Year 4 newsletter

 Year 4 have had a busy few weeks in class presenting their speeches to one another.  Congratulations to Frida and Ben for winning the class competition and going onto to represent year 4, 

This morning we visited the Trinity Church Night Shelter. We took our donations with us and asked lots of questions about who visits the shelter, why they might visit and what it looks like.  We had the opportunity to look around the shelter and inside the new ‘pods’.  This means that every one that stays there has their own little room to sleep in. Below, we have attached lots of information that we learnt! 

Year 6 newsletter

 What a fantastic return to school Year 6 have had! We were blown away by the passion and care each and every child had put into rehearsing their speech over the half term period. Our Global Goal focus is "Sustainable Cities and Communities: safeguarding and protecting the world's cultural heritage", and wow - the children have made the most considered, eloquent, and compelling arguments to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece, and to act as protectors of a nation's culture and sense of self. Huge congratulations to both James Allen and Louis Blind, who will be representing Kahlo and Da Vinci at the South Mill Arts Centre on our Speech Night. 

We have kicked off a new writing unit on Greek Myths - focusing on the legendary tale of the brave Jason and his band of trusty Argonauts, who faced peril and challenge in their quest to retrieve the infamous golden fleece. The children are thoroughly enjoying both the story and the imaginative narrative we are creating as we go. We can't wait to share their final interpretations. 

Our half termly World View lesson had an interesting focus - does having more make you happier? What an interesting afternoon we had, discussing the implications of everything from defining 'more' to the implications of finance, love, support, working for joy or for money. As always, the children were thoughtful, mature and extremely confident working in their trios and sharing their thoughts. We constructed a recipe for happiness at the end of the lesson, and we think this is a good way to live our lives.

As ever, a week of hard work, lots of enthusiasm and high energy - well done to Year 6!

Nursery Newsletter

Nursery Blog

What a lovely week back at school we have had after the half term.  We hope you all had a restful break.

This week in Nursery we have began our new topic ‘Transport’.  We have looked at different types of transport, including vehicles that go on land, fly in the sky and go on water.  We have been singing lots of transport songs such as the Wheels on the Bus and Row, Row, Row your boat.  We have even had some silly fun by reading a lovely transport book ‘The Whales on the Bus’ by Katrina Charman and Nick Sharrat.

We have been very involved with nature activities this week:

Our Religions around the World topic is Spring, and we have been on a couple of fantastic exploratory walks around the school, looking for signs of spring.  We took Bertie Owl with us too!  We found blossom and daffodils, daisies and new buds starting to grow on the trees.

We have been planting some of the Early Years Garden planters with primroses and violas and the children have been helping with this project. 

We have also been planting sunflower seeds and will observe these carefully over the coming weeks and months.

 

Year 2 newletter

 This week was kickstarted with the arrival of the duckling eggs for our science topic Lifecycles! The children were so excited to see the first few cracks appear and over the next few days we watched as the ducklings used all their strength to hatch out! We are keeping a duckling diary to closely observe the changes that we can see and they have already grown so much! 

The children have already had a duckling cuddle, but there will be more to come this week and we will even be swimming them! Stay tuned for the blog post! 

Not only did the ducks arrive, but we also had a week of performing our Global Goal speeches. All the children got up in front of their class and did a fabulous job of performing. Everyone did amazingly and should feel very proud of themselves! The children voted for the top 3 speech performers from each class and then they spoke again and the winners were decided by all the children in Attenborough and Greta. Congratulations to our finalists: Sebastian, Stella, Milla, Megan, Eesher and Archie!
 Well done to Stella and Archie for being our winners!

Reception Newsletter 28.02

Reception have had a good first week back, where we started the week introducing the children to our new topic of 'transport'. The Reception role play areas have been changed to train stations and we have had lots of Brio play, alongside making their own vehicles in CIP and outside, we have two car washes and a roadside cafe to keep the children busy!

We had our second Worldviews lesson this week as well, which totally engrossed the children - mainly because of us beginning the lesson with a song from Encanto! This term we are looking at the importance of family as well as friends and the children imagined that their families had magical powers, like the ones in Encanto. Some of the examples of magic powers we had were a sister who ' has magic powers that pull herself up to standing' and 'when I feel sad, mummy has magic powers to stop me feeling bad'. We painted our families, read books all about different families and discussed different ways in which we help our families at home. 

Year 3 Newsletter

Year 3 Newsletter

Writing
Have you heard of the the three little pigs and the tall tale they spun about the "big, bad" wolf? Well, year 3 have got their thinking hats on and ready to investigate this story further.

With his charming smile and passion for reducing waste (including leftover pig!), we were lucky to hear the wolf's side of the story.  

We couldn't wait to interrogate the wolf with many questions like: 

• Do you think you have been treated fairly?
• Are you the true villain of the story?
• Why did you eat the first two pigs?
• Did you mean to hurt anyone?

We were able to understand the wolf from a brand new perspective and who knows, maybe year 3 can prove Mr Wolf's innocence and change the story once and for all!

The TRUE story of the three little pigs

PE
This term, we are focusing on ball skills to prepare ourselves for tennis techniques and skills. We have used our knowledge of stopping, throwing and catching to help refresh our memories of ball handling and how we can apply this knowledge to different areas of sport.

RAW
We had a fantastic RAW (Religion and Worldviews) lesson this week. With the question being, "will we ever live in a world without fighting?", we were influenced by popular music that addressed this issue. This matched nicely with World Kindness Day and we each created pledges to show how we can work towards making the world a better and kinder place for everyone to live. 

Year 5 Newsletter

 We have thoroughly enjoyed listening to all the children performing their speeches this week, whether it was to a small group, the whole class or the whole year group, everyone spoke with great confidence! We want to say a huge congratulations to Kitty and Sophie who will be representing year 5 in the whole school speech competition! In our Worldviews lesson for this half term, we discussed fairness and two big questions were proposed to the children and discussed: Why isn’t life always fair and is being fair always the right thing to do? The children came up with some scenarios in their life where they felt they had been treated unfairly and we ranked them as a class from the least problematic to the most unfair! In science, the children explored the definition of a life cycle and had to try and sort the different stages for different animals.

 

Year 1 Newsletter

Science

During our Science lessons we have been learning about classifying animals into their animal groups. We learnt about the features of Reptiles and Amphibians and created our own out of Plasticine! We added labels to show their features.

Geography

In Geography this week we learnt about three types of settlements: village, town and city. We spoke about Hatfield Broad Oak, Bishops Stortford and London and discussed whether they were villages, towns or cities. We talked about the feature of each settlement and how we could tell them apart. We went into the immersion room to see the aerial views blown up and then completed our own maps of a village, town or city in groups.

Year 3 Newsletter

Year 3 Newsletter

Science
This term in science, we have been exploring and experimenting with how light is made. We have used our immersion room to help use investigate a range of different materials to understand the meaning of the scientific terms: transparent, translucent and opaque. We also explored how shadows can change based n distance from a light source and how this affected the darkness of the shadow.

Writing
We are becoming global changemakers and using our voices to prepare speeches ready for our Windhill21 speech writing unit. We are advocates for the oceans and fighting against ocean pollution. It has been a great unit for research and inspiring us to call people of all generations to action to protect our world!

Celebration of work
This week we were lucky enough to be visited by the adults of year 3 and celebrate all the work and learning they have done so far this school year. We shared our artwork, published work, books both old and new and even performed a taster of our Plastic speeches to the attending adults.

We are incredibly proud of all they have achieved and loved seeing them sharing their achievements with you all. Well done year 3!