From the Head
Dear Parents and Carers
As we begin Black History Month, I wanted to take a moment to share with you how we at St Olave’s Prep School are marking this very important time. Throughout October, we will be holding special lessons, assemblies and visits to our newly revamped school library, where children will have the chance to explore and celebrate our wide range of diverse books. This will provide our children with an opportunity to deepen their understanding of Black history and celebrate the richness and importance of Black culture.
However, I also want to assure you that at St Olave’s, our commitment to celebrating and learning from all cultures is not confined to one month. While Black History Month gives us an important, focused moment to reflect, we believe that diversity should be embraced, explored, and woven into every aspect of our curriculum throughout the year. Black history is part of the rich tapestry of experiences, stories, and contributions that make up our world.
Our goal is to ensure that all children see themselves reflected in their learning and feel valued and understood. At the same time, we want them to grow with a genuine curiosity and appreciation for the many different cultures, traditions, and histories that shape our shared human experience. This holistic approach allows us to build a truly inclusive environment where every child’s heritage is celebrated throughout the year.
Thank you for your continued support in nurturing an environment where kindness, respect, understanding and inclusion are at the heart of what we do. I am looking forward to welcoming you into school next week for our Parent Sharing mornings ahead of Parents' Evenings the following week, and looking ahead, we are excited to celebrate World Food Day, our annual cultural celebration with our whole school community on Thursday 17th October, more details to follow! Have a lovely weekend.
Kind regards,
Miss Holloway
Change of Date for Christmas Fayre
We are excited to announce that, due to unforeseen circumstances, our Christmas Fayre will now take place on Friday, 6th December after school, instead of Saturday, 30th November. While we apologise for any inconvenience this may cause, we can’t wait to host a magical Christmas evening for all our families!
Expect delicious food, wonderful stalls, fun activities for both children and adults, a brand new and improved raffle, Christmas shopping opportunities, and of course, a visit to Father Christmas in his grotto!
Thank you for your continued support of our amazing FRSC. Keep an eye out for ways you can get involved and help make this the best Christmas Fayre yet, while still protecting families' precious weekends as we head into the festive season!
The week ahead...
Safeguarding Team
Community News
Harvest Festival
Young Voices
This week, I was fortunate enough to attend the Young Voices 2025 Teacher Workshop, in Central London and have returned with a renewed sense of excitement and enthusiasm for this incredible event!
Please do not forget to put in your orders for tickets and t-shirts as soon as you can, as it is always a sold-out event!
If you are having issues accessing the 2025 content, please let the office know.
Keep singing!
Ms Tyler
Second Hand Uniform Sale 16th October 4.30-6pm
The FRSC will be holding a sale during Parents Evening. Even if you don’t have any appointments on Wednesday 16th October, you are welcome to come to school for the sale - cash or card payments.
Lost Property
We are accumulating quite a few items of lost property that is not named, making it impossible to return. Please make sure everything is named, including wellies, and check from time to time that the name has not fallen off/faded. Thank you.
This week at St Olave's
Cooking in the Allotment
This week has been a juicing week at the allotment. The children had picked all the apples and pears from the gardens so we used one of our juicers to give them a taste of fresh fruit juice. We also added some spinach to give it a lovely dark green colour which put some of the children off! Those that tasted it, on the whole, asked for more! We also had time to time to make a delicious tomato soup with our tomatoes, onions and basil from the allotment. It was very tasty.
Pupil Achievements
Congratulations to Penelope in Year 4 for achieving a distinction in her solo LAMDA acting award!
West End Performances
Primrose (Year 4) and Olivia (Year 3) had an amazing opportunity last weekend, performing on stage at His Majesty's Theatre in the West End in a show called 'Across the Line'. They performed very confidently and we're so proud that they showed such confidence and courage to perform in front of so many people - and Primrose even had a solo singing part! Well done girls!
Nursery
This week the children have become experts at putting on waterproofs and wellies as the rain has been relentless! Undaunted, we have continued to get outside as much as possible to splash, pour and transport the water in many different ways. Another advantage of the wet weather has been the discovery of lots of slugs and snails in the mud kitchen and the children spent time building them a habitat with all the things they thought a slug might need - leaves, water, a friend and even a tv to show Paw Patrol!! In order to warn people about the slug house the children wrote a sign to put beside it saying ‘SLUG HOUSE, BE CAREFUL!!’
In Special Group time this week the children have explored the sounds of percussion instruments, made colourful bead necklaces and collected a huge variety of different leaves.
Reception
The weeks are FLYING by and we’re having so much fun in Reception.
We have welcomed the rain, put on our wellies and puddle suits and splashed in lots of puddles!
This week, we have focused on counting and finding the corresponding object. We have used Numicon to help order the numbers and discuss which number is smaller or bigger.
We have continued to follow the children’s interests and we have created learning opportunities around their love for Kings, Queens, Castles and Knights. The children worked together to build their own castle using the loose parts and they created a wonderful story that they were able to act out through role play.
They have also enjoyed showing off their incredible writing skills when writing a shopping list for their royal banquet (ice cream and sweets were on many lists).
The children are so proud of their work and we have put so much on their WOW wall displays. They are excited to show you these on Monday during the Parent Sharing session.
We are looking forward to seeing lots of you at the Harvest Festival on Friday. The children have worked so hard to learn all the words and actions to their song!
Year 1
The children in Year 1, have worked really hard on their descriptive language skills this week. They have learned what an adjective is and have spent time generating appropriate descriptive words for a variety of contexts. They have applied their new vocabulary to write sentences using expanded noun phrases. We are sure they have been using many flattering adjectives to compliment you home.
They have finished their unit on place value and will now be moving on to applying their addition and subtraction skills. They have shown good understanding on how to find and compare numbers on a number line and counting forwards and backwards from any number up to 10. Please continue to practise these skills at home.
We have started our new Science topic ‘All about me’ where the children will learn to identify, name, draw and label the basic parts of the human body and say which part of the body is associated with each sense. The children have been given a knowledge organiser to share with you at home. We are sure the children will enjoy identifying the different senses they use in their day to day activities.
We have begun practising our poem for the school Harvest Festival performance. We look forward to sharing this with you next Friday.
Year 2
Year 2 have had an excellent week of learning. The children have really impressed us with their efforts in maths. They have practised their recall of number bonds and are beginning to see how related facts and fact families can help us with addition and subtraction calculations. They have also been learning how to set their work out carefully which is very pleasing to see.
Our English work has continued to build on our knowledge of nouns, adjectives and prepositions. We enjoyed writing some lovely descriptions about ‘The Moonlit Owl’ and in the process have added many new words to our vocabulary.
In science, we have been fascinated to learn more about the importance of eating a balanced diet, sharing our food diaries and planning menus with nutritious food choices. Our history lesson introduced primary and secondary sources and how these can be used together to give us information about the Great Fire of London.
We have also been working on a design for a Christmas card and these will be coming home for you to see very soon. We are busy learning songs and a poem for the Harvest festival next Friday, so please may we ask you to keep reading and practising the words at home.
Year 3
A whizzy week in super Sycamore and amazing Apple classes this week! We have been learning about the features of festival poems, spotting alliteration, similes, expanded noun phrases and other descriptive and structural techniques in poems about Diwali. We also split into groups to perform lines from a poem about carnivals using actions, volume and pauses for effect. With all this practice, the Harvest Festival performance will be fab!
In maths this week we have been focusing on addition and subtraction of ones and tens using three-digit numbers. We have explored how this looks on hundreds, tens and ones charts with some of us venturing onto the column method.
RE allowed us to participate in more Diwali discussions as we learned how Hindus celebrate. We found it interesting to hear the experiences of the children who celebrate in class too. Afterwards, we reflected on how each of us celebrates different festivals, who with and how it made us feel to relate this to our theme of belonging.
The preparations for the Harvest festival have started and the children have been practising in class, we hope to see you there next week!
Year 4
Another week has flown by! We have started to learn our Harvest poem and songs, and cannot wait to perform them to you next Friday at our Harvest festival. The children have embraced learning their lines and coming up with actions to go with their sections.
In English, we have concentrated on sentence structure and ambitious vocabulary. We started the week by discussing what ingredients go into a sentence, and learnt about the difference between the subject and the object in a sentence. For the rest of the week, we concentrated on generating vocabulary and writing a setting description about the Nowhere Emporium. Next week, we will start to look at different forms of poetry.
In maths, we have been consolidating our column addition techniques and applying the rules to word problems and reasoning problems. We talked about how important it is to ensure the digits are in the correct place value column. We have continued to practise our mental maths skills through our arithmetic tests.
In history, we had an interesting discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of a republic and emperor lead ruling system. Under emperor rule, the Romans were able to win more wars and expand their empire. We cannot wait for our Roman Day trip next Tuesday. It would be great if children could come dressed up for the occasion along with a raincoat just in case! In science, we had a fantastic investigation to see which food melted the fastest - we were surprised with some of our results and it provoked some thoughtful discussions.
We hope you have a lovely weekend!
Year 5
This week, Year 5 has been busy with a range of exciting activities! In English, we have been focusing on developing our summarising and inference skills, when exploring our class text ‘The Jungle Book’. We have been learning how to pick out the key points from the text and ‘read between the lines’ to understand what the author is really trying to say.
In Maths, we’ve been working on using the column method to confidently add and subtract numbers with more than four digits. We will then be using this skill next week to solve more complex problems, including multi-step and missing numbers.
We’ve also started our new Geography topic, learning all about biomes! The children have been exploring what a biome is and researching different biomes from around the world, discovering the variety of plants, animals, and climates in each one. We are really looking forward to our school trip next Wednesday to Kew Gardens to explore more about this. Please ensure your child has a packed lunch and raincoat with them on Wednesday.
Lastly, the children have already shown great commitment in practising their poem for the Harvest Festival. We are looking forward to sharing this with you all next week.
Have a lovely weekend!
Year 6
What a week Year 6 have had this week! It has definitely been a busy one! In English we have been continuing our learning about multi-clause sentences and how to incorporate semicolons and colons into our writing too. We have created a setting description about an industrial city which we all worked extremely hard on. In maths, we have finished our place value topic by consolidating our understanding of factors, multiples, prime numbers and composite numbers as well as beginning to remind ourselves of the process of long multiplication and division. It has been taxing, but we are showing great resilience if we make any mistakes.
Mrs Isenberg came in on Tuesday to do our first career talk of the year. She spoke to us all about archaeology and how you can become an archaeologist. It was so interesting - we learnt that there are a variety of pathways and branches to work from. She told us all about the tools she uses as well showing us photos of the digs she has taken part in previously.
On Wednesday, we had a fantastic morning where a number of us presented our House Captain presentations for the rest of the school. All the teachers were impressed with our confidence in speaking and sharing our ideas. We cannot wait to find out which responsibilities we have been given! We followed this by creating a periscope in science to look at the fact that light can be reflected off different surfaces in different ways as well as to help us to see things that are beyond our line of sight!
We hope you all have a lovely weekend!
Sport
This week in sports has seen EYFS take on their gymnastic obstacle course. Lots of balancing, jumping, crawling, and rolling skills have been developing. This has been super fun, and the children have loved the courses!
Lower School have been practising a variety of different skills this week, including gymnastic travelling moves where ball rolls, pencil rolls, forward rolls were demonstrated. This then progressed further to cartwheels (some small cartwheels and some more experienced larger cartwheels). The children really enjoyed the challenges! On better weather days we practised some ball skills by playing a game called muddy puddles. The children had lots of muddy puddles (hoops) and had a certain time to clean them all with the magic sponge (tennis balls). They had to roll the balls into the hoops from a far distance. Yet again the children enjoyed the race to clean all the muddy puddles against the clock!
Upper School had their games afternoon lessons consisting of hockey, football, fitness and tag rugby. The skills and games are really starting to take shape and lots of decision making and understanding of games is developing well. Back at school, we have been focusing on problem solving skills in our PE lessons.
Languages
Nursery and Reception started counting objects on their own: we had horses, pencils and cuddly toys. The children have listened to the story of an elephant and a giraffe who would like to change how they look, but in the end they realise they are great as they are. Year 1 worked on numbers from 1 to 15: they learnt a song and they practised their listening skills, writing down the numbers they heard. Year 2 did great work on numbers and months this week and the children are now ready for the next step of their learning.
Year 3 learnt the days of the week and started to build sentences using all the elements learnt this half term; Year 4 focused on recognising vocabulary for places in town and the use of prepositions to give location.
In Spanish, Year 5 continued on the topic of age and practised listening, writing and reading skills. Year 6 children challenged themselves, correcting a “bad” translation and doing a faster reading in Spanish. In Latin, Year 6 has started the new topic of food and started to explore adjectives. Have a great weekend!
Design & Technology
Year 3 Cardboard Castles
Pupils in Year 3 cut out and folded the main structures for their castles and prepared to glue them together.
Year 4 Torches
Year 4 pupils continued to work on the casing for their torches ensuring that the reflectors were sturdy enough for the bulbs to be inserted. They practiced using wire strippers and cutters to prepare the wiring for their circuits.
Year 5 Pop Up Books
This week pupils in Year 5 inserted the backgrounds to their pop up book and some advanced to inserting the first lever mechanism.
Year 6 Playground Structures
Pupils in Year 6 started making their own playground structures. They experimented with card and wood to make structures that fit with their chosen themes.
Music
We’ve continued to focus on learning our Harvest Festival songs in Music lessons this week. The children in Nursery and Reception have worked brilliantly as a team to rehearse their song, ‘Big Red Combine Harvester’ and have added actions - we look forward to seeing their performance next week. The children in Years 1-6 have brought home their song lyrics to learn off by heart, we will be rehearsing without the words in school next week so please practise these ahead of our Singing Assembly next Tuesday.
In our Singing Assembly on Tuesday, the children listened to an excerpt of ‘Peter and the Wolf’ by Sergei Prokofiev. We were amazed to find out that he composed his first piano piece at the age of just five years old and then went on to compose his first opera at the age of nine! As a whole school, we listened to the story and the musical instruments used to portray certain characters. In our Music lessons we discussed why Prokofiev had chosen certain instruments and how they were played to reflect the movement or mood of each character. We looked at each of the instruments and discussed which part of the orchestra they belonged to (strings, woodwind, brass or percussion). We also learnt about how the instruments, particularly the woodwind, are played, taking notice of the different mouth pieces with a double or single reed. You might like to play the piece at home together and listen out for the instruments and the characters they represent!
Our Musician of the Month is Tracy Chapman! The children will enjoy listening to her songs this October and perhaps they could listen to some at home too, which is your favourite? The School Choir have had a throwback to the 90’s this week learning ‘Stop’ by the Spice Girls (with all the actions!) as well as songs from the Lion King and one of our favourites at the moment, ‘I Am’. Have a good weekend and we look forward to seeing you at our Harvest Festival next Friday.