The Bulletin - Edition 30

Mr Salt writes in greater detail below about the Swimming Gala and Sports Day this week. As I mentioned at both events, it was fantastic to see so many parents attending. We are as proud of the boys’ accomplishments as you all are, and it is so enlivening for us here to share in that joyful spirit together!

Tim Smith

Headmaster

Prep News

Year 5 Transition to Year 6

This week in assemblies any boy in Year 5 had the opportunity who wished to do so to stand up and share his best qualities with all the other boys and staff.

Outstanding LAMDA success!

Ms Moorby is our LAMDA teacher here at the Prep. She does an outstanding job preparing and rehearsing boys with their various performance poetry pieces and short dramatic items so they may sit their LAMDA exams with confidence. We were thrilled to discover this week that the 55 boys who recently sat exams at various stages and in a range of Year group categories not only all passed their exams, but all 55 of them passed with the grade of ‘distinction’! Many congratulations to them all.

News from Mr Salt, Head of Games:

The Swimming Gala and Sports Day this week led to a few busy but very rewarding days of competition and good fun for the Games Department. That it all ran so smoothly is due to a fantastic effort from all the staff at school so a big thank you to them. To be finally able to hold whole school events with parents present and to see the enjoyment you and the boys gained from it was a real pleasure. Both events had a great atmosphere and reinforced to us all how much that has been missing from school sport over the last 18 months or so.

Year 5 French Competition

This was a swift 24 hour ‘facts’ challenge about snails, frogs’ legs and the Eiffel Tower! The lucky prize winners, who gave all the correct answers were presented with an Eiffel Tower key-ring from Mme Barry in assembly this week. These boys prove that it is always worth seizing an opportunity and rising to a challenge – bravo! They are: - Navraj Dhillon - Aron Drishti - Dean Fitzpatrick - Dennis Hayes - Ben Jago - Will Meehan - Fred Owen

Art Day and Hampton School Arts Award

My grateful thanks to the Parents’ Association for funding two fantastic artistic workshops for the boys in the Prep this week. They loved creating some very cool graffiti art and I was so impressed with their excellent ‘Wallace & Gromit’ inspired models. We have also greatly enjoyed having some ‘big boys’ from Hampton School on site this week, working with us on their Silver Arts Awards. The Silver Arts Award, managed by Trinity College London in association with Arts Council England, is a GCSE-equivalent qualification which enables young people to research, plan, complete and review a creative project of their own choosing and develop leadership skills in their chosen area. To develop these leadership abilities, the Hampton School pupils ran workshops on a wide variety of creative activities, including: drama, creative writing, clothes design, modelling, music, animation, and computer game design. This was a fantastic opportunity for some truly dynamic collaboration between the Prep and Senior School boys.

Pre Prep News

A word from Mrs Murphy

Although the news at the beginning of the week was not all that we hoped for, we are absolutely thrilled our Sports Day on Thursday 24 June can go ahead. Greater information about the event has been sent out via SchoolPost - we are greatly looking forward to seeing you! Please do read through all the information provided very carefully as it is imperative we adopt safe procedures in the light of Covid-19 when we gather together at the Prep site on Thursday.

Kindergarten

It has been a buzzing week in Kindergarten learning all about honeybees. Mrs G, the Beekeeper, visited on Tuesday dressed in her orange bee suit and told us all about her bees and the important jobs they do. We saw lots of photographs of her hives and bees, and we saw an extremely close up photograph of her last Queen bee - all the worker bees were busy cleaning her!

Reception

Our focus in Reception this week has been colour. We discussed our favourites and how they make us feel. It was lovely to hear the children’s favourites and reasons why – for example, green the colour of soft green grass in our garden, rainbow colours and blue for the sky on a sunny day. We read the book ‘Mouse Paint’, where three little mice get up to mischief jumping in pots of primary coloured paints!

Year 1

In English this week Year 1 have been writing postcards to invite our cuddly toys to our Cuddly Toys’ Picnic next week. We focused on how to correctly write out our address and enjoyed a trip to the post box to send these back to our homes. The boys have been really excited to tell us all about when their postcards arrived! We are looking forward to welcoming the toys into school on Wednesday for our special picnic.

Year 2

In Year 2, we have started exploring the book, ‘Buddy’s Rainforest Rescue’. We started by looking at the first four illustrations and writing a suitable opening to match. Later in the week, we read the whole story and had some big conversations about deforestation. In pairs, we completed a word class task, which involved finding different adjectives, adverbs, verbs and nouns in the text.

The Bulletin – Edition 1

Headmasters Bulletin

06.09.24

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