Newsletters

I can not believe we have already made it to the Easter break. This term has been extremely busy with trips out, visitors to school and the start of swimming for Year 5. I have been really impressed with how hard the children have been working, particularly the Year 6 children who are entering the last few weeks on the journey to SATS. During this term we have enjoyed some special events, one of which was the visit by Ashleigh Butler and her dog Sully as part of our world book day celebrations. Ashleigh won Britain's Got Talent in 2012 and enjoyed sharing stories and talking to the children about the importance of believing in yourself to fulfil your dreams.

We hope you all have a super Easter break, and we look forward to seeing the children return on Wednesday 23rd April 2025.

Mrs Richards 

 

EYFS

This term we have been fortunate to be part of a project in our Early Years focussing on speech and communication. We have been excited to work with colleagues in the trust and to share how we are supporting our children to develop these vital skills. Role play is a very big part of our day in reception, and this term we have been exploring what it might be like to visit a pizzeria or restaurant. Our children have formed excellent relationships with adults and other children in our school and are keen to get everyone involved in our imaginative play. 

 

As the weather is now getting warmer our outdoor provision has started to expand onto our larger playground. This gives us the opportunity for much larger scale games and activities and we are very pleased to have lots of space to explore our sand and water play. We really enjoy creative activities and have explored chalk, water painting and using the chalk and whiteboards which were kindly donated by Timotay earlier in the year. 

 

We have been especially proud of our writing progress this term. Our children are becoming familiar with symbols they may encounter during writing further up the school and are really developing their vocabulary. Our favourite story this term has been Burglar Bill and this always makes the children laugh. We are working hard to use capital letters, full stops and finger spaces in our work and some of us are even expanding our sentences using and or because.

 

  

Year 1

It’s been a very busy term in year one and we have certainly enjoyed our breaktimes in the (mostly) warmer weather!

In our Literacy work, we have been looking at writing a story based on ‘The Last Stop On Market Street.’ It’s about a little boy called CJ who goes on a bus journey with his Grandma. For our independent writing we carried the story on  with CJ and Grandma taking a bus ride on another adventure the following day! We have also been looking at writing a letter based on the story ‘Grandma Bird.’ This is a story about a little boy called Noi who goes to visit his Grandma who lives on a small Island all by herself. Grandma and Noi soon discover that they both like doing lots of things together. We are now doing some independent writing, pretending we are Noi writing to Dad about his time on the Island. Our teachers are super proud of how hard we are all trying with our writing!

In Maths we have been practising our counting up to 50 and looking at recognising the tens and ones in a number. We have also been busy practising some measuring with rulers and this week we are having great fun practising weighing items in scales using cubes.

In PE we have been learning how to work as a team. We have had great fun with some parachute games and then have worked together in smaller teams on our orienteering skills to find objects hidden in the school grounds. We have also been practising some gymnastic skills in the school hall, and have been very keen to challenge our balancing skills on the apparatus. We were also lucky enough to have a taster session with ‘Chance to Shine’ to try our hand at cricket.

In ICT we have just started a new topic learning how to control a ‘Bee Bot.’ We have also put our team work skills to the test again, as we are creating some big ‘Bee Bot’ treasure maps, a dinosaur Island and an underwater sea world so that when we have mastered our bee bot directions we can have a turn at navigating around the special maps we have made!  

Year 2

We are very much enjoying some brighter weather in year 2.

In Science we have been learning about Microhabitats and we took ourselves around the school site looking for minibeasts. We collected the data in a tally chart and discussed what we had seen. We were thrilled to find spiders, ladybirds, ants and caterpillars around the school to record.

Our Maths learning has been about Measures this term. We have spent lots of time learning about the ways we can measure in standard units like centimetres, metres, litres, millilitres, centimetres and metres. We have measured all sorts using rulers and are becoming experts at this. We even got Mrs Childs to help us measure the hall floor! Next we are learning all about fractions, it is tricky but we are working so hard to understand.

In our Reading lessons we have been so excited to read short chapter books, this term we have read both ‘The Frankenstein Teacher’ and ‘Unusual Day’ which we have really enjoyed. Some of us were so surprised we were able to read books with chapters and were itching to keep reading. We finished reading our class novel ‘Once Upon a Legend’ by Ben Miller and we are now reading another of his books ‘Diary of a Big Bad Wolf’ so that we can compare stories by the same author.

It really has been a busy term. We look forward to a Summer Term filled with fun and some brighter weather!

Year 3 and 4

Year 3/ 4 have had a really busy half term,  with lots of visitors and a school trip to Chester House to incorporate our history topic of the Saxons. Whilst there we completed 3 activities. The children were all really well behaved and a credit to our school. We were also given the opportunity to have a look at some artefacts from Chester House previously.

 

 

We have also had the life bus visit us to teach us about ‘ourselves and how its good to be me’.

This session was really fun and hands on and we got to meet Harold the giraffe!

    

At the beginning of the term we also had money sense (Natwest) come in to do a budgeting activity with the children.

The theme was birthday parties and the children had to work together to work to a budget to organise a children’s party. The children had lots of fun and most came in under budget!!!

   

Our science unit has taken us into food chains, finding out about producers, predators and prey. We have created webs linking a variety of different animals from a particular habitat and thought about what might happen if one of the animals wasn’t there anymore. We also found out about life in space during science week.

Please can we ask Y4 to really get practising their times tables, we have realised how important these are in our work on fractions this term.

This term we have been combining out Computing and D.T, working on a project to design and make a mindfulness timer.

We have been learning about physical computing, using our microbits, and working out how to program them to use as our timer. As well as experimenting with designing and making nets to create a 'case' for our timer.

The children have really enjoyed working with the microbits and learning to code - they particularly enjoyed making step counters and then using them to count their steps all around school.

Year 5 and 6

 

News update from Y6 

The children are working incredibly hard, and we are very proud of their attitude towards their work. This half term in Mathematics lessons we have covered shape, position and direction. In Writing we are working on formal language and writing a persuasive letter about the banning of SATs! Very popular with the children. 

In PE we have been practising our skills in both tennis and working on our fitness in circuit training. Some of the Year 5 children are going swimming and the second group will start once this group has had their allotted weeks. Our reading work has been based on the Beetle Boy book. This covers an adventure of a boy whose dad mysteriously disappears from a a vault in the national history museum with no doors or windows. 

The Year 5 children have enjoyed some time with the magistrates. Over two days the children had a visit from some local Wellingborough Magistrates. They delivered a presentation informing the children all about their voluntary role and what it is like to work in the court and justice system. The next day, some of the children acted out a crime scene so they could learn about the roles of the prosecutor and the defense. The children behaved well and impressed the visitors with their acting abilities. Year 6 will be working with the Magistrates after SATS.  

 

We also had a visit from the Lifebus, delivering a talk on decisions for all classes. This was great to initiative conversations around safe behaviours, peer pressure and knowing when to do the right thing if things feel unsafe. Again, all three classes were complimented on their behaviour and manners.  

Last week some children went to the Secondary school to take part in a netball tournament. The children did us proud again and one of the teams came second. Well done all and thank you to Mr Stockwell and especially Mrs Bryan for giving up their own time to take them. 

Sports club for Summer Term