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Keep up to date with all the latest news happening in school at the moment.
What a lovely Easter Service we had this morning. It was great to have so many of you join us. Whilst our services are opportunities to see your children performing they are also acts of collective worship where everyone participates together. That was really evident this morning when everyone joined in our simple communion – the taking of bread and wine (or ½ a grape in our case) as part of us marking the fact that today is Maundy Thursday; the day of the last supper.
I hope everyone has a lovely Easter and enjoys a good break, hopefully with some nice weather. I look forward to seeing everyone back on Monday 15 April.
The warmer days this week seem to have really started Spring. The trees and shrubs are suddenly showing signs of buds and on Tuesday ladybirds seemed to have appeared from nowhere, having emerged from hibernation. Children spotted these and were fascinated by their sudden arrival which was lovely to see. The photo above shows children counting them! Other children were studying lines of ants which were also active.
Children from Year 5 took part in a vocal festival yesterday. This is organised annually by all the headteachers, of all of the Wyvern cluster of schools, and involves groups of infants, junior children and the senior choir from Wyvern. It is a wonderful opportunity for our children to sing in large choirs, with different, complex choral arrangements. It also helps them aspire to how they might pursue singing at secondary school.
The theme this year was ‘Rivers and Oceans’ and they had learned the songs in school with Mrs Miller over the last few weeks. The whole arrangement was put together and conducted by choral director Paula Thomson. The preparation culminated in a concert to parents at Thornden Hall theatre and the singing was superb! My thanks to Mrs Miller who has been teaching the children the songs and gave up her evening to accompany them. Mrs Miller is amazing in so many ways but supports so much singing work across the school, especially at Christmas and this is another example of the contribution she makes!
What a lovely day we had yesterday on World Book Day. Children had some amazing costumes, so many clever creative ideas and fun outfits. It created lots of discussion and chatter at playtimes with children often playing in role of their character. In addition, for the last session of the day staff swapped places so they read a story to a different class. Everyone should have brought home a voucher with them (anyone absent can get one the next day they are here). These can be exchanged for free special books produced for World Book Day – at book shops and also online.
I am starting to feel like a broken record by mentioning the weather again but it seems to be a relentlessly wet winter – I hope as today is the first day of spring, technically anyway, that things are going to improve. Our climbing area that was put in last summer and the refurbished Coronation Garden area are certainly proving their worth as all-weather facilities for the children whilst we wait for the field to get a chance to dry out. The daffodils and crocuses at the front of the school are starting to look more lively at least!
After a horrible week’s weather, it was lovely to have a fun day today with children wearing onesies of every design, colour and style imaginable! This also generated lots of nice chat at playtimes! Of course, the reason was to raise money for Diabetes UK, a charity our school council wanted to support, particularly because one of its members was recently diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. Thank you to everyone for the donations, we raised £216. In worship today, we discussed this briefly and helped raise understanding about what this condition involves which is so important for that child to feel understood.
The end of a half term brings the end of topics and often the outcome of a topic is a planned event or significant moment. We had two of these yesterday. Class 4 have been learning about forces through their Science-lead topic about Extreme Sports. They had prepared experiments to present to Class 3 children which demonstrate these forces and held a science fair. Class 3s really enjoyed it whilst Class 4 explained their expert scientific understanding (picture left)!
In addition, Class 2 have been learning about significant moments from the past and their learning about The Great Fire of London was brought to life as they watched their
models gets set alight and go up in flames! The fact the fire brigade were on-site (having visited Class 1) also helped to contrast then and now! Lovely to see children in all classes loving their learning!
Class 2 made use of the kitchen this week. They were learning about bread (because the Great Fire of London started in a bakery) so they visited our lovely cook Mrs Pawling who was making fresh dough for the pizza base for lunch. The children felt the dough and learned to make small rolls with a fingers-down cup shaped hand. Thanks to Mrs Pawling for giving up some time to help the children understand the process – they were much more aware of what they were then eating at lunchtime. If you happen to be a bread-maker at home see if they might like to join you!
As a school we plan out the themes and areas we want to explore in collective worship for the year but this term I have changed this slightly. I’ve been exploring with children their ideas about things they would like to explore and during this week we discussed the effects of littering because it is something they raised. We discussed the impact of plastic in particular in the environment and then that we can each carry this into action, if each of us is more careful with rubbish then we would have no litter on our site. This is an important principle of our collection worship that have discussed something together, the children leave with something to consider. In Class 3, two children really took this forward and wanted to do some litter picking to clear our site – I gave them some equipment and they diligently made a difference!
Class 2 really enjoyed their trip on Tuesday to SeaCity museum in Southampton where they learned all about the Titanic. They have already learned a lot in class so could apply their understanding to the things they saw. They had a couple of workshops with centre staff who got them to explore artefacts and hands on activities about the ship. They also looked at all the exhibits, such as in the pictures above. Today in school they had a ‘Titanic Day’ which meant they could re-enact much of what they have understood. This experiential learning is a key part of their historical skills and how they start to understand different periods in time, outside of their lifetime, and start to build a sense of chronology about the past.