From the Head
Today marks the final day of the Spring Term, and as always, it is a moment to pause and reflect on what has been a very full and successful term at St Olave’s. This week has been particularly busy, with Parents’ Evenings providing a valuable opportunity to meet with so many of you and talk in detail about your children’s progress. These conversations are always a highlight for staff; honest, thoughtful and focused entirely on how we can continue to support each child to thrive. They are a powerful reminder of the strength of our partnership and the shared ambition we hold for every child in our care. Last night’s Upper School Easter concert was a wonderful way to bring the term towards its close. The children performed with confidence, joy and real pride, and it was a pleasure to see their hard work come together so beautifully. Moments like these reflect not only their talent, but also their commitment and the support they receive both in school and at home. Looking ahead, I am very much looking forward to spending time with our Year 5 children at their ETAP sessions next week. It is always a privilege to return to the classroom and work closely with the children and I am excited to support them as they continue to prepare for the next stage of their journey. After that, I think we will all be ready for a well-deserved pause over the Easter weekend and the holiday that follows. The Spring Term is always a busy and demanding one, and the children (and staff!) have given a great deal. As we reach the end of term, I would like to thank you sincerely for your continued support, encouragement and trust. It is this partnership that enables us to provide such a rich and purposeful experience for the children every day. I wish all of our families a restful and enjoyable break. For those celebrating Easter, I hope it is a joyful time spent with family and friends. For others, I hope the holiday brings rest, time together and the opportunity to recharge. We look forward to welcoming the children back next term on Tuesday 14th April, refreshed and ready for all that lies ahead.
Kind regards, Miss Holloway
The week ahead...
Lunch Menu
Monthly Safeguarding Update
March – Spotting Signs Outside School
Exploitation and radicalisation can affect any child, in person or online. Look out for unexplained gifts, secretive behaviour or sudden changes in friendship groups. If you are ever worried, speak to us - no concern is too small.
Focus on School Values
Our manner of the week is: “Don’t ask for snacks, just water – wait to be offered.” Whether at a friend’s house or in a new environment, we’re helping children understand that good manners include not assuming, not demanding and respecting others’ hospitality. You can support this at home by talking about what it means to be a polite guest. Ask your child what they’d do if they were offered something unfamiliar, or how they might politely respond if they were hungry or thirsty. A lovely companion book is Please, Mr. Panda by Steve Antony – a humorous reminder that “please” still makes a difference! Thank you for another fantastic half term of partnership and support. We look forward to seeing everyone back after the Easter break, refreshed and ready for a joyful Summer Term.
This week at St Olave's
Rights Day We all know that water is vital for everyone in their daily lives across the world, and back in 2015 the world made a commitment to work together to make sure that everyone has access to safe, clean water and good sanitation. This is Sustainable Development Goal 6. Right now, we are seriously off-track to meet SDG 6. To accelerate change, we need more action because there is still so much work to be done with over 2 billion people drinking unsafe water. This inspired our Year 6 Rights Ambassadors to focus on Global Goal 6 and make links to Articles 24 and 27 of the UNCRC. The focus was to understand what a precious commodity water is. In assembly we met Sangeta, a young girl who cannot go to school because she can spend up to 6 hours per day walking to collect, often dirty, water for her family to use. We all agreed that we are very lucky to not have to think twice about turning on the tap! Once back in class, different year groups focused on different things. Year 5 found out all about ‘virtual water’ - that is the hidden water that goes into the production of goods for our consumption. Did you know that it takes up to 80,000l of water to produce one car?!? Year 2 investigated the importance of water for all living things and discovered some of the challenges faced by freshwater habitats and Year 6 focused on sanitation and why clean water is essential.
Year 1 trip to the Old Royal Naval College On Wednesday, Year 1 had an amazing time on our trip to the Old Royal Naval College. They thoroughly enjoyed exploring the grounds and learning fascinating historical facts, from Tudor kings and queens to the purpose of the Naval College and how it has changed over time. The children were very fortunate to take part in a special art workshop focused on shape and symmetry, where they became “shape detectives” in the old chapel. They also had the opportunity to visit the Painted Hall and admire the incredible artwork. To finish the day, they enjoyed a game of skittles in the historic underground bowling alley once used by the Royal Navy pensioners. It was a truly memorable trip, and we are sure the children have enjoyed sharing their experiences with you. All children have been sent home with free tickets to visit again with their families. This could be a lovely activity to enjoy over the Easter break.
Sporting Round Up
Gymnastics Plus Year 2 took a trip to Sutcliffe Park on Monday afternoon, where they rose to the challenge at gymnastics. The children had great fun, challenging themselves in a variety of different gymnastics activities. I was very impressed with how much progress they made throughout the sessions. Well done Year 2!
Nursery
The spring sunshine has enticed much of our learning outside this week and the children have had lots of fun creating their own ‘batcave’ in the outside area. They have written signs and pegged them up so we know there is a batcave and definitely ‘no monsters’. It was great to meet with many parents this week and reflect on the progress the children have made over the last term. We would like to wish all our families a very Happy Easter and hope you enjoy some family time over the holidays. Please remember to put any special moments on Tapestry so the children can talk about them on their return to school and share them with their friends.
Reception
We loved catching up with you all at Parents Evening this week. It was such a pleasure to share your child’s progress and celebrate all the wonderful learning that has been taking place. We have also enjoyed a lovely week making the most of the sunshine. The children have spent lots of time in our outdoor area, where their creativity and imagination have truly shone. They have been busy building obstacle courses using a range of equipment, carefully arranging and testing their ideas while developing their balance, coordination, and teamwork skills. It has been wonderful to see them take turns, solve problems, and encourage one another. Water play has been another highlight, providing opportunities for both fun and learning. The children have been pouring, measuring, and experimenting with how water flows, as well as working collaboratively to create their own games and challenges. To round off a fantastic half term, we enjoyed a special campfire experience. The children gathered together to drink hot chocolate and sing campfire songs. In the classroom, we have continued to explore numbers within 10. The children have been developing their confidence in counting, recognising numbers, and understanding different ways to represent them through practical activities and play. We hope you all have a wonderful and restful Easter break. We look forward to welcoming you back for the Summer Term and continuing our exciting learning journey together.
Year 1
It has been a busy and exciting end to the spring term, and we are delighted to share some of the wonderful learning that has taken place. In English, the children have been exploring stories about Anansi the Spider. Inspired by these tales, they went on to create their own imaginative stories, drawing on their personal interests and creativity. We were incredibly impressed with the outcomes. Each child showed fantastic enthusiasm and originality in their writing. In Maths, we completed our unit on place value up to 50. The children worked hard to deepen their understanding of numbers and demonstrated great progress. We have also begun exploring measurement, looking at different ways to measure in a variety of contexts, including length, weight, and capacity. We encourage you to continue exploring these ideas at home over the holidays in fun, practical ways. It was a pleasure to see so many of you at parents’ evening. We are sure you are very proud of the fantastic progress your children have made this term. We wish you all a restful, safe, and happy Easter break, and we look forward to welcoming the children back for another exciting term.
Year 2
We have had a blast this week as some of our topics have come to a close. We continued our writing for non-chronological reports about different animals and started to assemble all of the different elements to create a finished product. We are looking forward to finishing these off after the Easter break! In maths, we focused on mass, volume and capacity. We learned the difference between volume and capacity and practiced using the correct units of measurements and vocabulary to identify various amounts of liquid. We are looking forward to our fractions and time topics in Summer 1 and would love for you to practice identifying halves and quarters at home in preparation. On Tuesday we celebrated Rights Day, focusing on our right to clean water and the vital role it plays in our everyday lives. In Year 2 we specifically explored how humans are impacting the freshwater environments of wild animals and in turn depleting the amount of freshwater for others to enjoy. We thought about ways we could be water superheroes, helping to reduce the wasteful use of water. Ask your child to share a way they could save water at home! We very much enjoyed seeing you all at Parent’s Evening this week. As always, thank you so much for your continuous support. We hope you are as proud of your children as we are. Have a lovely, restful Easter break! The Year 2 team are looking forward to seeing the children back for their final term of the year!
Year 3
What an exciting and busy term it has been! The children have worked incredibly hard and made fantastic progress across all areas of their learning. As we reach the end of term, we hope you all have a lovely, relaxing Easter break and enjoy some well-deserved rest and family time. This week has been particularly special as we prepared for our Easter concert. We were so proud of how confidently and enthusiastically the children performed, and it was wonderful to see so many families attending and supporting them at the church. The children truly rose to the occasion and should feel very proud of themselves. We also completed our swimming lessons for the year this week. The children have been excellent throughout, showing great effort and perseverance. It has been fantastic to see their confidence grow in the water, whether learning to tread water, swimming longer distances, or practising how to safely enter and exit the pool. They have all made brilliant progress. In Maths, we continued our learning on mass and capacity. The children now understand that mass is measured in grams (g) and kilograms (kg), and they have been practising converting between these units. They are also becoming more confident in reading different scales accurately. In English, we finished our topic on information texts. The children produced some wonderful pieces of writing, clearly demonstrating key features such as diagrams, bullet points, subheadings and relevant facts. It has been lovely to see how much their confidence in structuring non-fiction writing has grown. In Science, we explored the nutritional information in the foods we eat by studying a wide range of packaging - thank you to everyone who sent items in. The children discussed which foods are healthy choices and which should be considered occasional treats, using the information they could see to support their ideas. Thank you, as always, for your continued support this term. We are incredibly proud of all the children’s hard work and achievements, and we are very much looking forward to an exciting Summer term ahead.
Year 4
What a busy and exciting week it has been! The children have spent lots of time perfecting their ukulele skills and practising their singing in preparation for the Easter Concert. We hope you thoroughly enjoyed their performances of Can’t Stop the Feeling and Stay With Me. You may have noticed their wonderfully focused expressions, learning a new instrument and performing in front of an audience is no small feat! We were incredibly proud of how confidently they performed. It was also fantastic to see so many children learning all the song lyrics; this really shone through on the night and made the performances even more enjoyable to watch. We hope this experience may even inspire some of them to continue learning the ukulele as a hobby. On Tuesday, we celebrated our whole-school Rights Day. In class, we focused on Global Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitation. The children engaged in thoughtful and powerful discussions about the importance of water, not only for humans but for all living things. They explored the challenges faced by freshwater habitats and considered how we can all play a role in conserving water. To showcase their understanding, they created some eye-catching and informative posters. In Science, we wrapped up our topic on sound by learning about pitch. The children then completed a quiz to assess how much they could remember from the unit, well done to them for their efforts and enthusiasm throughout this topic. Over the Easter holidays, the children have been set a creative task to design and make their own musical instrument using junk materials. The aim is to create an instrument capable of producing both high and low notes. We are very much looking forward to seeing (and hearing!) their creations. If the instruments are tricky to bring into school, please do feel free to send us videos instead. We have also sent home some Maths learning on decimals, which will help prepare the children for our Summer Term work. Thank you, as always, for your continued support this term, hasn’t it flown by! We are very much looking forward to a fantastic final term with the children, including our much-anticipated residential trip to Danbury. Please could you complete the Google Form as soon as possible to help us send information to Danbury before Easter. Over the holidays, it would be really helpful if you could begin preparing your child for the residential by encouraging them to:
- Practise packing and unpacking their own bag
- Keep their bedroom tidy and organise their belongings independently
- Practise basic personal care skills (e.g. showering, brushing hair, getting dressed independently)
- Try new foods and develop confidence with eating a variety of meals
- Take responsibility for small daily tasks (e.g. making their bed, helping with chores)
We hope you all have a restful and enjoyable Easter break and look forward to seeing everyone refreshed and ready for the Summer Term.
Year 5
What an exciting term for Year 5 - the children have worked incredibly hard and it was lovely to share this with all of you over our parent sharing morning and parents evening. Alongside rehearsing for our fabulous Easter concert, we also managed to focus on longer maths questions ensuring we are honing the skills to identify all of the steps we need to take to answer the questions successfully. We have been improving our vocabulary skills, looking at new words both in and out of context to boost our understanding. We also continued our English learning around news reports and became budding journalists to plan an article about an exciting rainforest discovery, alongside brushing up on some areas of punctuation and grammar. Rights Day on Tuesday gave us a great insight into virtual water. We were shocked to think about how much water has already been used before a product even gets to us - just thinking about the journey of a tomato for our salad where water is used for the plant to grow, be harvested and transported even before we wash it before adding it to our salads. We were reflective on how lucky we are not to have to think about water and, in fact, it is something we often take for granted. We hope you all have a very restful Easter break and look forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks for the final term of Year 5.
Year 6
This week, in English, we continued our work on narrative poetry and began exploring a range of different poetic forms and structures, including haikus, limericks, and shape poems. The children have enjoyed experimenting with these styles while also thinking carefully about how poets express emotions through language, imagery, and poem structure. It has been wonderful to see their creativity develop as they try out new techniques and share their ideas with one another. In Maths, we have been focusing on data charts, with particular attention on pie charts this week. The children have practised both reading and creating pie charts, developing their understanding of how data can be represented visually. On Tuesday, we also marked Rights Day by exploring the importance of clean water and sanitation. This led to some thoughtful and productive discussions about water availability around the world and how we can all play a role in conserving water. We hope you all have a lovely Easter break and enjoy a well-deserved rest after a jam-packed Spring term.
Outdoor Learning
The weather still keeps us on our toes this week, as we were basking in the hot sunshine at the start before a wintery, windy chill descended on the allotment. The children have been busy pricking out lots of wildflowers that have done really well in the heated greenhouse. They were potted up and we will watch them grow some more over the next few weeks. The older children started to clear Poly 1 for the tomatoes and chillies which will go there. They discovered that a lot of lettuce and chard had grown from the compost we had spread on the beds. We removed them and replanted them in the new greenhouse. We have dug over a few outside beds in preparation for the clubs in the holidays. I hope to see some of you either next Tuesday 31st or Wednesday 8th April between 11am and 1pm for some more gardening.
Languages
What an amazing week to wrap up the Spring Term! All the year groups had a lesson to revise their topics: small animals and zoo animals for Early Years, pets with possessive and colours for Year 1, body parts and alien project for Year 2. Year 3 and Year 4 treated me to their amazing homework project: every child created a memorable poster on weather and seasons Year 3 and on hobbies Year 4. In Spanish, Year 5 revised school subjects and teachers and Year 6 opinions on school subjects. In Latin the children revised adverbs and adjectives, imperative verbs and present tense verbs ending. I wish you a wonderful and restful Easter holiday! Mrs Mossone Evans
Design & Technology and Computing
Quiz of the week, ask your child if they can explain what the words in bold mean. Year 3 Static Electricity Game Pupils in Year 3 completed their static electricity games and tested them for functionality and improvements to their designs. Year 4 Pavilion Structures This week, Year 4 assembled and completed their freestanding structures. They took the opportunity to customise their designs by adjusting the non-permanent fixings to create new outcomes. Year 5 Bridges In Year 5, pupils completed their wooden truss bridges by assembling and reinforcing the angled joints for added durability. Year 6 Electric car Year 6 pupils completed their motor assembly by securing the motor parallel with the axles and testing of their circuits. They also customised the placement of their switches and physical features of their chassis. Computing highlights Year 2 reviewed their understanding of abstraction, decomposition, algorithm and sequencing whilst using block coding to complete puzzles. Year 3 pupils used block coding in Scratch to edit and customise a game. Year 5 pupils created 3D images of Mars rover inspired vehicles and vehicle parts using Tinkercad.