Bagel bar

On Monday, our bagel bar will be opening at 8.30am. You can bring your child to school for a breakfast bagel free of charge. This will be available Monday to Friday until March 2021.

This is part of a Covid response under the National School Breakfast Programme.

Our school has signed up to receive free healthy breakfast food as part of the Covid response offer, under the National School Breakfast Programme (NSBP), which is being delivered by the charities Family Action and Magic Breakfast.

Reception, Years 1 and 2 will enter through the main door at the office. Years 3-6 will enter school through the playground gate as normal. Please remember to follow social distancing guidelines when dropping off your child.

We look forward to welcoming lots of children to our bagel bar next week!

Living and Learning: 8Rs for learning

We’ve been thinking about and discussing which 8Rs for learning we have applied in different lessons.

These are our 8Rs for learning:

Risk taking

Talk about the difference between a safe and unsafe risk. At school, we want your child to take a safe risk by having a go at answering, even if unsure; trying something new and attempting harder learning.

Responsibility

Provide time and space at home so your child is able to organise themselves: their PE kit, reading book, homework, spellings and tables… Don’t organise everything for them!
Make a link between rights and responsibilities: your child has the right to a great education, but needs to be responsible for their own learning.

Responding

This could be responding to their teacher in class or responding to feedback in their learning.

Ready

Make sure your child is at school on time for a prompt start.
Make sure your child has had plenty of sleep so they are alert and ready to learn at all times.
Encourage your child to ask lots of questions – that shows they want to learn!

Resourceful

Encourage your child to be organised so they can play with a range of different toys.
Encourage your child to try new ways to solve a tricky problem.

Resilience

Encourage your child to keep going! Set a tricky challenge or puzzle for your child to do.
Encourage your child to think of different ways of doing things.
Don’t let your child win when they play a game – they need to experience losing, too!
Celebrate mistakes as opportunities to learn – be happy that your child found some learning hard and encourage them to ‘bounce back’ and learn from the experience.

Relate this ‘R’ to Humpty Dumpty and our current whole school topic, After the Fall.

Remember

Make sure they have time to learn spellings, number bonds and times tables – a little practice daily is best.
Play memory games:

Kim’s game: show them objects for 30 seconds… can they remember all the objects?
Can they build up the sequence, ‘I went to the shop and I bought an apple’… ‘I went to the shop and I bought an apple and a bike.’… ‘I went to the shop and I bought an apple, a bike and a cucumber.’ etc … Take turns!

Reflect

Talk with your child about what they’ve learnt, asking questions about how they learnt, why they learnt it, when they’ll use their learning, how they would teach this to someone else, what learning might link with what they’ve learnt today…

 

In PE, we have been playing football rounders. We discussed that we need to be READY to kick the ball and to run, we need to be RESPONSIBLE by following the rules, we need to be RESILIENT when we miss the ball or if we are out of the game and we need to be REFLECTIVE after the game to reflect on what we have improved on (this week it was our fielding) and how we can improve further (next week it will be our football skills).

First week back!

It has been fantastic being back at school with our whole class together again. Everybody has come back with a really positive and responsible attitude towards their learning and towards the new rules and routines we have in place. Here are some quotes from of a few children in the class about our first week back at school:

“At first, I felt confused because I wasn’t sure what school was going to be like, but after we were told the new rules I understood and felt better. I’ve enjoyed maths- we’ve been learning about numbers up to 10 million!”  Mackenzie Y6

“The bubbles and timings of things seemed strange at first, but now I’m comfortable with it. I’ve enjoyed coming back and seeing my friends and teachers.  In maths, we’ve been learning about greater than and less than.” Erin Y6

“This week, I’ve enjoyed reading because I like the book ‘After the Fall’ and we’ve done some research about the history of the nursery rhyme- Humpty Dumpty.” Joe Y5

As Joe mentions, we’ve been reading a book called ‘After the Fall’ by Dan Santat. It is a story about Humpty Dumpty and how he overcame his fear of heights and picked himself back up again. We asked lots of questions about the history of this character and the nursery rhyme; we found out some very interesting and surprising facts!

11 September 2020

This week, we’ve been learning about homophones. Homophones are words that sound the same but are spelt differently and have a different meaning. Choose a homophone from each bullet point and write it in a sentence- in the right context. Can you up-level your sentences by using fronted adverbials?

Please email me your sentences to [email protected]

  • there/their/they’re
  • hear/here
  • to/too/two
  • which/witch
  • wear/where/were
  • of/off
  • threw/through

11 September 2020

This week’s homework is Talk Time and is due on Thursday 17 September.

What qualities do you look for in a friend?

This half term, our Christian value is friendship. In school and in collective worship, we will be looking at what makes a good friend and examples of being a good friend from the Bible. With your family, discuss the main question ‘what qualities do you look for in a friend?‘ along with the other suggestions underneath. Be prepared to talk about your answers in our homework review.

There’s an old saying that goes, “In order to have good friends, you have to be a good friend.”

What does that mean? Do you think it’s true? Why? What are the benefits of having friends who are different from us?

PE days

Hopefully you have read the information in the Autumn for all – Key Info St James’, which also has a link to our uniform policy.

On the days your child has PE, they should come to school in their PE kit. (Track-suit bottoms instead of shorts would be good on colder days. Footwear : black/brown/grey/white flat shoes which are safe to run around in.)

Footwear on PE days could be children’s ‘school shoes’ which are often a ‘trainer’ style anyway, if you want to avoid having to buy 2 pairs of shoes.

Please find below the days each class has allocated PE times, which will be taught outdoors, except in extreme weather.

  • Foundation (Miss Marsden) – Wednesday
  • Year 1/2 (Miss Harker) – Thursday & Friday
  • Year 3/4 (Mrs Welsby/Mrs Rowley) – Tuesday & Friday
  • Year 5/6 (Miss Beatson/Mr Mills) – Tuesday & Friday

17 July 2020: Home Learning

Well done on making it to the end of the school year! I’m so proud of each and everyone of you. It’s been a strange year and you’ve all been so resilient with your learning.

Party time! Normally, we would be celebrating the end of the school year and Year 6 would be celebrating their primary school years.

Follow this link to The Mad hatter’s Tea Party, where you can dance, do some body percussion and write a poem.

 

Have a wonderful summer and I can’t wait to see you again in September!