In Oak Class we enjoy a bit of what we call 'graffiti maths'. This is where Mrs Bramwell draws on the tables and we create calculations with cubes, numicon or base 10. We have been making number sentences using the <>= symbols. Which number is greater than or less than another?

As part of our community work the JRSO’s  have decided to sponsor a guide dog. This is an important charity to support and it raises awareness of guide dogs for our children.  We have spoken with our children about how to react if they see a working guide dog.

Our new guide dog is called Albus and is a golden Retriever/Labrador.

Following our recent election, our new Pupil Parliament attended their first meeting today. They emptied our suggestion box and noted suggestions made from our pupils. They will do their very best to act upon these and will keep everybody informed of progress.

As it is around this time of year when we celebrate Harvest Festival, we thought it would be a great time to support our local community. So, next week in assembly, Pupil Parliament will be asking our pupils to donate some non-perishable foods for us to give to a local food bank to help others who are finding it difficult to buy enough food for their family due to rising costs of everything. 

Acorn Class

What a fantastic start to the year! We have had a wonderful few weeks full of learning through our play, making new friends and getting to know each other.

We have shared lots of important and exciting stories and made a super start to our Talk 4 Writing story. We have chosen ‘Owl Babies’ by Martin Waddell and everyone has really enjoyed learning about the characters and looking at the setting in the story. We have used this story to learn lots about the world around us and about our outdoor environment by looking at the changes we can see through autumn.

We have been enjoying our music and art sessions immensely, using and exploring the new resources we have and getting stuck in to making marks and sound!

In PSED we have been thinking about different types of family. We have discussed what the children thought family meant and why family is important. We also have spoken about the family members we have in our household. We have looked at the many wondrous ways our families are different and the ways in which we are similar. We have celebrated each other and the way us and our families are all unique.

Chestnut Class

We are all very excited at Barnby and Glebeland to share our new 'Reading Champions' initiative. We are actively encouraging all pupils to read at home as many times as possible. We have sent home guidance for families to help them when they hear their child read and the types of questions they could ask to provoke discussion. These questions are linked to our 'VIPERS' skills questions that we use in our daily Whole Class Reading sessions.

All Teachers monitor and record the number of times that all pupils read at home each week and then in our Whole School Assembly on Mondays, certificates are presented to celebrate the achievements of pupils and then one pupil from each key stage is selected randomly to receive a 'free' Reading Book.

We have also established a Whole School Display that identifies the Reading Champions for that week! The pupils have already shown a very enthusiastic attitude to this idea and we hope that this will be maintained throughout the academic year

Robin Class have been exploring Autumn and the changes they have noticed in their local environments. They began by looking for signs of Autumn with their families by having an Autumn treasure hunt. Next, they brought their findings into school so we could sort and compare our objects and investigate how they may have changed since summer. We then used these items to inspire drawings and paintings of our environment.

Red Kites

In computing, Red Kite class have been focusing on ‘Google secure your secrets’. We have been looking at various aspects of internet safety and the importance of being safe online. We have looked at various aspects such as: password protection, think before you type and identifying the importance of internet safety being taught in schools.

Woodpeckers

Woodpecker class have settled back into school well. There has been some tremendous learning going on that all children should be extremely proud of. 

We have written tales based on a character that does not fit in and enjoyed sharing them with our peers. Children are currently learning a poem called 'What is Pink? in order to identify structures that can be used when writing their own poems. Children have completed learning on Place value over the last few weeks in school and have used this knowledge to compare objects and numbers. They are now beginning to apply this knowledge into lessons around addition and subtraction.

In other areas of learning children have consolidated knowledge about the countries that are in the United Kingdom before looking more closely at the local area, discussed different animal groups and the similarities and differences between them, talked about the rights and responsibilities of all people and discussed how the senses are used to worship.

Starlings

Starlings have now finished their ‘last tree unit of work in reading. We read the book the last tree over the first few weeks of September. We discussed the meaning behind the book and how we can apply it to ourselves - what can we do to help/hinder the environment. After some comprehension, illustration, role-play and debate. Class 3 summarised their learning by compiling together their favourite quotes, moments, definitions (deforestation, reforestation, afforestation) and lessons they learned from the story. Together, they created this ‘tree of learning’, representing the last tree.

Reading
The first Early reading parent meeting was held at Glebeland Primary school recently. Miss Bettinson led a session on our expectations for reading at home and gave a taster into how reading is taught in our schools from the beginning stage of learning about phonemes, onto how sounds are represented by graphemes and then into becoming more fluent readers. We also looked at how reading comprehension is taught through applying skills such as vocabulary, prediction, inference, retrieval and summarising. 

Reading Champions have now launched across the partnership with all teachers seeing a rise in home reading. Children have been celebrated for showing ambition in their reading at home and some have been enjoying new books as a result.

Parents Evening
A very big thank you to all our parent/carers who came to our open parents evenings on Tuesday 4th and Thursday 6th October. We look forward to welcoming you further for future events including the EYFS Nativity.

PTA
We are very excited to announce we have had a group of parent/carers who have restarted our PTA. They have already had their initial meeting and are keen for new members to join. Their planned upcoming events include a Witches and Wizards disco on Thursday 3rd November. Please see our weekly newsletter for further information.

Hedgehogs and Foxes class

As part of our Community Engagement and Sense of Place we have been looking at the fields around us- being a rural school and the changes through the season.  Seeing the fields change and the tractors working in the fields.  We have acted out the story of The Little Red Hen, made our own bread rolls (looking at our ingredients, weighing and shaping).  This extended into us using corn in our maths to fill and empty.  We walked the footpaths picking blackberries, watching tractors ploughing and drilling.  Returning to our Nursery to cook blackberry sponge to take home and share with our families. 

The children were very interested in the tractor, looking at the back to see how the implements are attached, seeing who was the tallest nearest the wheel and 'bouncing up and down on the blue tractor' seat as they steered!  A favourite song from our carpet time in Nursery.

 

The Henley children had a very successful Harvest Festival service at the church yesterday. The children sang, read their poems and shared their thoughts about harvest.

Enrichment clubs at Henley include Sewing Club and KS1 and KS2 Art Club.

The children in Sewing Club are busy making Christmas tree decorations out of felt and decorating them with stitching or sparkles! The children in KS1 Art Club are studying Axel Scheffler and have been making ‘Stick men’ and the children in KS2 are studying the style of Van Gogh. They are building a collage starting with torn up paper and painting using lines to create a woodland scene.

Here at Kirkley we have had a very busy start to the Autumn term. We have welcomed back many familiar faces after the summer holidays and had lots of new children start with us.  They have all settled in very well and shown great resilience.

Over the Summer we successfully appointed Emma Carter as our preschool room lead.  Emma started with us on the first day of term, she has already built good parent partnerships and the children think she is great!

Emma has lots of new exciting ideas that she wants to implement and we are looking forward to seeing them in action.

We have also appointed Francesca Burgess as an additional bank staff member.  Francesca is an experienced practitioner with Early Years Teacher Status, she has experience in the curiosity approach and also butterflies of Britain.

Francesca enjoys the outdoors and likes to spend time at the weekends going on adventures with her 3 children.

Learning environments

Here are a few pictures of our owl’s room this includes our home corner, cosy area and carpet area where we enjoy getting together for registration, song time and story time.

 

Juniper Class

It was lovely to see so many parents in school this week for our guided reading session in Juniper Class. The children really enjoyed finding lots of information about Anne Frank from the text.

Pine Class

On Monday 3rd October Pine class were joined by several parents for phonics and guided reading lessons.  The children loved showing their families how to play number splat in phonics! We then shared the story Cuddly Dudley and asked and answered some very tricky questions about the book. 

Seedlings Class

The children have spent some time thinking about how we can remember Queen Elizabeth.

We looked at books about the Queen before using our motor skills to create flowers. A portrait of the Queen was created during our own learning time.

After the weekend these will be taken to the church and be left with the book of condolence.

Reception open afternoon 11th November 2022 and we have another nursery stay and play on 18th October 2022.

 

During the last academic year a working party was formed across the Yox Valley Hub of Teachers and Teaching Assistants who have the day to day responsibility of teaching our phonics curriculum to our youngest children.  The main intention was to promote a consistent approach and share good practice with our colleagues.

At Middleton we were so proud in the summer term as our children in Year 1 scored extremely highly in their phonics screening.  Mrs Pain is our Phonics expert at Middleton and she has already started delivering phonic lessons to our new reception children who are ready and eager to learn. 

Mrs Pain ensures our Phonic lessons are fun, short and follow the same principle every day.  Revisit and review, Teach, Practice, Apply and Assess.  The children become familiar with this routine approach and look forward to their daily sessions.  They particularly love Phoneme Bear who has a daily change of attire and resources!

Children engage in all kinds of activities; games, caption writing, reading interactive games on the whiteboard, but the children think the messy ones are the best! 

It was amazing this week to be shown a clip that a parent is going to upload to Tapestry of her reception child applying her phonic knowledge in their reading book – it definitely was a WOW moment. 

We know that reading and writing is the essential vehicle for communicating ideas, emotions, understanding, and learning in other subject areas. Phonics is the very start of that learning journey and so important for our children.

 

Year 1 and 2 at Rendlesham recently had visitors from SARS - Suffolk Accident Rescue Service. They are a charity who provide immediate and advanced medical care to patients with serious or life-threatening medical conditions or trauma.

We have been studying 'When do we call 999?' in RSHE and the charity happily came into our school and spent the morning with us. We got to see their emergency response vehicle on our playground, got to discuss what is safe to put in or on our bodies and even got to learn and practise CPR. It was an amazing day and we all learnt so much!

If you want to know any more about the charity visit their website https://www.sars999.org.uk

 

Pupil Leadership at Southwold

It has been a busy start to the academic year at Southwold.  After saying goodbye to our Year 6 cohort in July, September is always an exciting time as the new Year 6s take up the realm of being the oldest in our school and start applying for the pupil leadership roles we have within our school.

In September all the Year 6s were invited to apply for the position of Head Boy and Head Girl.  The children were given an overview of what the ‘job’ entailed and what would be required of them. Their first task was to write a letter of application stating why they would like the ‘job’ and what strengths and qualities they have which would help them do the job well.

Following on from the many excellent application letters the children were invited to attend a group interview with the Academy Head and Assistant Academy Head.  The children were asked four questions; Why did you apply for the position?  What qualities and strengths do you have that would make you excellent at the position?  What are you proud of at school and what would you show case if you were giving visitors to our school a tour?  Finally – if you were given the job and you were asked to represent our school at public occasions like our Harvest Celebration how would you need to conduct yourself?

The children amazed the interviewers with their mature, reflective and thoughtful responses to the questions.  The children drew upon the Learning Pi learning characteristics and described in detail how they would need to be determined and resilient, independent thinkers, be responsible, adaptive, reflective and understood completely that the job would entail a massive element of risk taking – as there would be occasions when they would be out of their comfort zones.

The interview panel are in the process of having the very difficult task of making their choices and successful candidates will be notified shortly.  In the meantime, all pupils are invited to stand for school council with elections taking place in October and other pupil leadership roles and responsibilities with be awarded to further Year 6s. 

We look forward to developing our pupil leadership team this academic year.

 

 

Children at St Edmund's enjoyed a visit from the Yorkshire Building Society. They learnt a wide range of skills including how to budget for a party.

  

 

Parents across Waveney Valley were invited to attend a curriculum information session, to discover the principles and ethos behind what the children are taught in our schools.

If you were unable to attend then please feel free to read through the presentation that was shared on our curriculum tab of the website.

https://www.stedmundsprimary.org.uk/page/?title=Curriculum+Overview&pid=47

Starfish Class

Starfish and Seahorse class have had a flying start to the year with our theme of the term being ‘Owl Babies.’ They have woven the story in all aspects of their learning from Literacy and Maths to Art and PE. The class have also had a visit from Mr Downes, who had lent us one of his Long-eared Owls from his home collection. We have used this in Art to paint our own owls using the technique pointillism, experimenting with different pointed tools. Well done everyone on a fantastic start!

Seal Class

In the Seal class, we have been working exceptionally hard on collage pieces in art. Our inspiration was Megan Coyle who makes art out of magazine cuttings. We then made our own pieces of fruit out of magazine cuttings and the results are spectacular! Next, we will be moving on to Arcimboldo, who makes portraits out of fruit!

Shark Class

Our budding artists in Sharks have been busy again this term with our new focus artist Joel Penkman! Inspired by her paintings, the children have been developing their skills in sketching and watercolour pencils by making these brilliant biscuit observational drawings.

 

Oak Class have been busy learning all about Number and Place Value.

We have been fully embedding the CPA (Concrete, Pictural, Abstract) approach by using many different manipulatives. Skills covered have included: number recognition, representing different numbers, one more and on less.

Anything can be used to support learning maths at home - coins, pencils, ear-buds etc - so please don't feel the need to spend money on specific equipment.

Children in Yoxford and Peasenhall have been developing their knowledge of diversity by exploring inspirational people. So far, they have learnt about Mary Seacole and her extraordinary life, following her own role model of Florence Nightingale to become a nurse during the Crimean War. The children were initially puzzled as to why Mary Seacole was refused a job at her interview after travelling such a long way and showing great determination. This promoted excellent discussion on equality and fairness. They then worked independently in their self-chosen way to create their own fact pages about her life.