The Bulletin – Edition 19
The final day of our current period of enforced school closure dawned brightly and very cheerfully this morning I would say! That was certainly the case where I live, and with my usual cup of early morning espresso and Radio 3 in the background playing something suitably uplifting, I felt another tangible rush of excitement as I considered once again how wonderful it will be to have pupils back on our sites next week.
Pre-Prep & Prep parents will have received my letter and the accompanying appendix, which sets out our plans for next week, and for the weeks remaining for this half term. Mrs Murphy has been meeting with her team at the Pre-Prep and we had an excellent and very positive staff meeting here in the Prep this week, to discuss how we can ensure pupils will enjoy being back on site from both pastoral and academic angles. I think it is fair to say there will be some adjustment once more, as we all settle back into our usual ways of working, well, as usual as they can be given the last 12 months or so! In my experience however, Pre-Prep & Prep school aged children possess plenty of resilience (there is often more in them than they believe they can draw from) and natural enthusiasm, so it does not take much for that to come tumbling out.
To that end then, excellent lessons will continue apace across both sites and our close and careful but unobtrusive watchful eyes and open ears shall remain alert to the social and emotional matters our pupils bring to light during the course of any normal day. Please rest assured, as far as we are concerned here, it will be business as usual once we get over the excitement of seeing everyone in person first thing on Monday morning.
Enjoy your weekends and we look forward to seeing you and saying hello in person once more, over the course of the next couple of weeks!
Pre-Prep
A word from Mrs Murphy
What tremendous fun it has been in the run up to World Book Day this year, we hope you have had enjoyable afternoons ‘escaping with books’ – our grateful thanks to Miss Horton once again for putting together such a great selection of hands-on activities. Highlights have included seeing the children creating wax pictures in connection with the story, ‘ The Day the Crayons Quit’ written by Drew Daywalt and so cleverly illustrated by Oliver Jeffers, and the beautifully crafted rainbow fish. If you can bear to part with yours, we would love to have it to help us to create a shimmering new display for our library but we promise to return all fish at a later date.
Kindergarten
This week, Kindergarten have been reading the traditional fairy tale story, ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears.’ Many versions have been read, from very old little hardback books to modern picture books. We discussed the differences between them but, one thing we noticed in each version was there is always a small, medium and large size bowl, chair and bed. There was plenty of talk about how Goldilocks should have asked to go into the cottage and how we should never take things that do not belong to us.
Reception
This week in Reception we have loved celebrating World Book Day. We have shared many of our favourite traditional tales and fairy stories. We enjoyed playing a game making our own mixed-up fairy tale stories. We watched the author Julia Donaldson, along with friends, acting out the Gruffalo on stage, and listened to David McKee reading his world-famous story ‘Elmer’. In phonics, we learnt the digraph ‘ar’.
Year 1
Safe to say it has been a book-filled week in Year 1, who have thoroughly enjoyed World Book Day and the run up to it! This has included a book scavenger hunt, where we were amazed to find out just how many books are centred around bears, Roald Dahl maths related tasks, designing book covers and, of course, lots and lots of stories!
In mathematics, the children have honed their skills at counting in 2s, 5s and 10s and developed their understanding of place value, identifying tens and ones.
Year 2
Year 2 have been enjoying the fantastic book, ‘Man on the Moon (a day in the life of Bob)’ by Simon Bartram this week. Bob has a very special job looking after the moon and knows almost everything about it. He is, however, blissfully unaware of aliens! With this in mind, the children wrote a detailed description about aliens and, in doing so, made use of a vast array of adjectives. Their accompanying drawings were quite terrifying – definitely not the sort of aliens Bob would like to meet!
Similarly, World Book Day has been the greatest of fun in Year 2 - we loved all of Miss Horton’s super activities!