From the Head
It has been genuinely nice this week to enjoy a relatively calm and settled time in school, just familiar routines, clear expectations and the space to focus properly on learning and behaviour. Weeks like this matter. When children know exactly what is expected of them, and those expectations are reinforced consistently, they are able to relax into school life and be their very best selves. That is what I have seen across the school this week: children responding well, taking responsibility and showing pride in themselves and their work. We have also finally reached the end of January; a long month for everyone! The evenings will soon start to get lighter, energy begins to lift and, quietly, we start to see the impact of the hard work that has gone in over recent weeks. Our exceptional Year 6 children deserve a particular mention. They have shown real maturity and leadership in carrying out their responsibilities around the school and, as they reach the end of their secondary school transfer journey, we now eagerly await their offers so that we can celebrate the many successes they have earned. They are a credit to themselves, their families and the school. I would also like to mention our Year 5 children, who began the first of their 11+ practice sessions with me this week. They approached these sessions with maturity, confidence and trust; exactly the qualities that allow children to do their best. This careful, supportive approach is how we get the very best out of our children, and I am really looking forward to working closely with them over the coming months. This all reminds me why I love our school; working together for the good of our children, overcoming challenges, teaching genuine values and maintaining high expectations. Thank you, as always, for your support and partnership. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend - see you in February! Kind regards, Miss Holloway
The week ahead...
Lunch Menu
Monthly Safeguarding Update
January – Attendance Matters
Did you know that attendance is closely linked to wellbeing and safety? If your child is struggling to come into school, let us know early so we can support you. Children who miss school can be more vulnerable - together we can make sure every child is present, safe, and learning.
Focus on School Values
This week’s school value: Respect At St Olave’s, respect, courtesy and kindness sit at the heart of our school culture. They underpin the calm, safe and purposeful environment we work hard to create for our children every day. This week, we have begun a whole-school focus on reinforcing what respectful behaviour looks like in practice. In assembly, we reminded the children that respect is shown through polite language, careful listening and responding promptly to adults. We also spoke about the importance of using an appropriate tone and understanding that how something is said matters just as much as what is said. We have shared a child-friendly Respect at St Olave’s guide with the children, which clearly sets out our expectations and reinforces that all adults in school have the same authority and should be treated with the same courtesy and respect. Our approach is calm, consistent and supportive. Making mistakes is part of learning, but children are always expected to reflect, repair and try again. As ever, we are grateful for your partnership in reinforcing these values at home. When school and home work together, children feel confident, secure and proud of their school. Thank you for your continued support.
This week at St Olave's
Food Committee - Plates for Change On Thursday, our Food Committee, comprised of children from Year 1 to Year 6, led an assembly linked to world hunger and food poverty. They spoke confidently and eloquently in front of the whole school about why food poverty exists and the impact it can have on us. Inspired by Plates for Change, the committee launched a school-wide competition - more information on this coming home soon!
Sporting Round Up
Year 6 Netball Tuesday saw Year 6 girls take part in a netball fixture at Bromley High School. In a solid display of team work and skill, our Year 6 finished the closely competitive match 2-2. The girls were a credit to the school and are loving their netball, well played girls.
On Wednesday, Years 5 and 6 had two matches each against West Lodge School. Year 6 played against a very strong team losing both games 2-1 and 4-1. Year 5 drew the first game 2-2, and lost the second 2-0. As always, the girls worked their socks off and are developing their knowledge of the game. We look forward to the next netball fixture. A fantastic effort girls, well done!
Nursery
The Little Acorns have had another busy and exciting week exploring their environment and different areas of the curriculum. The awe and wonder of mixing colours is always of interest to our children and they have continued this outside this week. Using powder paints and water they have explored what happens when they mix different quantities and proportions of each and have used their paints to decorate on a large scale. We think you’ll agree these old net curtains have never looked so colourful!
Our children are encouraged to extend their mathematical knowledge everyday through their play and routines. From filling in our self registration grids to check everybody is in school, to crossing off the days on our weekly calendar and counting down the days to the next birthday or weekend our children are able to subitise and recognise small quantities without counting. This skill is an important part of developing early Number Sense and we encourage the children to tell us what they notice about amounts. This week the children have been playing games with the five frames, filling them and removing amounts while noticing patterns.
Reception
5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Blast off! Reception have been preparing for launch as we zoomed into our exciting topic all about space and our solar system. We began by learning about the Sun, Moon and planets, talking about what we might see if we travelled into space and sharing lots of curious questions and brilliant ideas along the way. We explored rockets and discussed how astronauts travel into space, learning about countdowns, launches and what makes a rocket fly. We were lucky enough to see clips of the rocket launch on Wednesday. The children were fascinated by spacesuits and why astronauts need them, which inspired them to design and create their own. As part of our creative learning, the children made their own solar systems, carefully placing planets and adding some wonderfully cheeky aliens who brought lots of smiles and imagination to the activity. Check out our post on X to see our final masterpiece. We also created our own space passports, where the children decided which planets they would like to visit and recorded their ideas, just like real astronauts preparing for a mission. Our Drawing Club was inspired by space too, as we enjoyed reading Aliens Love Underpants. The children wrote their own independent codes, including sentences, red words and numbers, to match their drawings and ideas. We also enjoyed a hands-on (and tasty!) activity by making fruit rockets using marshmallows, mango and strawberries, developing fine motor skills while following instructions. The children’s creativity and excitement have been a joy to see throughout this week. We hope you have an 'out of this world' weekend!
Year 1
This week in Year 1, the children have been incredibly enthusiastic about their learning. As we approach the middle of the year, we are really seeing their maturity and confidence grow, which has been wonderful to watch. In Maths, the children have been developing their estimation skills and have been practising comparing and ordering numbers up to 20. In English, we have been learning how to write clear instructions. The children have focused on making sure their steps are in the correct order and easy to follow. We hope they are just as good at following instructions as they are at writing them! In Topic, we have continued our Geography learning. After exploring the United Kingdom, we have now expanded our knowledge to include the continents and oceans of the world. In PSHE, we are continuing to learn about the Zones of Regulation. This helps the children recognise their feelings and develop strategies to regulate their emotions in a positive and manageable way. We are very impressed with all the fantastic work the children have produced this week and hope they all have a lovely, restful weekend.
Year 2
After thoroughly enjoying ‘Claude in the City’ as our English text, we have been hard at work writing our own Claude adventure stories. We worked hard to use our descriptive skills to let our reader know all about a variety of characters and settings. We also refreshed our memories with speech to make sure we could include this too. We spent the week hard at work to include the usual problems that Claude would encounter and thinking up solutions so that he would end his day tucked up back in his bed reflecting on his brilliant day! In maths, our money topic drew to a close with calculating change and solving two-step problems. The children showed plenty of resilience with these tricky concepts and hopefully will be able to put this knowledge to good use when shopping in the future! Later in the week, we started our new topic of multiplication and division. We hope to see lots of Year 2 children popping up on the TTRS leaderboard in celebration assemblies from now on. We continued our learning about extreme weather with a research task on hurricanes. The children enjoyed learning facts and figures about hurricane Katrina, its size, structure and high speed winds - and how it started out as a tropical storm in the ocean. Some of the children have been following the news reports about recent stormy weather in Devon, which we hope to include in our learning next week. A real highlight of the week was a science investigation where the children made a chocolate road. This caused much excitement. Mrs Farrell came to visit us as we tested the strength of 3 different roads made by combining chocolate, raisins, biscuits and marshmallows. This was all part of our learning about melting and combining materials to change their properties. We compared our investigation to the process that an inventor, John McAdam, went through to build a new road surface. We found out that all 3 roads were pretty strong but the biscuit, marshmallow and chocolate road replicating stones and gravel was the most compact and could take the greatest weight.
Year 3
What a busy week! In English, Year 3 children are greatly enjoying ‘Charlotte’s Web’ and stepped into the shoes (and hooves) of Wilbur by planning and writing a diary entry. They used emotive language to describe Wilbur’s feelings of loneliness and hope, carefully choosing words to show his thoughts and emotions. The children impressed us with their empathy and worked with great focus to produce quality written work. During art, we managed to enjoy a dry day and worked in the allotment to create observational drawings. Using magnifying glasses to see fine details in leaves and flowers, the children greatly enjoyed the opportunity to be outdoors with friends and created beautiful artwork. To finish the week, we enjoyed a fun and practical maths lesson that launched our new unit on length and perimeter. Using real objects around us and of course each other, we measured carefully, compared lengths and perimeters and explored shapes. It was a lively, hands-on way to explore our new topic.
Year 4
We have had a fantastic week in Year 4, full of creativity, curiosity and enthusiasm across the curriculum. In English, the children completed their topic on playscripts by writing an unaided playscript based on Little Red Riding Hood. They were given the opportunity to innovate the story if they wished, and many rose to the challenge with imaginative ideas and creative dialogue. After writing, the children used a features checklist to self-assess their own work. We were very impressed with the quality of the playscripts and pleased to see that most children demonstrated a clear understanding of the key features of a playscript. In Science, the children investigated sound through four short experiments called Sugar and the Speaker, Hanging from Your Ears, Rocks Underwater and Balloon Chatting. They thoroughly enjoyed setting up and carrying out the experiments and thought carefully about their observations. All children then answered questions focusing on what happened during each experiment and what caused the sound, showing thoughtful scientific reasoning. In Geography, the children loved learning about the different layers of the rainforest and enjoyed discovering where different animals live and why, based on the conditions within each layer. There were lots of squeals of excitement when we played an interactive game where the children had to place animals into the correct rainforest layer. In Maths, the children have been practising how to solve multiplication and division problems by reading questions carefully, extracting the important information, choosing the correct operation and solving the problems accurately. This has helped to develop their confidence and problem solving skills. Please can you bring in cereal boxes for their DT project starting next week! Thank you, as always, for your continued support. It has been a pleasure to see the children so engaged in their learning this week.
Year 5
We have loved finishing ‘The Arrival’ in English, an emotive story about migration told only through images. The children worked hard to summarise their understanding of the final chapters and showed off their fabulous inference skills in unpicking the messages from the author/illustrator. We then used this to discuss, plan and write formal letters aimed at making some steps of the migration process easier and less stressful. Maths saw us delve into calculating with negative numbers; using the four operations and becoming au fait with the rules around double negative and double positive numbers. We also started to explore averages with a focus on calculating the mean which allows us to test our addition and division skills in a different way. Games was absolutely glorious on Wednesday afternoon and the children showed off their netball skills under the afternoon sun. They love playing netball and getting their heads around the rules for different positions - we had some wonderful interceptions, great use of space and some very ambitious shots!
Year 6
This week, we have continued to explore texts inspired by World War Two. Earlier in the week the children drew upon our work over the last few weeks to create a powerful introspective piece. Within their writing the children demonstrated the use of subtle transitions to create flashbacks, amplification, semi-colons and varied sentence structures. The resulting pieces were powerful and emotive. Towards the end of the week, we began to explore our second text, Rose Blanche. We started our topic by inferring meaning from images using evidence, exploring emerging themes and moral choices. In maths, we were all things algebra. We explored and deepened our understanding of formulae and equations to support us when solving problems with unknown values. Deepening our understanding of rules - how to set out equations accurately and working systematically - supported our work. At the beginning of this week, we were fortunate to have the children present their alphabet projects. We have been incredibly impressed with the effort, buzz and calibre of work the children have produced- a very big well done! In history, we learnt about what life was like for evacuees in WW11 and how propaganda was used in Britain to encourage families to evacuate their children and help with the war effort. On Friday, we said, ‘See you soon!’ to our lovely Mrs Malham by throwing a class baby shower. Thank you all for sending in the children’s baby photos. We all had a lovely time celebrating Mrs Malham and her next exciting adventure. We all wish Mrs Malham the best and can not wait to meet the baby once they are here!
Outdoor Learning
This week the children have been busy with their project work as the weather has not been great. The Nursery and Reception children did manage to get out and dig over some of the beds ready for the Spring. We also carried on picking up the leaves to put into our mulch. The children have spotted lots of creatures including a large spider (see picture below!). Let’s hope for nicer weather next week.
Languages
This week Nursery and Reception revised the core vocabulary, also adding on extra members of the family: we talked about uncles, aunties and cousins; and we carried on reading “Jaques et le haricot magique”. Year 1 added more family members to their repertoire and, very importantly, also tackled a tricky grammatical concept: the children spotted the difference between singular and plural nouns. Year 2 learnt to describe their eyes and hair; whilst Year 3 learnt to describe the weather in different seasons. Year 4 studied how to say the different types of TV programs in French and how to use “je regarde” in a full sentence about what they watch. The children played the battleship game to help cement their understanding of opinions about TV programs. In Spanish, Year 5 learnt how to talk about their teachers using adjectives that end in -o/-a. Year 6 carried on translating a complex text: the children did a marvellous job using their Spanish knowledge and skills and demonstrated maturity with their team work effort.
Design & Technology and Computing
Quiz of the week, ask your child if they can explain what the words in bold mean. Year 3 Electrical Posters Pupils in Year 3 selected their poster bases and mounted these onto card. They also referred to their mind map to start researching the Roman facts that they will include on their poster. Year 4 Slingshot Cars This week Year 4 learned about pavilion structures and they experimented with drawing these from different perspectives. Year 5 Doodlebot In Year 5, pupils completed their doodle bots, tested them for stability and added extra features to make their products individually customised.
Year 6 Microbit Arcade Year 6 pupils completed the wiring and contact switch for the Micro:bit scoreboard to trigger a change in score.
Computing highlights Year 1 learned about editing images and they practiced using online software to edit a photo. Year 2 learned about abstraction and they applied this to coding by using loops in simple code block activities. Year 3 pupils learned about communicating responsibly over e-mail and digital communication platforms as well as the CC and BCC functions in e-mail. Year 4 pupils added more sub pages to their collaborative website about weather prediction. They also learned about extreme weather prediction and the sensors used to do this. Year 6 experimented with brute force hacking by methodically cracking 3 digit codes.