A message from Miss Quarmby
Hello! I hope you all had a super Easter break and managed to enjoy a bit of that sunshine. I can’t quite believe we’re already into the final term of the year — time really is flying!
It may have only been a four-day week, but we’ve already managed to fit so much in. As always, we launched our WOW afternoons to kick off this half term’s Geography topics, and they felt more creative than ever! In Year 4, the children were scaling mountains and comparing them to the Eiffel Tower – all brought to life with Lego models! Over in Year 5, they were building countries out of Lego too, thinking really carefully about their human and physical features.
We’re also really excited to share that, although it’s been a long time coming, Mrs Mackintosh has officially been appointed as our permanent Wraparound Club Manager. The impact she – along with the brilliant wraparound team – has had on the provision has been nothing short of amazing: a 5* hygiene rating, doubled capacity, and a completely transformed holiday club. We’re so proud of what’s been achieved!
You should have received a letter this morning about our Nursery Welcome Evening on Tuesday 14th May at 5pm, and we’d love to see you at our Parent Coffee Morning on Thursday 9th May at 9am, where we’ll be chatting more about what this all means for Whitkirk. We really hope you can join us – places are booking up quickly! Have a wonderful weekend!
VE Day
Girls' football opportunity - Colton Tots
Attendance
This week, our overall attendance was 97.15%! This is well above out school target of 96.5%. A huge well done to 1JL and RJS for both achieving the highest attendance at an incredible 100%!
Let's take a look AT WHAT'S BEEN GOING ON THIS WEEK
EYFS
Reception had a brilliant start to the term with a WOW afternoon full of garden adventures! As part of our new Big Idea, From Tiny Seeds to Big Adventures, the children explored plants, seeds, mini beasts, and life cycles. They then became garden detectives, hunting for items and creatures in our forest school area and around the school grounds! Fantastic teamwork and detective skills reception, well done!
Key Stage 1
What a wonderful start to the Summer term Year 1 have had this week! We launched our new Geography big idea 'Can animals survive in extreme climates?' by creating our very own globes. We drew on our equator and then placed each continent onto the globe. We discussed how the North and South Pole were cold climates, and the continents on the equator are hot! In science, we discovered garden and wild plants around our school grounds. Well done Year 1!
This week, Year 2 have had a fantastic start to our new topic, What Makes Yorkshire Unique? We explored our local area with a transport survey and learned all about famous Yorkshire landmarks in geography. We also launched our new science topic, Growing Up, and the children have loved discovering how humans change over time.
Lower Key Stage 2
We have enjoyed welcoming one another back to school this week, and getting stuck straight in to new topics of learning! We began our Science topic all about plants by experimenting the functions of leaves. We have set up a comparative test and can’t wait to document our finding over the next two weeks. In English, we have introduced our new class text ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and enjoyed making success criteria’s for our new narrative unit.
On Tuesday we launched the new Geography unit on mountains when we made scaled models of famous mountains. Every centimetre of the model represented 100 metres in the real world. To full comprehend how massive the mountains are, we then made scaled models of the Eiffel Tower out of Lego. We then worked out how many Eiffel towers we would need to stand end on end to reach its top. For example Mount Everest is 22.5 Eiffel Towers high!
Upper Key Stage 2
This week in Maths, we started looking at classifying and comparing various types of angles. We then began by defining a right angle and distinguishing between anticlockwise and clockwise rotations. After that, we then reviewed our knowledge of acute and obtuse angles, comparing it to our understanding of right-angle characteristics. Year 5's attitude to learning was fantastic this week, we were particularly impressed during our Maths carousel by using their oracy skills to identify the various angles within each activity! Miss Kaur and Miss Richardson were particularly impressed by Year 5's superb teamwork skills. Well done Year 5!
Even though it’s only been four days since the start of term, Year 6 certainly haven’t slowed down! We’ve hit the ground running with SATs revision, showing great focus and determination as we prepare for the upcoming assessments. Alongside this, we’ve also loved diving into our brand new Geography project, exploring the question: How has Yorkshire changed over time? This week, we used iPads to locate Yorkshire on a map and began thinking about the major cities and landmarks that make it such a unique and interesting region.