ‘Check-Out.’
· In mental maths we have been focussing on our 6 times table. If you would like any further practise, visit http://robinhood56.blogspot.co.uk/ and click on Numeracy. There is a link to Hit the Button which is being used to practise all times tables. There are also lots of free iPad apps to help with times tables – Multiple Wipeout is a particular favourite of ours.
· Next week, we will be revisiting fractions, decimals and percentages.
Literacy:
· In Literacy, the children have been finding out about our chosen charity Hearing Dogs for Deaf People. They have begun writing a letter from the charity to children at Robin Hood asking for their support. They have been focussing their attention on the use of connectives to join sentences as well as conjunctions to join ideas within sentences.
· Next week, we will be continuing to write our letter using a formal tone, making sure we use emotive words and phrases to really help win the support that the charity needs. Our sentence level focus will be on subordinate clauses and commas.
· SPELLINGS: Our focus next week is on the prefixes related to number: - Uniform, bicycle, biannual, triplicate, quadrilateral, pentagonal, September, octopus, November, decimal.
Other areas of the curriculum:
· In Topic, we have started to look at the meaning of the word ‘charity’ and how different charities support different people, animals and causes in so many ways.
· In Music, 5/6B have begun their unit on recorder performances and have been playing music using the notes B, A and G. 5/6M have begun their unit on percussion music with Mr Major and have started to get a feel for the Samba rhythm. 5/6G have been exploring the world of Garageband on the iPads.
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