And just like that, our first half term draws to a close! Read on to find out what a jam-packed month we've had - and what is coming up after the half term break.
Dates for your diary:
- Wed 25th October - Break up for half term
- Mon 6th November - School re-opens
- Wed 8th November - school photos (individual)
- Wed 8th November - library visit (4U)
- Mon 13th November - Odd sock day & launch of Anti-bullying week
- Tue 14th November - Flex Dance Anti-bullying Dance Workshop
- Wed 15th November - library visit (4S)
- Mon 20th November - Cross country (Ainthorpe)
- Wed 22nd November - library visit (3CM)
- Wed 29th November - library visit (3H)
- Wed 29th November - WINTER WONDERLAND
- Thu 30th November - Flu Sprays (Rec - Y6)
- Mon 4th December - Boccia (Quay Academy)
- Mon 11th December - DRET Carol Service at Hull Minster
- Wed 13th December - Hull's Festival of Carols
- Wed 20th December - Christmas Dinner Day & Christmas Movie Nights
- Fri 22nd December - Break up for Christmas holidays
- Mon 8th January - Staff training day
- Tue 9th January - School re-opens
Good luck on your retirement Mrs Loftus!
After an amazing 23 years at Wold Academy, Mrs Loftus has decided to take a well-earned rest and enjoy retirement. Mrs Loftus has worked in a variety of roles over the years, but more recently has been the welcome face for our youngest children in the Beehive and Nursery. We know that parents have appreciated her kindness and patience as they have handed their 2 and 3 year olds into her care.
From everyone at Wold Academy, we thank Mrs Loftus for her hard work and dedication to our school for the last 23 years - she has made such a difference to so many young lives! We hope that we see her again - maybe coming in to support readers or attending future events (although we know that she will be busy relaxing!)
Goodbye and good luck Mrs Loftus - we will miss you!
F1 and Beehive
This term we have had a lots of fun talking about Autumn. F1 went on an autumn hunt looking for leaves and sticks which we then used for out art topic printing. The children even had a play throwing the leaves around - it was beautiful to see them enjoying themselves. The Beehive and F1 then had a super spooky story afternoon when the parents were invited to attend. Everyone had great fun and a few parents even had a dance to 'Funny Bones'.
We are looking forward to next term where the children will be learning about different types of homes and the planets in our universe.
Thank you for your continued support
F2
We cannot believe the end of our first half term is here so soon. Time flies when you're having fun!
This half term we have become 'Little Red Hen' experts in our Talk For Writing sessions. We have even been introduced to the term 'innovating' and enjoyed innovating parts of the story. Next half term we will learn the story 'Whatever Next' during our Talk For Writing sessions. In Maths we have been busy following repeating patterns to create the Hull Fair Ferris wheel, as well as using our fast eyes to subitize and using autumn treasures to compare groups of objects.
During our CKC topic time, we have enjoyed experimenting with our voices in music, sharing special items from when we were a baby during history, exploring different materials and textures to create fairground scenes in Art and were looking forward to doing some Halloween baking for Design and Technology.
We have created a little wish list of things that we would like to enhance our provision. If you have any of these things at home that you no longer use, we would love to take them off your hands as they would be very well loved in F2: plastic/wooden small world toys (castles, farms, houses, vehicles, figures etc...), small high heeled shoes for dressing up, costume jewellery for dressing up, pans, utensils, baking trays etc, old mobile phones/laptops/cameras, unused diaries/notebooks/calendars, unwanted pens/stationary, jigsaws, cars (hot wheels types), outdoor wheeled toys (balance bikes, go carts, scooters etc).
Thank you so much! Enjoy half term ☺️
Year 1
What a super busy half term we have had! The children have worked incredibly hard and should be very proud of how they have settled in to Year 1.
Over the past few weeks, we have enjoyed learning about Howard Carter and how he discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun. We loved having Mrs Riley visit our year group and tell us all about Ancient Egypt. She brought some artefacts from Egypt for us to explore, and we even got to hold a piece of rock from the Valley of the Kings! Please see our photos below.
In Geography we have continued to look at maps and have created our own maps of our school grounds. We have been on an Autumn walk in science, where we looked for evidence that the season has changed. We had to use our skills in observation to be scientists here!
In T4W, we have enjoyed writing about Hull Fair and in maths, we have started to look at number bonds within numbers up to 10. If possible, please encourage your child to practise this skill on Numbots, to help them with this.
Next half term, we are looking forward to hearing all about Christian Baptism from some special visitors in RE and will be starting a new project in Design and Technology.
Year 2
The children in Year 2 have had another great month.
In T4W we completed a new journey story with the star having a journey through school this time. We are currently writing a non-fiction leaflet linked to our geography topic to persuade people to visit Egypt.
In maths we have moved through addition and subtraction and are now working on multiplication and division which we will be continuing after half term. The children are learning to use more formal methods alongside using concrete resources to help them and they are really aspiring to move their learning forward. We would also like to thank all the parents who have encouraged the children to go on Numbots; we know that playing games which help them with their number bonds will also help with all the maths we do in class.
In science we have continued learning about what plants need and we set up our own experiment to test this. We looked at making predictions, how we can make it a fair test by only altering one variable (in this case the children chose water as their variable) and then made observations. We found that plants definitely do need water as by week 3 the plant with no water had drooped and begun to get black on the leaves. As a lot of children had predicted the plant would die, we were very happy to see we were correct.
In history we have compared the story of Cheng Tang from the Shang dynasty and Guy Fawkes to see how their rebellions differed. In geography we compared the climate in the UK with the climate in Egypt. We then used the information gathered in this to help us write the leaflets mentioned above.
In music, we have worked in pairs to create a 4 beat rhythm using our body as percussion instruments. We all did really well, as well as having great fun! We have also continued to really enjoyed our forest school - even with the terrible weather we have had.
Thank you as always for your support and have a lovely half term holiday - the children have definitely earned it!
Year 3
What a fantastic start to the Autumn Year 3 have had!
In Talk for Writing, Year 3 finished off their warning tales and demonstrated the use of adverbs, similes and powerful adjective choices to create description that captured the reader's attention and made for some rather spooky moments!
In Talk for Reading, we continued our look at Rosa Parks and compared her life to that of Martin Luther King, with the children making comparisons between the lives of both figures and how the two texts represented their struggle for equality. The children showed an awareness of how the text used language choices to instill a message of determined struggle that we all took inspiration from.
In art, we looked at sculpture and how artists such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth used abstract concepts to challenge what we see as a human form by using familiar shapes to create weird and wonderful sculptures. The final pieces were simply excellent and the children enjoyed demonstrating skills such as cutting, making slip and rolling the clay to make their chosen shapes.
Our music lessons have begun in earnest and the children have been learning how to play the violin. We have been plucking the strings and using the bow, learning how to create different sounds from the same instrument, as well as playing several pieces after just a few weeks! We would like to thank Mr Wright for the work he has done with the children so far and we cannot wait to see how much the children improve as the year goes on.
In history we looked at the ancient culture of Mesopotamia. The children looked at the legend of King Gilgamesh and learned about the first written laws laid down by King Hammurabi, making comparisons between the consequences given for crimes in 1750 BCE and today and deciding whether or not the punishments in Ancient Mesopotamia really did fit the crime! We also learned about the role of women in Mesopotamian society and tried our hand at writing in Cuneiform, the very first written language.
We hope the children have a wonderful half term, they have worked tremendously hard over the course of the last eight weeks and the work they have produced suggests a bright year is ahead! As always, we would like to thank everybody for taking the time to join us at parents' evening, it was wonderful to meet you all and we look forward to what we are sure is going to be a fantastic second Autumn term!
Year 4
Year 4 have had a great first half term.
In Talk for Writing we have enjoyed creating our own adventure stories and have written some superb pieces. Whilst in Talk for Reading we have had a real focus on improving retrieval and comprehension skills through the text 'King of the Cloud Forest', which we have enjoyed massively so far.
In art we have focused on Van Gogh and his amazing work, looking at the techniques he used and his style. We finished our unit imitating his work with a focus on one point perspective.
We have worked extremely hard on our times table practice and impressed the teachers with our recent scores in the practice MTC. In our maths lessons we have practised column addition and subtraction with a great focus on exchanging.
We’ve now finished our work on The Alps and are looking forward to creating our information text about everything we have learned.
We have had a great half term and are all looking forward to a well-earned break.
Art
Thank you so much for the Autumn strips that you created. These have been sent to #WeMadeThisHull to contribute to their autumnal patchwork quilt which will be displayed in the city centre soon ... more details to follow.
We had so many contributions that they could not all be sent in, so Miss Harrison created a beautiful Autumn display within school too.
Year 5
As we are coming to the end of the first half term in Year 5, it must be said that the children have certainly grown in maturity and are rising to the expectations of this year group. It was lovely to meet so many parents and carers at parents evening; it is wonderful to know we have your support and that we are working together in your child’s learning journey. We must also comment on the success of the children during their bikeability sessions this half term. The bikeability teachers were extremely complimentary about the children and how they listened with enthusiasm and responded to instructions and advice quickly. As a result, all children who took part made good progress and will have received a badge and a certificate with advice on their next steps. Well done everyone!
Since the last newsletter, we have started our history module on the Mayan civilisation and the children are finding it fascinating. They have particularly enjoyed learning about Mayan temples, where sacrifices were made to their Gods and how Mayans believed in reincarnation.
In English, we have been doing some cross curricular writing, drawing together our geography knowledge on deforestation, with formal letter writing skills. The children have written a formal letter to the Brazilian government trying to persuade them to stop deforestation and climate change - the letters they have written are certainly very compelling. In reading, we started a fictional text on 'The House with Chicken Legs' by Sophie Anderson, which has invoked some interesting responses from the children. The children are particularly interested in how the author has made the house itself a character with feelings and empathy; this has ignited their imagination. With this in mind, it would be wonderful if children could visit our local Fred Moore Library over the half term and take some pleasure in choosing a reading book; it would be lovely to share this with us on their return to school after the half term.
Year 6
We are delighted to report that the majority of our Year 6 pupils have maintained positive attitudes and resilience towards their learning throughout this half-term.
The children have produced outstanding pieces of writing based on their geography unit: Brazil. They have embedded their writing skills that they developed earlier on this year in the 'Mountain Troll' unit: complex sentences, formal language and parenthesis - well done!
Our pupils have made rapid progress in mathematics, evidenced in their mock arithmetic tests. We are proud of their mature attitudes towards testing and how they respond to feedback in order to improve in every lesson.
During our 'Core Knowledge Curriculum' sessions, the pupils have been immersed in history, geography and R.E. In history, children have shown a depth of understanding about the early man and migration out of Africa. Children have recalled prior learning, including that of the Romans, and how this linked to migration throughout history.
The children thoroughly enjoyed our Year 6 art sessions towards the end of the half-term, where they studied a movement called De Stijl. They worked collaboratively to create a sculpture, using 3D nets, which enhanced their mathematical knowledge of shape.
We would like to congratulate the Year 6 pupils for, generally, a great start to their final year at Wold. We look forward to continuing this journey after the well-earned half-term break!
Mental Health Matters!
In The Launch Pad, the children had great fun celebrating World Mental Health Day by thinking about how they have positive connections. As you can see from the new display we created, there were lots of good discussions and some fabulous ideas! The children recognised that positive connections in their lives support everything they do and help them succeed.
Some children also wanted to share what they do to support their own self-care and mental health with other Launch Pad users, these peer discussions allow the children to understand that they are not alone, and it can be very empowering for the children to be positive peer role models.
We are continuing with the theme of positive self-talk after half term and will be exploring the 'Power of I Am'. We look forward to sharing this with you next Month.