From the Head
Dear Parents and Carers
What a wonderful week we’ve had at St Olave’s! Our parent sharing mornings have been a great success and it’s been such a joy to see so many of you engaging with your children’s learning. Thank you for making the time to join us.
This afternoon, we had the pleasure of celebrating our beautiful Harvest Festival. I’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to Mrs Aldridge, Miss Penney and all the staff for preparing the children so well for this special occasion. Their hard work truly shone through, and the children were an absolute delight; thank you to those of you who joined us at All Saints' Church and for your generosity in donating items for the Greenwich Food Bank.
Looking ahead, we’re excited to welcome many of you next Thursday for our World Food Day celebration. It’s always a highlight of the year, as our children get to experience delicious dishes from around the world, generously provided by you, our amazing families. We can’t wait to taste the incredible variety you always bring to this event.
Next week also brings our Parents’ Evenings on Tuesday and Wednesday. These meetings are such an important opportunity to connect with your child’s teacher and discuss your child's progress. We look forward to seeing you and working together to support their continued development.
Finally, as we enter this busy time of year, preparations for the Christmas Fayre are beginning. We appreciate your support in helping make this festive event a success - whether through donations or volunteering, every bit helps to create a special event for our school community.
Thank you, as always, for your wonderful support. We couldn’t achieve all of this without the commitment and generosity of our families. Have a lovely weekend and I look forward to seeing you next week.
Kind regards,
Miss Holloway
The week ahead...
Safeguarding Team
Community News
Christmas Cards
This week your child brought home a Christmas design with all the information as to how you can place an order for cards, wrapping paper and notebooks, etc. This is a wonderful way to stay in touch with loved ones over the holiday by sending an original card, and it’s also a really easy way to help raise a little extra money for our wonderful school.
You must place your orders online and then the form must be returned to the class teacher so we can send the design away. If you place an order online but do not send the form in, you will be initially charged but have nothing to show for it. The deadline to return these forms is Monday 14th October so we have enough time to cross check all orders before they are collected.
Many thanks
Mrs O’Sullivan
This week at St Olave's
Year 4 trip to Kent Life
On Tuesday, Year 4 visited Kent Life as part of their Roman topic. We dressed up in Roman costumes to get into the spirit of the day, and what a day we had! We had seven fantastic activities throughout the day including finding out about life in the Roman times - did you know we have the Romans to thank for bringing grapes to Britain? We met a very strict centurion and created the famous ‘tortoise’ formation with our shields and swords. As well as this, we learned about Roman legacies including straight roads, aqueducts and central heating, and we perfected our battle cries with Boudicca! We ended our day by making our own leather amulets. The sunshine even came out for us, and all of the children were fantastic ambassadors for St Olave’s.
Year 5 trip to Kew Gardens
On Wednesday, Year 5 took a trip to Kew Gardens as part of our geography topic on biomes. We managed to explore lots of Kew and definitely got our steps in! Our favourite part would have to be the Princess of Wales Conservatory as we travelled through the tropics to deserts within the different sections. Having the opportunity to explore these different environments, atmospheres and plants helped to not only develop our understanding of our geography topic, but also brought our two texts, The Jungle Book and The Explorer, to life.
Harvest Festival
This afternoon saw our annual Harvest Festival! Thank you to all our friends and family who joined us - it was lovely to see so many of you there! The children from Nursery all the way up to Year 6 have worked very hard to learn their year group poems and Harvest songs over the past couple of weeks and they performed brilliantly! We hope you enjoyed it. Thank you all for your generous donations for the Food Bank.
5-a-side Football Tournament
Last Friday, Year 5 and 6 children took part in an 5 aside football tournament organised by the ISA. We played some really good football and dominated all the matches in the group stages, conceding only 1 goal during our 4 group-stage matches. We progressed through to the knockout stages where we unfortunately came unstuck and lost. The children performed brilliantly across the day and have a bright future of football ahead of them. Well done on a great day everyone!
Nursery
The children in Little Acorns have been creating again this week and have been inspired by their fascination with buses… we showed them how to attach wheels using split pins so that they can ‘go round’ just like in the song. The children have also added numbers and destinations to the wooden vehicles in the classroom and we have Bus Stops popping up all over the place with a wide variety of passengers waiting to climb aboard!
The children continue to be interested in all things minibeast and were delighted to find a large spider had fallen into one of our pencil pots and couldn’t get out. We took a closer look using our visualizer, counting the legs and looking carefully at the parts of the spider before releasing it into our outside area.
Special group time this week has seen the children making patterns with the peg boards, sorting objects into rhyming groups and playing a giant game of dominos.
We would like to thank all the parents who came into class on Monday to see some of the wonderful creations the children have made since arriving at school in September. The children were so proud to show you their individual boards and WOW books. We look forward to seeing you again at our Parent Meetings next week.
Reception
Happy Friday!
Thank you for coming to Parent Sharing morning. All the Reception staff were taken aback by how proud the children were to share their work with you. They have worked so hard and it was a joy to hear them explain what they have been up to with so much confidence and pride.
The children have been very busy this week, writing birthday cards and practising forming the letters that they have learnt during their phonics lessons. It has been lovely to hear about their families as they write the cards. We have been so impressed with their ability to recognise the initial sound in the words and apply them independently.
We have had an ‘out of this world’ creation station theme this week as the children have shown a great interest in rockets and space. They have made some fabulous rockets, thinking carefully about the different parts of the rocket and what it’s used for. To make the rockets, the children have been developing their fine motor skills. We will continue to focus on using scissors to cut accurately in a range of different activities throughout the next few weeks.
I’m sure many of you would agree that the Harvest Festival was a HUGE success. The children sang their hearts out and it was just magical!
We’re looking forward to seeing you all at parents evening next week.
Have a great weekend.
Year 1
We have had another wonderful week in Year 1! The children were extremely excited to invite their parents into school on Tuesday morning, to share some of their learning. We hope you enjoyed looking through their books and talking to them about all of the amazing things they have done.
The children have enjoyed their week looking at humorous poems and identifying rhyming words. We have been reading the book Oi Frog! by Kes Gray. The children have found it rather amusing and enjoyed creating their own versions of the story.
In Maths we have started our unit on addition and subtraction. We have looked at part-whole models and how to write number sentences as a fact family. We have then used our number bond knowledge to help us add. Please continue to practise number bonds to 10 at home.
In science, we have continued to learn about the human body focusing on our eyes and sight. The children should be able to talk to you about the basic parts of the eye and their functions. In history, we began to look at space travel and the moon landings. They were really surprised to hear about all the different animals that have travelled out to space! Next week, the children will be designing their very own rockets and space stations. Please send in any empty cardboard boxes and kitchen roll tubes for them to use to build their models in Thursday’s lesson.
We were very proud of the children and their fantastic performance at the Harvest Festival. We hope you enjoyed it too.
Year 2
It was so lovely to welcome you into our classrooms this week for our Parent Sharing Morning. The children loved showing off their work and we’re sure you will agree they have had a super busy half term! We saw you again on Friday for our Harvest Festival, and what a performance! We hope you enjoyed it.
Taking inspiration from Edward Lear, we planned and penned our own limericks in English this week. We had to consider rhyming words, follow the rhythm and be a little bit silly too! We’ve had a focus on addition in maths, using our number bonds knowledge to add to the next ten and beyond. Please continue to support your child to know their number bonds backwards and forwards to aid fluency.
We had a wonderful art-filled afternoon on Wednesday, where we used the various techniques we have been practising to create texture, to draw our own toys. We had everything from lions to penguins, and ninjas to puppies, and it was brilliant to see the children use lots of ways to ‘show’ how their toy felt.
Year 3
Another busy week in Year 3 has flown by. Our week began welcoming you all to our parent sharing morning. We know that all our children were proud to show off the work they have done so far this year and share the knowledge they have already gained.
This week in Science, we extended our knowledge of rocks by looking at how fossils are formed. The children came to learn that fossils are imprints of animals and plants from thousands of years ago. They could also confirm that fossils are found in sedimentary rocks. The process of fossilisation was brilliantly explained by all.
In RE this week the children continued their topic of belonging and applied it to the Hindu festival of Diwali. We tried to immerse ourselves in the Diwali spirit by creating colourful rangoli patterns, making and writing Diwali greeting cards and listening to Diwali music.
We also spent some time practising for our Harvest Festival performance. We rehearsed songs and our poem “Harvest Moon” to ensure that we were loud, clear and using actions. We hope you enjoyed our performance!
Year 4
It has been such a busy week in Year 4! The highlight of our week was our fantastic trip to Kent Life - everyone looked brilliant in their costumes and we learnt so much about Roman Britain. We were very proud of all of the children’s behaviour and their questions during the day.
In English, we’ve begun looking at Haiku poems and learning about their unique syllabic structure. We adapted noun phrases to fit the structure and found it quite challenging, but fun. Once we understood the pattern, we composed several Haikus about Pokemon characters and ended the week by writing about the season of autumn. We cannot wait to publish these next week for our corridor display. In maths, we continued to consolidate our column subtraction learning. We learned how important it is to start by taking away from the one’s column as it can affect the whole answer if we do not exchange in the correct place value column. We applied our learning to multi-step problems, and to a fun football subtraction game.
In science, we wrote up our results and drew conclusions following our melting investigation last week. We discussed how the quicker the food melted, the lower its melting point is. In PSHE, we discussed how we feel when we receive rewards and consequences, and it can impact our behaviour.
Our week ended with our wonderful Harvest Festival on Friday. Thank you all for coming, and we hope you enjoyed it. We hope you have a lovely weekend, and we look forward to seeing the children for our final week before half term.
Year 5
Year 5 had a fantastic first trip out to Kew and thoroughly enjoyed exploring the numerous conservatories. We were blown away with how humongous some of the plants were and even saw a plant that was around before the dinosaurs!
In English, we have been honing our editing skills. We reflected on our big writes from the previous week. We have focused on uplevelling our work to include rich description, literary devices and ensuring that our writing flows well. We developed our understanding of fronted adverbials to aid with flow and to create cohesion between our paragraphs. Finally, the children worked on publishing their excellent descriptions. Within maths, we developed our understanding of the use of inverse operations and then applied this to multi-step word problems. We even looked at extending our understanding by applying the use of algebra to work out missing values - we were very impressed with their resilience to challenge themselves!
During PSHE, we explored our rights and responsibilities as a citizen of our country and a member of our school. We focused on how we uphold rights for ourselves and others through our actions.
We hope you all enjoyed our Harvest Festival and wish you all a lovely weekend!
Year 6
Did you know research has shown that only 7% of our communication consists of words, 55% is attributed to body language and 38% to tone of voice? On Tuesday, the children found this out during a very useful workshop led by Sarah from Talk the Talk. It was a fast-paced and engaging ‘Confident Communication Workshop’ that developed the children's oracy skills and spoken confidence. They explored different modes of communication, developed effective use of structuring in short talks and presentations and applied persuasive techniques to get their message across confidently and effectively. Effective communication is a life long skill and not only will the children have collected some top tips for any upcoming interviews, they will have also gained some tips for any future endeavours.
In science this week, the children enjoyed exploring how shadows change. After creating a block shape using cubes (this was a particular highlight for some) the children used a torch as a light source and measured the shadows created. They made sure it was a fair test by only changing one variable, in this case it was the moving of the object/shape. They recorded their results and plotted these on a line graph, making it easier to analyse and to show trends.
In history, the children have begun a research project about the Maya Civilisation. The children were put in partners or threes and were given specific objectives to research. For example, everyday life, trade, cities and architecture and maths and writing. This gives the children the opportunity to learn from each other by sharing strategies about computer programmes and choosing appropriate websites. Once the research is completed, they will present their learning to the rest of the year group.
Thank you for supporting your child today at the Harvest Festival. The Haves and the Needs poem recited by the children so effectively today reminds us all of how fortunate we all are. We look forward to next Tuesday when the children will find out their positions of responsibility for Year 6. We also know that with your partnership and encouragement that all the children will leave a legacy making the best of all the opportunities they are given.
Wishing you all a happy and peaceful weekend!
Outdoor Learning
This week the children have been busy cooking the last of the tomatoes to make a delicious soup. This meant that we started to clear most of Poly 1. There are still a few chilli peppers left and the older children tasted a chilli heatwave which is a variety of cayenne pepper, so quite hot! The younger children put up a new polytunnel kindly donated by one of our parents and it was quite a challenge considering they did it with no instructions! We also moved some wire to build a new cage for the sweetcorn. It is this time of the year when we start to dig over lots of our beds to prepare them for next year.
Languages
It's been another lovely week filled with learning and fun in the Languages Department.
Nursery did more work on numbers and they listened to a sweet story called “Bonne nuit”, in which Molly puts to bed all her cuddly toys. Year 1 did some impressive work on numbers, writing them down in French and adding some lovely colours; Year 2 put together all their learning on months and numbers and started to work on birthdays. We played “Jump Frog”: whenever the children heard their date of birth they had to jump from their seat. Year 3 did some revision work on transports with fun games.
In Spanish, Year 5 learnt the months and numbers up to 31. The children are now ready to learn their birthdays. Year 6 children practised their writing skills and they wrote some sentences on their own appearance, using the three tenses that we have learnt this half term. The children have also worked on a reading comprehension, comparing three different Spanish texts. Hope everyone enjoys the weekend!
Design & Technology
Year 3 Cardboard castles
This week pupils experimented with turning flat paper and card into conical shapes that can be used to replicate the roofs of cylindrical castle turrets. They continued to assemble the main structure of their castle into a 3D shape.
Year 4 Torches
Pupils in Year 4 completed the assembly of their circuits and tested these for functionality.
Year 5 Pop Up Books
Year 5 inserted two of the pop up structures into their pop up books.
Music
This week we have been very busy polishing our performances for Harvest Festival and all our hard work certainly paid off this afternoon! It won’t be long until we start learning our Christmas songs and we can't wait!
There are lots of children who are ready to play a musical piece to the school in our upcoming assemblies. If your child learns an instrument either in or out of school and would like to play to their class or to the school in an assembly, please do let me (Mrs Aldridge) know and this can be arranged. Have a good weekend!