A Fantastic First Week!
Hello everyone! Mr Freeman here with our first official Year 5/6 post of 2022/23. I hope you are all happy, healthy and excited for the upcoming year.
First of all, I would like to start by saying a massive thankyou to all pupils in Year 5 and 6. It’s never easy starting somewhere new – there are many emotions that both pupils and adults have to deal with. However, every single person in the classroom has made me feel so incredibly welcome. From the “Hello Mr Freeman” in the mornings, to playing zombie tag outside, I’ve really enjoyed getting to know everyone and they’ve allowed me to settle in quickly and comfortably.
On top of that, the learning this week has been outstanding! The resilience to improve our handwriting, the British history knowledge in our topic learning and the fantastic levels of engagement in our new class novel are just some examples of the excellent week we’ve had.
If you’re wanting to build on the learning at home, here’s a quick breakdown of what we’re learning in lessons:
- Writing – capital letters, squashed sentences and basic punctuation
- Spelling – homophones (were, where, wear, two, too, to, which, witch)
- Handwriting – forming capital letters from the top and joining lower case letters
- Reading – class novel (Secrets of a Sun King by Emma Carroll) and fluency
- Maths – Roman Numerals (Year 5) and place value up to 1,000,000 (Year 6)
- History – Stone Age to Iron Age and the Ancient Egyptians
- Biology – classifying plants and animals (Carl Linnaeus is our featured scientist this half term)
- Living and Learning/Christian values – I follow the school rules / perseverance
- PE – ball skills and teamwork
Thanks again, Year 5/6 – I’m looking forward to a brilliant year together!
Mr Freeman
Dates for your diary
Over the course of the year we will be holding lots of exciting events for you to get involved in.
If you have any questions about any of the sessions please do not hesitate to get in touch.
The Reception Team
Welcome to Nursery
We’ve been very busy getting our Nursery ready for you all. We’ve tried to make sure that there’s something for everyone to enjoy – including some of your favourite things that you told us about. It was lovely to meet some of you at our first ‘stay and play’ session and we are looking forward to seeing you again throughout our transition period next week!
Below is some information about some questions you may have;
What does my child need?
- A waterproof coat (NAMED)
- A pair of wellies (NAMED)
- A water bottle (NAMED)
- A bag containing a full change of clothes (including a top, trousers/leggings, underwear and socks – ALL NAMED)
Next week, we will be welcoming more children back to nursery and also some new children. We are so excited to see you all!
Here is a sneak peak of some of our provision!
See you soon!
The Nursery Team
Welcome to Reception
A big hello from everyone in Reception!
This week we have been busy creating an exciting learning environment for everyone to enjoy. We have welcomed our first group of children for transition sessions and are excited to see our second group on Monday.
We hope you enjoy looking at some of our provision that will be ready for you to explore next week.
See you all on Monday!
The Reception Team
09 September 2022 – Year 1
This week’s spellings are ‘Common Exception’ words – words that don’t follow the usual spelling rule or pattern. We keep spellings for 2 weeks.
Encourage children to write their spellings out a few times over the 2 weeks.
This week’s spellings are:
- are
- ask
- be
- by
- come
Why not try our super spelling strategy?
Year 4 – 09 September 2022
This week’s spellings are the days of the week. Each day we write down the date along with our learning objective so it’s a good idea to know how to spell these words accurately:
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
This week’s spellings
This week, we’d like you to practise homophones. These are words that sound the same as another word but have a different meaning, and often a different spelling. Learn the following words ready for a test on Friday 16th September:
there
they’re
their
hear
here
witch
which
where
wear
were
Library
Year 1 will be visiting the library on a Thursday. We enjoyed our first session yesterday. The children choose their ‘love of reading’ book to borrow. Please bring these books back on a Thursday to change.
We looked at the books we had chosen and noticed that some children had chosen fiction book and some children at chosen non-fiction books. We talked about what this meant.
Fiction: a made up story.
Non-fiction: a book that gives facts/ real information.
Why not have a look through your books at home and see if you can group them into fiction and non-fiction books.
Maths
This week, we’ve had some ‘naughty numbers’ in our classroom. The numbers were all mixed up and we had to get them back into the correct order. The children worked together to see where they needed to be in the giant number line. We used some great language such as more, less, smaller, higher when deciding where we needed to be.
Why not count forwards and backwards at home? Starting from 0 to 10 and backwards from 10 to 0. Can they count from any given number e.g. 7 to 10 or 6 to 0?
This week’s message (Friday 09 September 2022)
We’re sad to note the death of HM Queen Elizabeth II. She demonstrated and represented important values and behaviours. In school today, we have marked this historic moment with a special assembly and teachers have followed this up with a review and reflection in class.
Our first weekly message of the year continues with some important information for the year ahead at St James’ CE Primary School…
Dates for the year
Key dates for the school year are in our school calendar. We’ve prepared this list for you to print out and have ready to check, too.
Support your child at home
Like last year, we’re hosting a series of Zoom presentations to help you support your child’s learning at home – the first one is this Monday.
The invitation is open to all parents and carers across Sphere Federation, although we’ve indicated if the session might be more appropriate for particular age ranges. The full list of presentations are:
- Phonics and early reading: 12 September 2022
- Story telling: 19 September 2022 (Mrs Payne here at St James’ CE Primary will read a story over Zoom for your child and you to enjoy – the session is ideal for children in Reception, but children in Year 1 and 2 are welcome to join, too.)
- Number (KS1): 03 October 2022
- Number (KS2): 10 October 2022
- Topic: 07 November 2022
- Reading and Writing: 14 November 2022
- Online safety: 28 November 2022
- Key Stage 2 SATs: 09 January 2023 (This one is mainly for parents of Y6 children.)
- Key Stage 1 SATs: 27 February 2023 (This one is mainly for parents of Y2 children.)
- Reception to Year 1 transition: 19 June 2023 (This one is for parents of Reception children.)
All the sessions are at 6pm on Mondays and should last around 30 minutes.
If you’re interested in attending any of these Zoom workshops, please either send us a message on the School Gateway app or email the school office. We’ll then email the Zoom joining details out to all those who have expressed an interest.
Homework
Your child’s first homework task is published today.
Homework is an important part of education and gives you a chance to support your child and find out what they’ve been learning. This doesn’t need to be sitting at home with a stack of worksheets or creating an elaborate project: quality time talking to your child and practising basic skills is enough.
Today, we’ve given each child a new homework book. The book is for your child to practise spellings, writing, times tables and number facts. It doesn’t need to be sent back to school.
This homework guide sets out what we expect children to do and why. Reading, spellings, times tables and number facts are essential for all children to be confident with. The focus of your support at home should be ideally around these areas. Your comments in the Reading Record book (at least once a week) are really helpful for your child’s teacher.
As always, contact school if you have any questions or concerns.
Children settled into the new school year really well this week. It’s likely they’ll feel tired after a busy week back. Have a restful, happy and healthy weekend.