From the Head
What a fantastic week it has been at St Olave’s! From the moment we welcomed families into school for our Parent Sharing Mornings on Monday and Tuesday, the energy and enthusiasm across the school have been truly inspiring. It was wonderful to see so many parents enjoying time in the classroom, watching their children engaged in learning, and experiencing firsthand the vibrancy of our curriculum. Thank you to everyone who joined us – these moments of connection between home and school are so valuable.
Tuesday afternoon brought another highlight with the Year 5 and 6 Spring Instrumental Concert. Our talented musicians took to the stage, showcasing their dedication, hard work and love of music. From solo performances to ensemble pieces, the concert was a testament to the strength of our performing arts provision and the commitment of our children and music staff. A huge well done to all involved – we were so impressed by your confidence and skill!
And then, of course, there was World Book Day – a true highlight of the year! St Olave’s was brimming with literary magic as we welcomed an array of inspiring authors, who brought books to life and ignited imaginations across the school. From interactive storytelling sessions to workshops that had children thinking like real authors, it was a joy to see the power of books in action.
The day started with what can only be described as the best World Book Day costume parade St Olave’s has ever seen! The creativity and effort that went into the costumes were phenomenal – from classic literary characters to clever, homemade creations, it was a feast for the eyes. The joy on the children’s faces as they proudly paraded in their costumes was a perfect reminder of why we champion reading for pleasure. Thank you to Miss Kiely for organising such an inspiring week for the children and staff.
And yes, for those wondering – I did eventually find my hat, and I can confirm that no rabbits were harmed in the making of the photos below!
Thank you to our staff, children, and families for making this such a memorable week. The excitement, joy and sense of community that filled the school were wonderful to see – and a testament to what makes St Olave’s so special.
Have a lovely weekend and I look forward to seeing you next week as we get ready to wish our Year 5 children and staff team a fantastic residential in Swanage!
Kind regards, Miss Holloway
The week ahead...
Lunch Menu
Safeguarding Team
This week at St Olave's
St Olave's Book Week
We’re delighted to share that our book fair raised £2,096.53, earning £1,257.92 in Scholastic rewards!
Our Book Week celebrations featured inspiring visits from Tom McLaughlin, Peter Bently, and Piers Torday, who captivated students with engaging talks and workshops. Children enjoyed a fantastic dress-up parade, shared reading sessions, and exciting activities across the week.
We had the pleasure of welcoming three incredible authors to St Olave’s for our celebrations this year which have left us inspired to read and write more! Tom McLaughlin spoke to Years 1-6 about his writing and drawing process and difficulties with dyslexia. We were even fortunate enough to have some exclusive previews of his next book! Peter Bently enchanted EYFS and Lower School with storytelling and some amazing artwork was created with the child. Piers Torday led Years 3-6 on a journey, exploring his writing inspirations and the impact his family history has had on his writing. Thank you to everyone for making World Book Day 2025 such a memorable and successful event!
Years 5 and 6 Spring Instrumental Concert
A huge congratulations to all of our Year 5 and 6 instrumentalists who performed in our Spring Instrumental Concert on Tuesday afternoon. We were treated to singing, piano, violin, saxophone, harp and guitar performances. Well done to all of the children for working so hard to rehearse their pieces for the concert and perform with such confidence. It was a wonderful afternoon and it was lovely to see so many of you there.
Reception Visit to Blackfen
We have been learning about money and People Who Help Us, so on Wednesday, Reception went to Tom's Butchers in Blackfen and J Ayre bakery. We jumped on the B13 bus and had a great journey to the shops. First we went to the butchers where we were able to buy tasters of sausages, chicken, cheese and olives. It was great to have a chat with Tom the butcher and find out all about his job. We then went to the bakery to buy a roll. We took our roll back to school and made a delicious lunch. We had such a lovely trip and it was fantastic to visit Blackfen to meet all the friendly people who help us. The local community commented on how polite and considerate the children were on the bus and in the shops. We are so proud of them.
Year 4 Diverse Storytelling Workshop
On Wednesday, Year 4 had a wonderful workshop delivered by Ayo from the Flame Tree Collective. The Flame Tree Collective is an educational initiative that connects people to Black History. Ayo taught us about six African Kings and Queens who were in power during the Roman times right up to the 1800s. The children got the opportunity to dress up in some costumes and even make their own crowns! Some of the children were able to talk about their own heritage and we had some great questions asked too!
Sports Round Up
Year 6 Netball Competition
Last Friday morning children from Year 6 took part in a Netball competition. There were 10 teams competing at the tournament. Year 6 were immense and their teamwork sparkled throughout the day. Passing and moving the ball quickly and clinically in front of the hoop when shooting. St Olave’s finished in 2nd place overall, losing just 1 game (to the overall winning team), and winning all the remaining games. Brilliant performance Year 6!
Mixed Football League
After school on Friday, we returned to the Meridian ground for the mixed football league. Children from Years 5 and 6 competed in their league fixtures, competing in two games. We won the first game 1 - 0, but fell short in the second game losing 2-0. The children have been brilliant every game as this takes our record to 6 games, 4 wins, 1 draw, and 1 loss so far. Well done everyone!
Notices
Marie Curie Great Daffodil Appeal
We will be supporting the Marie Curie Great Daffodil Appeal again this year and will be selling daffodils for a donation (cash only) every morning next week. Thank you for your support.
Uniform
With the weather getting warmer, and with children taking off jumpers, cardigans, blazers and coats throughout the day, can we please ask for you to check that everything is accurately named, including items from our uniform fairs. This makes it so much easier for us to reunite lost property with its owner. Thank you.
Nursery
Another week has flown by and my goodness, it has been a fabulous week.
This week, we have really enjoyed all the World Book Day activities, especially getting the chance to meet the author, Peter Bently. He read us lots of his lovely stories that he had written and told us all about the characters and illustrations.
On Thursday, we had the best day as we were able to dress up as a character from our favourite book. We really enjoyed showing the rest of the school during our first World Book Day Parade. We were also able to show our local librarian, Sally, our costumes when we visited the library.
During Special Group time, we have continued to strengthen our fine motor muscles. We created beautiful scenes using paint sticks. The pictures included a jungle, an under the sea scene and a park. Outside we have been collecting ‘5 interesting things’ to fill a five frame then describing what we found. In phonics we have continued to learn some sounds and we have ‘ fixed’ some letter cards that accidentally got cut up!!
The sun has shone this week and what a difference it has made to our outdoor play. We have really enjoyed playing on the bikes and in the mud kitchen. We are hoping for lots more sun next week.
Have a lovely weekend.
Reception
I spy with my little eye, something beginning with S… Sun!
We are over the moon that the sun is shining this week. It has been so lovely to take our learning outside in the beautiful weather. We have had a great time playing in the mud kitchen and digging in the outdoor area.
We have had a REALLY busy week this week, celebrating World Book Day. We had books read to us by amazing authors and we enjoyed drawing characters from their books, following step-by-step tutorials taught by their author. If this wasn’t cool enough, Peter Bently came into our class to read us some of his stories. One of his books was called ‘Shark in the dark’ so he asked us to draw our own fish to use to create a collage of a whale. It was so fun and he was blown away by our beautiful drawings.
The day we had all been waiting for was World Book Day on Thursday, as we were able to dress up in our costumes. The children had great fun showing the rest of their friends in the school their costume during the parade. We were also lucky enough to visit the library and choose a book on World Book Day!
This week has been full on but fantastic. We cannot wait to see you all next week (fingers crossed for some more sun!). Have a restful weekend. :)
Year 1
Another wonderful week in Year 1! The children were so excited to invite you all into school to share all of the amazing work they have produced. Thank you for taking the time to come in and we hope you enjoyed being able to see what happens on a daily basis in Year 1!
In the spirit of World Book Day, we have spent the week creating our own books. During our English lessons, we have read the book 'The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!' by Jon Scieszka. The children then created their own characters and generated adjectives to describe them. They then created plans of what would happen in their stories to support them in writing the story in their very own books.
In maths, the children have completed the unit of Place Value within 50. Please continue to practise counting in units of 5 and 10 at home. Their next unit will be length and height. They will begin exploring the concept of measuring using objects before moving onto using centimetres. Maybe measuring family members height could be a fun activity to do over the weekend!
We had a great time in our Geography lesson where we learnt all about compasses and even made our own!
We were so impressed by the wonderful outfits the children wore to celebrate their favourite book characters on Thursday. Thank you for taking the time and effort to support them with this. We hope you have a restful weekend and look forward to our trip on Wednesday!
Year 2
What a week! Spring arrived at the same time as World Book Day! Hurrah!
It was fabulous to see so many of you at our Parent Sharing Morning this week. I'm sure you'll agree that the children have been working really hard and that you're as impressed with their progress as we have been.
We enjoyed meeting the wonderful author Peter Bently on Wednesday, not only did he talk to us about his stories but we also did a spot of story creation with him! How lucky are we? We also loved visiting the book fair, sharing books with our friends from Birch Class on Thursday and were amazed at the array of costumes on display for our parade.
Maths this week has seen us recapping addition and subtraction, particularly in terms of word problems where we need to figure out what we're being asked to do first. In History, we found out about Queen Victoria - did you know she could speak several languages and often threw her shoe at someone when she got cross!? Science was great fun, looking at baby photos and pictures of our parents to start exploring genes and inheritance. Oh and we also made delicious cheesecake in cooking!
With the spring weather set to continue over the weekend, we hope you have a lovely couple of days and we'll see you next week!
Year 3
As Spring has sprung, we have had a brilliant week in Year 3. We took full advantage of the UV rays being on show in science as we investigated how to keep safe in the sun! We placed UV beads covered in different SPF sun creams to test which SPF value we would recommend. We were amazed to see the UV beads change colour with lower SPF values and with our control beads. This highlighted how important it is to wear our SPF 50 every day!
On Thursday, our classrooms were full of an array of different book characters, including Mary Poppins, Fantastic Mr Fox and The Cat in the Hat! The children were so excited to dress up and celebrate with each other. We had a fun packed day, full of character designing, parading in costumes, live lessons and even another author visit to inspire us to create our own stories!
In maths, it was fractions, fractions and more fractions as we focused on the difference between unit fractions and non-unit fractions. We compared these against each other to see which fractions were biggest. We are looking forward to bringing this topic to a close next week and starting to apply our new fractions knowledge to some wider mathematical contexts.
Geography this week focused on how mountains are formed. We were fascinated to find out about the different types of mountains and where they can be located in the world. We then had a go at categorising different mountain types across the world. We are looking forward to exploring this further next week when we explore volcanic mountains more specifically.
Year 4
Another week has passed by quickly in Year 4! Our week started with our Parent Sharing Morning. It was lovely for the children to be able to share how proud they are of their work with you all - thank you so much for coming. As it has been World Book Day this week, we were lucky enough to visit the Book Fair on Monday, have a workshop by Piers Torday on Thursday and take part in lots of other activities. Thank you so much to Miss Kiely for organising all of this for us.
In English, we have started our new topic on Fairy Tales. We read an alternative version of ‘The Princess and the Pea’ by Rachel Isadora and retold it in our own words using fronted adverbials. We also focused on our comprehension skills using an extract from Lauren Childs’ version of the story. Next week, we are going to start looking into playscripts with the intention of writing our own by the end of this half term.
In maths, we have continued with our fraction topic by revising equivalent fractions and how to use a Fraction Wall to help us. We then learned how to add fractions to mixed numbers and then convert them from improper fractions - we have been really impressed with the children’s resilience in this topic. In science, we have learned about sound insulation and what a vacuum is! On Friday, we devised our own investigation to find out which materials are the best sound insulators. In RE, we learned about the Buddhist festival - Vesak - and explained what happens in our own words.
With just over two weeks to go until we go on our residential to Danbury, please can we remind you to hand in any outstanding forms so we can check them before we go. Thank you, and have a lovely weekend.
Year 5
What a busy and exciting week in Year 5. The children were so proud to share all their hard work with you on Monday and it was wonderful to see how proud they were to share their learning and their outcomes with you all.
This week has been filled with World Book Day fun. Year 5 loved visiting the book fair and purchasing new books to enjoy. On Thursday, our day was filled with the love of reading. We took part in World Book Day quizzes, live lessons and shared reads with younger years. We even managed to squeeze in creating bookmarks sharing our recommendations for books which will be shared in our libraries to continue to encourage other pupils to enjoy reading and sharing books! To top Thursday off, we were very lucky to have a visit from Piers Torday, who shared his journey as an author and the inspirations for his stories with the children.
In English this week, we continued to work on our comprehensive skills by identifying key vocabulary and providing evidence from the text to support our inferences. In addition to this, we explored verbs and the impact that well chosen verbs have on our writing and the image we are able to create for our readers which we applied in our creative writing where we continued a story from a given stimulus. We applied our understanding of verbs to include sentences that begin with them to help develop our use of various sentence structures and impact of language. During our maths lessons, we have been looking at all things decimals, fractions and percentages. We have developed our knowledge of rounding to 1 decimal place and whole numbers and started to make the connection between equivalent decimals, fractions and percentages.
Wishing you all a restful weekend - see you bright and early on Monday for our trip to Swanage.
Year 6
What a fantastic and enriching week for Year 6! We were thrilled to welcome so many of you to our Parent Sharing Morning. It was wonderful to see the children enthusiastically discussing their learning with you and showcasing their progress.
Our World Book Day celebrations were a great success. Last Friday, author and illustrator Tom McLaughlin captivated the children with his journey from political cartoonist to best-selling author. They were fascinated by his digital illustrations and inspired by his message that anyone can write a story with great ideas, regardless of challenges like dyslexia.
On Monday, the children eagerly explored the Scholastic Book Fair, selecting exciting new reads and sharing recommendations with their peers. It was a joy to see their enthusiasm for books and their growing love of reading.
On Wednesday, the children watched a live talk from Lucy Edwards, author of Ella Jones vs. the Sun Stealer. She shared her inspiring journey of becoming blind at seventeen due to a rare disease and how she transformed her experiences into a powerful story. The children were particularly interested in how her book features braille on the cover, making it accessible to a wider audience. Her resilience and creativity left a lasting impression.
Thursday’s World Book Day was a truly memorable event! Year 6 dazzled us with their creative costumes, bringing their favourite literary characters to life with enthusiasm and flair. The excitement reached new heights when renowned author Piers Torday visited, captivating the children with his inspiring journey to becoming a writer. He shared how his love for wild animals and fantasy shaped his storytelling, and how growing up in his mother’s bookshop nurtured his passion for literature. He also spoke about his family’s origins in Turda, Romania, and their escape to the UK during World War II as Jewish refugees. Discovering this part of his heritage led him to visit Transylvania, where he learned firsthand about its fascinating wildlife. With the help of some eager volunteers, he even demonstrated how to react when encountering wolves and bears! The children were thrilled to hear about his latest book, Midnight Treasure, an exhilarating adventure about Tibor, a young werewolf raised by his guardian, a powerful vampire. Alongside his friend Roza, Tibor embarks on a perilous quest—one that will push their immortality to the limit. But they’re not the only ones searching for the legendary Midnight Treasure… It was an unforgettable experience that left everyone inspired and eager to dive into new stories!
Outdoor Learning
This week it feels like Spring has sprung! The mornings have been cold but the children have started to get back out into the allotment for their carousel sessions. They have been helping clear a new area which the Eco Comittee are then going to decide what to do with. The children have been excited to see what they can find while digging. Highlight of the week has to be the two slow worms that we found at lunch. The children all thought they were snakes but they are in fact legless lizards! We hope for more of the same weather next week.
Languages
We have been blessed with glorious weather this week and the children worked even harder, probably powered by the sun!
In Early Years, both Nursery and Reception have had such lot of fun singing and dancing, they are extremely good at recognising body parts and face parts, family members, colours and numbers, and they are ready to move to their next topic.
Year 1 started with the topic of pets and learnt how to say “I have a cat, a dog, a hamster, a fish and a rabbit”. The children played the chain game: one child started the sentence saying “I have a dog”, the following child added another pet and so on until the whole chain was completed. Year 2 learnt the words for the different parts of the body in French and they enjoyed singing “Head, shoulders, knees and toes” in French.
In the Upper School, in French Year 3 used numbers to give the temperature, and Year 4 revised how to say different TV programmes and give simple opinions. In Spanish, Year 5 started the new topic of 'my home': the children talked about some of the European countries and recognised all the forms of the verb vivir (to live). Year 6 children have also started the new topic, 'what do I do during my break?', learning the core vocabulary, which they applied straight away to a translation task. In Latin, Year 6 learnt to name parts of the body based upon their Latin derivatives; they also revised the use of adverbs and imperative verbs in Latin.
Design & Technology
Year 3 Electrostatic Game
This week Year 3 pupils continued the design process by making an electrostatic experiment with card and tissue.
Year 4 Pavilion structures
Pupils in Year 4 tested their structures further and applied reinforcing techniques to their designs to ensure they remained standing without losing their shapes.
Year 5 Wooden Bridges
Year 5 pupils assembled their bridges and added reinforcement to the corners of their bridges to ensure the bridges were strong and stable, some pupils also took the time to analyse the shape of their bridges and search for imperfections that they could rectify.
Year 6 Automata Toys
Year 6 pupils used computers to design the background and characters that they will include in their customised product.
Music
In Tuesday’s assembly we were treated to a piano duet performed by two of our Year 6 pupils, Arianna and Chloe. We discussed what a ‘duet’ is and look forward to next Tuesday’s assembly performance by Alfred in Year 4.
The Upper School children have been focussing on learning the song, ‘Uptown Girl’ by Billy Joel in their Music lessons, ahead of the Easter Concert at the end of the term. It would be great to play this at home over the weekend and sing along! Over the next couple of weeks, the children will be bringing home their song words to learn for the Easter Concert.