A message from Miss quarmBY
Hello everybody! It was so lovely to see a sea of yellow in school today—thank you for getting involved, even though I know yellow isn’t the easiest colour to find at this time of year! I definitely wished I had a Colton or Leeds kit in my wardrobe this morning. You may have seen my email about cereal boxes for our Harvest celebration. We’re hoping to achieve the domino challenge by lining them from the Small Playground, through the corridors, into the Small Hall, and finishing in the Large Hall—with children lining the route to watch it all come together. Fingers crossed we can make it happen!
Lunchtimes have been full of fun this week—we’ve started our own skipping competition and it’s been wonderful to see children from all year groups playing together. This week, Mrs Downes announced our new Eco Warriors and Young Interpreters. We’re incredibly proud of our young leaders—they’ve taken on very important roles and we’re excited to see them shine. A big thank you to everyone who applied! On Thursday, the children were lucky to have Mr Stout lead our assembly, introducing our new initiative: we’ve become a Parkrun Takeover School! We’re really looking forward to our first Parkrun together on Saturday 19th October, and hope lots of you can join us.
Have a wonderful weekend and I’ll see you all on Monday—let’s see if next week can be our best week for attendance yet! Let’s aim for every single one of us to be in school every day!
Parkrun Partners!
We’re thrilled to share that Whitkirk has partnered with Temple Newsam Junior Parkrun as part of the ‘Parkrun Primary’ initiative! A huge thank you to Kate and Annette from Temple Newsam Junior Parkrun for visiting our launch assembly and helping us kick things off in such an inspiring way. It was wonderful to see everyone getting excited about being active together! We can’t wait to see our pupils, families and staff joining in with the Temple Newsam Junior Parkrun on Sunday 19th October. Let’s get moving and show our Whitkirk spirit - go Team Whitkirk!
Attendance
This week, finishing in first place with 100% are 2CH and 6NT. In second place are 1LR, with 99.57% and in third place are YNAT, with 99.3%. A shout out also goes to RJS, 3RD, 4AB, 5AK and 6OS who have also finished the week above our school target of 96.5%. The whole school attendance this week is 96.87%: can we beat this next week? The only way to do that is if we all come to school as often as we can.
Please remember look at the NHS guide Is my child too ill for school? - NHS (www.nhs.uk) This is used to determine which reasons for absence will be authorised or unauthorised.
let's take a look at what each year group has been up to this week!
EYFS
This week in Pre-school, the children have been busy making and comparing collections of items in Maths. Using the language of 'large' and 'small' as well as 'a lot of' and 'a few,' they explored autumnal treasures from outdoors, including sticks, leaves, and conkers. Miss Tree was so impressed with the children’s growing mathematical vocabulary and how confidently they used new words in their play!
This week in Reception, we have been practising counting using 1:1 correspondence – saying one number name for each item counted. The children amazed the Reception team with their fantastic counting skills and their ability to recall key mathematical vocabulary such as 'accurately' and 'total amount'! We also explored subitising, where the children practised recognising numbers of objects without needing to count them one by one. They enjoyed creating different arrangements of numbers and talking about what they could see. It’s been wonderful to see their growing confidence and enthusiasm for early Maths!
LOWER school
The Year 1 children have loved reading and retelling our new key text, Paddington, bringing the story to life with great enthusiasm. In Geography, they’ve been busy creating their own maps, showing impressive creativity and understanding. During music lessons, the children explored Clair de Lune and were inspired to compose their own soundscapes. We continue to be blown away by their enthusiasm, curiosity, and love of learning!
This week, Year 2 have created 3D maps of the local area, labelling key places such as the roads, the temple, the city centre, and our school. In Maths, we have started our new unit on addition, learning how to add three single-digit numbers. In English, we have begun exploring different types of sentences.
What a busy and wonderful week in Year 3! In Maths, we have continued practising column addition and subtraction. We have consolidated our Science knowledge of movement and the human body and finished the week in St Mary's Church for our Harvest Experience!
UPPER school
This week in English, Year 4 have been busy crafting our spooky setting descriptions, which we are now recording to turn into our very own audiobooks—perfect for Halloween listening! In Maths, we’ve been rounding numbers to the nearest 10, 100, and 1,000, sharpening our place value skills. Over in DT, we baked our final product and had a fantastic time enjoying the results of all our hard work. We also had a visit from MindMate, who spoke to us about managing our big emotions. Together, we created our own emotional toolboxes to help us understand and handle how we feel.
This week in Maths, Year 5 became Math Detectives! We practised unpicking key vocabulary in word problems to work out whether we needed to add, subtract, or multiply. Words such as altogether, left, and groups of helped us decide which operation to use. By spotting these clues and planning our steps carefully, we solved tricky problems with confidence. Everyone did an amazing job becoming confident problem-solvers! Well done, Year 5.
Year 6 have blown all the staff away this week with their perseverance and determination with some challenging long division questions and problems! In order to relax, they've taken up baking and made delicious cakes and muffins!