A Message From Miss Quarmby
Hello everyone, I hope you’ve all had a great week – where has the sunshine gone? As we head towards the summer months, we’d really appreciate your help in ensuring that all school uniform is clearly labelled. Jumpers, cardigans and coats are often taken off on the playground or in classrooms, and labels make it much easier for lost items to find their way back to their rightful owners. A gentle reminder as well that, even in the warmer months, our school uniform includes plain black shoes or trainers. Finally (sorry!), we have noticed some very short cycling shorts being worn on PE days. To ensure PE clothing is practical and appropriate for school, children should wear either knee‑length cycling shorts or standard PE shorts. For clarity looking ahead to next year, PE kit will be navy blue only. This year we allowed both black and blue as part of a phased approach, but from September PE kit will be navy only. I will share full details again in Summer 2. To help with dates for your diary, Sports Day will take place on Wednesday 24th June:
- Reception, Year 1 and Year 2: morning session, 9:30–11:30
- Year 3, Year 4, Year 5 and Year 6: afternoon session, starting at 1:00pm
Thank you, as always, for your support. I hope you all have a lovely weekend.
KEY DATES FOR SUMMER 1:
- 11th - 15th May - Year 6 SATs week
- 13th May - Reception trip to Temple Newsam Farm
- 20th May - Year 3 trip to Saltburn-by-the-Sea
- 21st May - House Film Afternoon
- 22nd May - Diamond & Platinum Awards
- 22nd May - Break up for half term
Attendance
This week, finishing in first place with 100% are RLE, RJS and 2CH. In second place are 1LR, with 99.4% and in third place are YNAT with 99.35%. A shout out also goes to 1VM, 3RD and 4CO who have also finished the week above our school target of 96.5%. The whole school attendance this week is 96.58%. 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 half term, pre-school are exploring the artwork of Tony Cragg by creating bright, colourful collages using a range of materials and textures. This week, the children painted pasta sheets in vibrant colours before carefully breaking them into smaller pieces to arrange into different shapes and patterns. Some children chose to group their pieces by colour, while others created beautiful rainbow collages within the shapes. We are so proud of our amazing artists for experimenting with colour and shape and developing the confidence to express their ideas!
This week in Reception, the children have continued to wow the Reception team with their incredible independent writing! The children are confidently using their phonics skills to write words, captions and sentences, showing fantastic progress and growing independence every day! It has been wonderful to see the children’s enthusiasm and willingness to write develop so naturally over the year. Our writing areas and phonics teacher stations continue to be a hive of learning as the children excitedly complete writing challenges throughout the day! We cannot wait to see the amazing writing the children continue to produce, linked to our class texts and experiences throughout the summer term. Well done, Reception!
LOWER SCHOOL
In Year 1 this week, the children have enjoyed writing thoughtful questions in English to ask David Attenborough, showing growing confidence with using question marks correctly. In Maths, we have been creating arrays using practical equipment to explore rows and columns. In Art, we have continued learning about the artist George Seurat and his style of work. The children were very engaged as they planned their own designs, which they will soon create using the pointillism technique.
This week in Year 2, the children wrote amazing sets of instructions on how to stop a train safely, inspired by The Railway Children. In music, they have designed and created their own drums, which we are excited to use in our upcoming class drumming performance. In science, the children have been fascinated watching our caterpillars grow and change each day.
This week in Year 3, we have been solving money problems! We have been looking at key words in questions to help us add, subtract and find change. In Geography, we have looked at how coastlines change. We identified how erosion affects a headland and made storyboards to show how it changes from a crack, to a cave, to an arch, stack and stump!
UPPER school
This half term, Year 4 have been really shining in our Dance PE lessons. We have been focusing on 'line dancing' which has involved a lot of determination and resilience when exploring different dance patterns. In addition, the children have needed to work together when putting sequences together. We have been really impressed with the effort they are putting in and their never ending enthusiasm. Great work Year 4!
Whether on the football pitch or the classroom it's a very successful and productive week in Year 5. On Tuesday four members of Year 5 played a year up and played a vital part of the U11s football team making it to the quarterfinals of the Leeds Schools Champions of Champions. In the classroom, we’ve been hard at honing our journalist skills ready for our newspaper writing next week. In maths, we have been learning all about angles and using these to describe routes. In reading, we have continued learning more about the events and characters in The Skellig. We have focused making inferences with evidence from the text.
Year 6 have shown incredible determination and focus this week as we have completed lots of work in preparation for their SATs next week. They have tackled all the challenges that we have set them and proved how knowledgeable and confident they are. They even managed to demonstrate how much better their grammar knowledge was than Mr Sadler's, when they marked some of his answers to test questions!