Friday 26 th February 2021 Message from the Headteacher We look forward to welcoming the children back to school on the 8 th March. I am sure the children are looking forward to seeing their friends and getting back into a normal routine. We will still have in place the same social distancing measures. All adults and children please keep 2m distance from everyone on site and wear a mask at drop off and collection times to keep everyone safe. There are narrow paths outside the school and it is difficult to socially distance whilst on the footbridge. The children do not have to wear masks inside and must only bring in a water bottle, coat and packed lunch if they are not having school lunch. Junior children can bring a pencil case to leave on their desk at school for the term. Full school uniform must be worn and PE Kits on the days they have PE. In the first month back we will be increasing physical activity and opportunities to be outside as we appreciate the children have been indoors in lockdown. Thank you for all your support to make remote learning successful for the children, we know how tough it has been on many families. The staff are looking forward to seeing their classes. Please continue to contact the teacher through email and this avoids the close contact at the classroom doors. School lunches will be available as normal from the 8 th March, junior children may need to have their lunch accounts topped up. Breakfast and aftercare will be available in Ash Class before and after school from the 8 th March. We will monitor take up of this service to ensure it remains viable. Many parents are now working from home or are on furlough and were not using this service last term. We have recently purchased a brand new learning platform called Flash Academy which supports students who have English as an additional language. Please find below a link to their brochure - which explains the platforms purpose, https://d1zor6r9h1io4a.cloudfront.net/slt/brochure.pdf. Currently it can support our children with 30+ languages - we have already put in a request for Konkani! The teachers have set a lesson on it for next week, so the children are familiar with it for their return to school. Skye our school therapy dog is looking forward to meeting all the children in March. Mrs Farid will be sending out a survey to check for those children who are allergic to dog hair or are very anxious about dogs. All the children in school at the moment have enjoyed meeting Skye in small groups. The teachers will be calling all parents for pupil progress meetings next week. Please share any information that will help the children settle back into school.
Transcript
Friday 26th February 2021
Message from the Headteacher
We look forward to welcoming the children back to school on the 8th March. I am sure the children are looking forward to seeing their friends and getting back into a normal routine. We will still have in place the same social distancing measures. All adults and children please keep 2m distance from everyone on site and wear a mask at drop off and collection times to keep everyone safe. There are narrow paths outside the school and it is difficult to socially distance whilst on the footbridge. The children do not have to wear masks inside and must only bring in a water bottle, coat and packed lunch if they are not having school lunch. Junior children can bring a pencil case to leave on their desk at school for the term. Full school uniform must be worn and PE Kits on the days they have PE. In the first month back we will be increasing physical activity and opportunities to be outside as we appreciate the children have been indoors in lockdown. Thank you for all your support to make remote learning successful for the children, we know how tough it has been on many families. The staff are looking forward to seeing their classes. Please continue to contact the teacher through email and this avoids the close contact at the classroom doors. School lunches will be available as normal from the 8th March, junior children may need to have their lunch accounts topped up. Breakfast and aftercare will be available in Ash Class before and after school from the 8th March. We will monitor take up of this service to ensure it remains viable. Many parents are now working from home or are on furlough and were not using this service last term. We have recently purchased a brand new learning platform called Flash Academy which supports students who have English as an additional language. Please find below a link to their brochure - which explains the platforms purpose, https://d1zor6r9h1io4a.cloudfront.net/slt/brochure.pdf. Currently it can support our children with 30+ languages - we have already put in a request for Konkani! The teachers have set a lesson on it for next week, so the children are familiar with it for their return to school. Skye our school therapy dog is looking forward to meeting all the children in March. Mrs Farid will be sending out a survey to check for those children who are allergic to dog hair or are very anxious about dogs. All the children in school at the moment have enjoyed meeting Skye in small groups. The teachers will be calling all parents for pupil progress meetings next week. Please share any information that will help the children settle back into school.
Nursery This week we have been reading our new story called Owl Babies. The children enjoyed listening to the story and many of them could relate it to when they first started nursery and missed their mummy. The children also drew lovely pictures of the owl babies and tried to use their phonic knowledge to write the initial letters of the owl babies name. The children also spoke about their favourite part of the story and we are really impressed with how confident they are at expressing their thoughts on stories, Krystle’s favourite part was ‘when mummy owl came back and flapped their wings and danced happily on the branch’ and Anika’s favourite part was when ‘mother owl comes and baby owls jump and are happy’.
Our new sound of the week was the letter ‘h’ for hhhhat, hhhhedgehog, hhhhheart
and hhhabitat. The children found lots of objects around their homes that began with
the letter h. The children are also hearing the initial sounds in words which can be
tricky at times. We are so pleased with how the children can listen to the sound and
write them too. With your continued support the children have made fantastic
progress in phonics.
In Maths, the children have used their 5 frames to count back. We introduced simple
word problems which involved the children finding 1 less than a given number. The
children used the 5 frames to support their learning and find the answer. They have
done a great job with this and we were really pleased with how the children are
becoming confident with number recognition.
We have also explored habitats this week and discussed where owls live. We spoke about how
owls are nocturnal which means they stay awake at night and sleep in the day. The children
created their own owl habitats using leaves, twigs, feathers and paint. They made some
amazing owl homes and really thought about the colours they could use to show that it is night
time.
For arts and crafts the children made their very own fluffy owl babies using cotton wool. We had some very cute owl baby creations from the children.
A huge well done for those children who participated in the half term reading challenge. We
were so pleased to see the children get creative and design new front covers for their favourite
books. Well done to the parents too for all your efforts.
Stars of the week
Ayaan for super work in maths finding 1 less than a number.
Jaisvi for fantastic maths using Lego.
Isaac for a wonderful Stick man reading challenge picture.
Vidhi, Zain, Tianna and Aishman for creating a fantastic owl habitat.
Lily for uploading some excellent home learning.
Kimaya for talking about the owl babies story using a clear and confident voice.
Nursery birthdays this week
Vidhi celebrated turning 4 this week!
Happy birthday from us all!
Reception
Literacy
This week in Reception our new focus story has been ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. The children read sentences from the story, wrote speech bubbles for the characters, read and created ‘Get Well Cards’ for the grandma in the story...
Birch class Elm class
Alankrita made a big effort with her reading this week,
well done!
Rudra created this Get Well Card
for the Grandma in the story.
Oak class Yew class
Ruhan is writing ‘I am going to eat Grandma’ in his speech bubble! I think he is playing the character of the wolf!
Aasvi doing beautiful reading.
For Phase 3 phonics, we have been learning the new sounds:
‘j’ as in ‘year’ and ‘ear’ ‘v’ as in ‘air’ and ‘air’ ‘w’ as in ‘treasure’ and ’cure’ ‘x’ as in We find videos from Alphablocks, Mr Thorne Does Phonics (with Geraldine the giraffe) and BBC Bitesize very helpful too.
Now we can use these sounds to write words and sentences.
Birch class Elm class
Sophia has been learning
how to form the letter ‘w’
correctly and writing
sentences with ‘w’ words.
Rasagnya drew a volcano
that begins with ‘v’.
Oak class Yew class
Shanaya sounding out letters and writing sentences so clearly,
well done to Shanaya!
Heer has been doing some beautiful writing.
In Phase 2 phonics, we’ve been revisiting, blending and segmenting the letter sounds: c k ck.
Birch class Elm class
Lilia joined in saying the sounds with Miss Hawkes and
made a ‘c’ with her finger on the table.
Aydin has been learning how to blend really well this
week!
Oak class Yew class
Aarav practicing his letter
formation on flour! Well done to Aarav as he
has really improved his
writing!
Zayyan worked really hard during
his phonics lessons and is
now able to blend sounds to read
words.
That’s amazing, well done Zayyan
and mummy!
Mathematics
This week in maths we have been learning all about position and positional language.
The children have been really good at putting their toys in different places around things like boxes and using the new vocabulary to say where they are.
Birch class Elm class
Rizzia showed us where
‘Minnie’ was in relation to the
box using positional
language really well!
Claudia used positional language
very well.
Oak class Yew class
Rameen N is practicing her positional skills by placing her animal in between
the Tiger and the box.
Tanav used a lot of positional language to say
where his toy was too.
Towards the end of this week, we had a mini focus on ‘time’ and the
children in the EY pod really enjoyed playing ‘What’s the time
Mr Wolf?’ outside!
They also created our own watches to wear.
Science / Topic
This week in science, some children showed us how well their beans are growing.
Birch class Elm class
Reve’s plant has grown really well.
I wonder how many leaves it has grown
already?
Omisha had a good look at her plants and
was already able to
work out what they need to
grow well from the results!
Oak class Yew class
Rameen Z. had planted her seed to grow a beanstalk just like Jack! She has been
watering her plant and this is how much it has grown! Well done to Rameen!
Rayyan has been checking the results of the
science investigation that we did before half
term.
Wellbeing
The children have been very busy with a range of activities that are very good for their wellbeing too. Have a look at what we’ve been doing…
Birch class Elm class
Leo enjoyed some
sensory play with water
and washed the dolls feet
and eyes with care.
Claudia has been
painting some
daffodils carefully.
Oak class Yew class
Eva has been busy with yoga based on the story of Little Red Riding Hood for this week’s
wellbeing activity, well done!
Maya dressed up as Red Riding
Hood and filled her basket with healthy
eating choices.
Reception Merits
Birch Alankrita - for trying really hard with her reading of sentences from our focus story this week. Ananya - for working hard and always trying her best with everything. Reanne - for learning how to recognise the o’clock times on your clock with mummy – amazing! Reve - for working hard and always trying her best with everything. Rizzia - for fantastic use of positional language to describe where her toy was, well done! Sophia - for really improving her writing with lots of practice, great effort Sophia! Elm Swara and Rakeem - for demonstrating super understanding of positional language through asking good clear questions when looking for the hidden wolf. Kshitja - for amazing reading and writing about Red Riding Hood. Andrea - brilliant energy when playing musical ‘positional language game’, she showed a good understanding of positional language. Katie - for her beautiful still life painting of daffodils. Shrihaan - for his enthusiasm and creativity when painting a volcano. Oak Diya - for answering lots of detailed questions based on our new focus story ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Elma - for amazing maths work, showing great understanding of positional language. Udhbhav - for creating a Volcano and being creative by using different materials. Rayan - for showing lots of determination in his jumping activity and keeping up with his tasks. Yew Eva - for working hard and always trying her best with everything. Tanisha - for working hard and always trying her best with everything. Kusha - for following instructions in maths and using the key words correctly. Jigar - for following instructions in maths and using the key words correctly. Firoz - for working very hard and improving in his writing. Ravya - for working very hard and doing beautiful writing in literacy.
Rameen Z in Oak class Elano in Elm class Shaan in Yew class
This week, there are no children with birthdays in Birch class
Key Stage 1
Year 1
Fatima - Mariam Fatima Nikita Jana
Phoenix Tanishka
Happy 6th Birthday! Have a great birthday!
Willow - 220
Ebony -240
Beech -232
Maple - 247
Well done to all those children in year 1 who completed the reading challenge over half term. We were really impressed with all of your front cover designs.
Our new topic is space and the children have enjoyed making rockets and drawing and labelling astronauts. They have also enjoyed reading the story Beegu.
This week in phonics we have been revisiting phase 3 and phase 5 sounds. On Monday we looked at the ‘th’ sound. The children have created some amazing wild thing monsters and have written some words with the ‘th’ sound.
Merits
Beech
Aaryana for super effort this week with all of her work.
Sudheshna and Krish for creating a super space helmet and drawing an astronaut.
Jana for excellent reading and sharing of a story with Beech Class
Shivayan for an excellent comparison of lengths in maths this week.
Nikita, Jovan and Amelia for all their hard work this week.
Maple
Shanaya for her fantastic book cover portraying ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ - well done!
Leon and Arslan for their great improvement with handwriting this term, keep it up!
Shanzay and Ksawery for measuring the length of objects in maths and remembering to use cm in their answers, great work!
Louie for his super effort in phonics this week and writing words with the ‘th’ sound.
Ebony
Navya, Mariam and Angeleena for amazing effort in History and for their super astronaut helmets and labelling. Keep up the great work!
Adam for amazing measuring and comparing lengths in maths. Keep up the fantastic work!
Devanshi for creating stunning pancakes for pancake day and explaining why Shrove Tuesday is important. Keep up the super work!
Devansh for his super effort in phonics this week especially on the ‘th’ sound. Keep up the brilliant sentences!
Willow Yuven and Thisari for their amazing astronaut helmet and rocket!
Parmpreet, Niveesha and Nova for their amazing sentences about Beegu and using amazing adjectives.
Year 2 Chestnut - 512 Sycamore - 524 Pine - 527 Aspen - 502
Happy 7th Birthday!
Fabio Maya
Have a super birthday!
Year 2 Social meets
For our next socials next week, we will be thinking about World Book Day which will be celebrated on Thursday the 4th March. When it is the day of your class social meet, we would like you to dress up as a book character! You could even make a mask or a prop that belongs to your character. If you do not have a book character outfit you can wear any fancy dress or your favourite clothes. Challenges, Challenges, Challenges!! WOW!!! So many of you got involved with the Art, Reading and Maths challenges over the half term! We are so impressed with all of your efforts! Amazing work!!
Art Challenge
Reading Challenge
Into the forest We have really enjoyed reading ‘Into the Forest’ by Anthony Browne. Year 2 have been making predictions and describing a character’s feelings. We have also been busy collecting adjectives to describe the setting. Look at these amazing pictures of our own forests! We used lots of different textures and materials!
Fractions We have been busy identifying equal and unequal parts. It has been so impressive to see so many of you using playdough and paper to cut and make equal and unequal parts of a shape! Can you spot the shapes with the unequal parts?
Merits
Chestnut Arken, Kushika, Saanvi and Safa - For their excellent effort with home learning this week. Well Done! Harshvardhan - For his fantastic effort in the art challenge over the half term! Amazing work and creativity! Aleksander, Neev and Damian - For an incredible and enthusiastic performance of their poems! You created excellent actions and used lots of rhyming words and sounds! Excellent work!! Sycamore Ayoub - for creating and performing a brilliant sound collector poem! You spoke confidently about how you created it! Parth - for an incredible and enthusiastic performance of his poem! You created excellent actions! Otis - for creating a larger than life forest and collecting lots of great adjectives to describe it! Hargun and Venkata - for confidently explaining in a video how a shape can be split into equal and unequal parts! Giselle - for creating an excellent adjective alphabet and silly sentences! Aspen Shoubhit - For reading his sound collector poem beautifully in his video. Well done!! Arathana, Jugaad and Artiom - For using their creative skills to create a lovely picture of the woods for English this week. Parnika and Amina - For their fantastic half term challenge entries. Well done girls!! Nathan - For his super maths this week learning all about fractions. Well done!! Pine Neathra and Rudra- For creating super sound poems in English Jenson and Lucas- For wonderful posters about being kind in RE. Asher- For making an improvement with his home learning, keep it up!
Key Stage 2
Year 3 Reading Competition Children created a new front cover for their favourite book. There were so many creative entries! Here are a few:
Merits this week Topaz merits: Summer, Aarna, Aayat, Enes, Gautam, Samaira, Laasya and Tyler - for their absolutely brilliant quest stories in our recent hot task! They used direct speech, a variety of fronted adverbials and made their stories flow. Rhea, Eliana, Sahasrara, Muhammad and Eliana for their great work on Statistics, tally charts this week in Maths! Sapphire merits: Bhavyasri and Daniyal- For their descriptive quest stories that even included speech and fronted adverbials. Inaya- For her participation in the google meets this week. Gabriel and Ridhi- For identifying what happens to their body when they are not well in R.E. Gabriel even used the term anti-bodies!
Lapis merits: Eduard- For trying really hard in English this week and developing independence skills in his learning. Ibrahim- For trying really hard in his reading and phonics. Trisha F- For trying really hard in her maths work this week. Qaafiyah- For working hard and independently in maths this week. Jonathan- For working hard in maths and English. Turquoise merits: Leila, Mishika, Aariz, Deen, Zainab- For their excellent use of speech in their quest stories. Bryson and Lukhanyo- For their fantastic use of pictograms in Mathematics this week. Victoria- For working so hard on her phonics sounds this week, Shanelle and Natalia- For their consistent good standard of work with online learning this week. Maths In our monthly TTRS battle before half term, the winners were Turquoise! Well done! You did wonderfully! Look out for the next battle in March, on the 11th -17th of March.
English Before we discuss what year 3 have explored this week, we wanted to share some quest stories that the children completed before the half term holidays. All of us teachers were blown away by these incredible pieces of writing. Below are some excellent extracts from some children’s stories:
This week in English we have been exploring the image below.
The children have explored the clues that they can see in this picture. The children came up with some excellent assumptions using the Poppy and Jaspare facial and body expressions to help them.
We have also been able to use ‘Role on the Wall’ to infer a character's feelings and emotions.
RE This week in R.E the children have explored what happens and how they feel when they are not feeling well. We used a children’s book to help us do this. Discussing questions such as: Who looks after you when you are not well? How does your body feel when you are not well? Below is an example of excellent work.
Topic In Topic this week, we have started our new topic on Volcanoes. We used a brilliant website tool called Google Earth to discover some of the world’s most volatile volcanoes! Here are some reports that the children put together sharing amazing facts about volcanoes.
Spanish In Spanish, we have been learning the names of musical instruments in Spanish. We recently completed our end of unit assessment and here are some examples of our work.
Year 4 A very warm welcome back to all of our Year 4 families. We hope you all have had an enjoyable and safe week. We have been very impressed with the effort and commitment that has been put into completing work assigned. Remember daily lessons are being uploaded for mathematics and English to be turned in the same day for marking. Reading Competition Children were asked to design a book cover, we have had so many entries and all children really enjoyed taking part. Here is a selection of their work.
English In English this week, we have started reading our new book ‘The Great Kapok Tree’. The children made predictions about what they thought the book would be about using the front cover. We also wrote setting descriptions to describe the rainforest using their 5 senses.
Maths In Maths this week we have continued our learning on multiplication and division. We applied our knowledge of our times tables to investigate the factors of 36 to create new packaging for new sweets. Here we applied our knowledge of factor pairs and arrays. The children have been working really hard to show their working out to answers and develop their reasoning skills. We have also started our unit on area, where we will be learning what area is and how to calculate it for rectilinear shapes. We have been very impressed with how much children are improving with their ability to reason when answering questions. Keep it up.
Times Tables Rock Stars Tournament
Well done Amber Class for winning the Year 4 TTRS Tournament - you achieved a staggering 5, 977 correct answers. Obsidian, you all tried really hard - well done for achieving 4,549 correct answers. Next week it will be a
battle between the boys and girls. Science, PSHCE, RE and Spanish Last week, children used rainfall data from London and Manaus to make graphs. What similarities and differences can you see between the two areas?
This week in Science we have started our new topic on sound where we will find out about the ear, how sound is made and travels and also complete some investigations into sound and making our investigation fair.
In RE children have started a new unit on Judaism, this week children learnt about Passover and what it means to Jews. Children were asked how they would feel if they were forbidden to eat their favorite foods and who has a right to tell them to do that. What is your favourite food?
Wellbeing & Creative We celebrated the Chinese New Year, children created colourful presentations. They found out about China, customs, how the new year is celebrated, about Chinese zodiac animals and much more. We have learnt so much from their presentations. Here are a few:
This week, we are preparing for a “Spirit of the Rainforest’ exhibition. Children have been inspired by the work of an artist who curated a similar exhibition a few years ago. Here are a few of the pictures contributed to the show. Next week we will have more to show in our exhibition.
Amber Class: Karman - for working very hard to include evidence from a text to back up her answers.
Blanka and Sarpreet for working very hard with their ThirdSpace learning lessons from the very beginning. Alina for her excellent work on solving more complex correspondence problems by applying her learnt skills. Darshini for her excellent video explaining how to make idli for our world food well-being lesson. Shrihan for using a variety of time connectives when making a prediction about our new book The Kapok Tree.
Obsidian Class: Ali- for writing an excellent setting description including different writing
techniques Salvino-for creating a beautiful painting to show the Spirit of the Rainforest. Jivraj and Avni- for their constant hard work in completing their maths work.
Lynne- for working very hard to include evidence from a text to support her answers. Dojo Points: Amber Class Obsidian Class
Year 5 It’s been a lovely week welcoming everyone back after a well-deserved half-term. It’s been great seeing everyone’s smiley faces on the Google Meets and we are now just a week and a bit away from being back in the classroom! It’s been a challenging 7 weeks remote learning, but everyone has worked so hard and has adapted so well and the Year 5 team are so proud. As part of a half-term project for English, the children had to create a comic strip to re-tell the story of our class reader – The Butterfly Lion to either a younger audience or in a different language and there were some fantastic entries!
(An extract from Yusuf’s comic strip, Diamond)
(An extract of Safaa’s comic strip, Emerald) This week in English, we have started our new class reader: The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. It is a poem, set in 18th-century rural England, which tells the story of an unnamed highwayman who is in love with Bess, an innkeeper's daughter. Betrayed to the authorities by Tim, a jealous ostler, the highwayman escapes ambush when Bess sacrifices her life to warn him. This week we have begun to unpick and analyse the figurative language used in the poem and have begun to make inferences about what different phrases mean.
In Maths this week we have continued with our Fractions topic. This week we have been learning to add and subtract fractions, add fractions within with (with different denominators) and add 3 or more fractions.
We have also been making fraction strips to help us gain a better understanding of equivalent fractions. Here are some fraction strips made by Linuka (Emerald Class)
Half Term Reading Challenge: It is World Book Day on Thursday the 4th of March and in preparation for this, we had a half-term reading challenge. Here was what we had to do to enter: We love to read at Wellington! What is your favourite book? Can you create a new front cover for your favourite book? It must be different to the original front cover. It can be as creative as you like! There were some absolutely fantastic entries and we would like to share some here:
This is an amazing front cover adaptation of The Worst Witch by Aminah (Emerald Class) Look at those 3D designs!
A fantastic adaptation of the classic – Oliver Twist by Arhat (Emerald Class)
Look at this brilliant adaptation of the Aladdin book by Muhammad (Diamond Class)
Look at this fantastic adaptation of Not My Fault by Ritisha (Diamond Class)
Class Dojos Emerald Class: Diamond Class
Merits Emerald Class: Rheanna – For her continuous and fantastic attitude to online learning. Amani, Linuka, Heena and Akshita – For their brilliant comic strips to re-tell the story of The Butterfly Lion. Vivaan & Jagdeep – for his well-written analysis and summary of the animated version of The Highway Man Diamond Class: Abdullah, Corinne, Daniel, Manav, Marwa, Satveer, Yasmine, Ritisha, Ryaan and Rohan -for their fantastic attitude and effort to online learning throughout this half term. They have all worked so incredibly hard and their efforts have not gone unnoticed. Well done!
Year 6 For English this week, the children took a break from the class reader and focused on techniques to help with their descriptive writing. They explored one particular picture - shown below. They needed to develop descriptive words, phrases and sentences to describe the picture. Then they needed to think about what might have happened before this image was captured and what happened after.
Here are some examples:
They then explored how to write a descriptive paragraph for the picture that includes tension, suspense and atmosphere. We will be using a technique called D A S H.
In maths, the children have been learning the principles of algebra. The children found it a challenge at first- but are now starting to get it and apply their knowledge for solving problems. They were even writing their own algebraic expression for a particular problem.
They then went on to solving two-step equations.
In RE, this week the children learned about the life of different leaders who have put their beliefs into action. They researched the life and work of one of these inspirational leaders and presented their findings as a fact file. Here is an example of the effort made by some children.
In Topic, they had to research all about the Maya ball game Pok a Tok. They then used this to create an informative and exciting explanation text on the Mayan Game. To enhance their writing, they needed to use causal connectives and other language features to make the game sound dramatic and exciting.
In Science, the children started a new Topic on Evolution and Inheritance. They started looking at inheritance and how characteristics can be passed onto offspring and some are acquired. They were introduced to the concept of chromosomes, genes and DNA. Here are some examples of their work.
During the half-term ‘break’, the children were given a reading challenge competition. Based on their favourite book - they had to create a new front cover for it. It had to be different to the original front cover and they were encouraged to be as creative as they liked! Here are some of the entries.
Class Dojo points: Ruby: 494 Opal: 480 Merits: Ruby: Veer: For his excellent detail and thinking for his science work on inheritance. Jaideep and Vrishin: For their super understanding of solving 2-step equations in Maths. Hrik and Tom: For their super descriptive sentences, that included figurative language, to describe a setting. Jaya: For her excellent Maths work this week on forming equations. Opal: Kriti and Phoebe: for their excellent effort with their reading tasks. Artiom, Bartosz, Anagha for their super effort with forming equations. Yunus: for his persistence and increasing accuracy with solving one-step equations.
