Prep School Newsletter

Wellbeing Week Monday 9 March to Friday 13 March

To help pupils take part comfortably, please note that Years 1–6 should come to school in PE kit on Monday (9 March) and bring their uniform to change into after lunch, while Reception may remain in PE kit for the day as usual. On Tuesday (10 March), Years 3–6 should also come in PE kit and bring uniform to change into after lunch. Pupils should wear suitable trainers and bring a water bottle each day.

World Book Day – Thursday 5 March

What a wonderful day of imagination and storytelling it was today as we celebrated World Book Day! The school was filled with a colourful parade of beloved book characters, from brave heroes and magical creatures to mischievous villains and classic storybook favourites. The excitement began the moment pupils arrived, proudly showing off their fantastic costumes and sharing the stories behind their characters. Even the teachers joined in the fun – some arriving at school almost completely unrecognisable in their brilliant disguises!

Today was a joyful celebration of reading for fun and thinking about the magical places that stories allow us to explore! Mrs Hall

What happened in School this week?

Caterpillars

Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum… watch out everyone, here we come! We were so excited to see what everyone dressed up as for World Book Day. The classroom was filled with wonderful characters from our favourite stories, making it a really magical day. As part of our fun retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk, we compared our heights to see who might be the tallest in the class – just like the giant at the top of the beanstalk! It was great fun discovering who reached the highest.

Butterflies

This week we have been enjoying a range of Jack and the Beanstalk themed activities. The children are watching their own magic beans grow with great excitement, and along the way we have been learning how important it is to water our plants and make sure they receive plenty of sunshine. We also had great fun celebrating World Book Day. The children loved coming to school dressed as their favourite book characters and thoroughly enjoyed sharing their favourite stories with their friends.

Reception

Reception have enjoyed so many books this week, starting with Anthony Browne's ‘I Like Books’. We had fun discussing our favourite books and story characters. The children also remembered the different parts of a book, like the front cover, back cover, spine and blurb. Each of the children chose a favourite book from our classroom collection, telling their friends why they chose that particular book. Our book for the week, Pass It On by Sophy Henn, has given us the opportunity to talk about what makes us happy and the importance of passing on our happiness and wonder to others. We loved dressing up, sharing even more stories, entering the book competitions and listening to Helen Peters reading one of her books.   

Year 1 and 2

Year 1 and 2 had a fantastic day out at Drusillas this week, starting with an educational workshop all about Maasai life to tie in with our topics. Some of the children were dressed in traditional clothing while James explained their roles in the village. Everyone was able to handle items from the villages; shoes, hollowed out gourds used to carry milk or water, as well staffs belonging to the elders. They also learnt more about the animals that may be found on safari, as well as discovering while there are differences between their lives and ours, there are also many similarities.  After that we were able to explore the little Maasai village, as well as the rest of the zoo (and of course, the famous train)! The children were so enthusiastic and engaged, showing the education team all that they had already learnt; we were very proud of them.

Year 3

This week Year 3 have been investigating shadows. They enjoyed drawing around their shadows in the playground first thing in the morning, after lunch and again at the end of the day. The children learnt their shadows moved as the earth rotates around the sun. They also discovered that the length of the shadow changes throughout the day being longer in the morning and evening because the sun is low in the sky and shorter in the middle of the day as the sun is at its highest point in the sky.

Year 4

The sunshine finally made an appearance this week, putting big smiles on everyone’s faces. In English, 4S continued their journey through Norse myths, learning how Heimdall brought the divine spark to humans. In history, they explored the origins of local place names and discovered how many of them can be traced back to Anglo-Saxon settlements. As part of Book Week, the class wrote a fantastic chapter for the whole-school story—beginning in Reception, moving through Year 2, arriving with us, and soon to be taken forward by Year 6. The children also had great fun creating their book‑board display, choosing the classic Mr Men and Little Miss series by Roger Hargreaves as their theme and designing their own characters based on their personalities to add to our KC Mr Men world. World Book Day was a wonderful success, with the class looking brilliant in their costumes and thoroughly enjoying an inspiring talk from children’s author Helen Peters. In science, we programmed BBC Microbits to measure sound and to display it as bar chart of LEDs in real time. Finally, many pupils proudly represented the school in a netball tournament and on the football pitch.  

Year 5

Greek history and Chinese art have filled Year 5's brains in the last seven days as they have explored the origins of our alphabet in ancient Greece and created Chinese dragons and painted plum blossom. Multiplying fractions in maths was not as tricky as it sounds because of the maths Year 5 already knew and could use and World Book Day filled Thursday to the brim with competitions, shared writing and book cover creating. The visiting author, Helen Peters, kept us all enthralled for over an hour as she immersed us in the research she does prior to writing  which involved many mysteries and puzzles. A treat of a week! 

Year 6

Year 6 have been learning about Electricity and how to make a variety of circuits. We started by making a simple circuit and progressed from there. We overcame some challenges; is the battery dead or has the filament in the bulb blown? Once we had a solid base to work with, much fun was had with powering fans and seeing how loud the buzzer would buzz!