Newsletter27 January Newsletter

Dear Parents/Carers,

Welcome to the first newsletter of the Spring Term. It has been a great start to the term with all of our brilliant children doing great things with their learning.

We have already this term launched our reading hut and book bus during the reading week. This was a huge success. It is wonderful seeing all the children inspired to read, as reading is the most important skill they will develop while at school. Thanks to Miss Atkinson and her team who have worked hard to make the launch such a success and to raise the profile of reading over the last six months.

We are very excited to announce that our next big project is to develop a STEM lab in school to promote collaboration and exploratory learning. St. Paul’s children will enjoy hands-on-learning activities that allow them to apply technology, science, maths and engineering skills as they enjoy a 21st-century learning experience. Mr Colley and Mr Payne have grand plans so watch this space!!

As you will have noticed recently, we have made changes to the newsletter. We want it to reflect more of what happens in school and to give you an insight into the curriculum and what the children are experiencing. This we hope is a counterbalance to Covid restrictions. To make sure this is the best it can be we have decided to produce it as a monthly document/online magazine. We will continue to send out all the important information that cannot wait through, email, text and Class Dojo.

Have a lovely weekend.

– Mr Thornton, Head Teacher

 

Religious Values

As we return from all the excitement of Christmas, we enter a calmer season in our church calendar. Our collective worship time focuses on Epiphany. As a school, we are looking at the ‘firsts’ that Jesus marked in his lifetime. In doing so, the children are reading well known stories, think and talk about them, and reflect what this could mean for their own personal life today. We explore God’s

manifestation through the baby Jesus; the visit of the Wise Men – not Jewish, not from Israel, hence not the chosen people of God – that came from the far East, and worshiped Jesus and what this means for the future. We are looking at John the Baptist and Jesus’ baptism, and his first miracle.

Furthermore, our new ICON Ambassadors have been chosen and are now undertaking a programme at Coventry Cathedral over the next few months, where they will be equipped with peace making and bridge building skills that they can put into practice and pass on back into our classrooms.

 

‘Star of the Week’ Awards

The following children have received their awards:-

14 January: Elijah, Marcin, Aman, Diana, Jevin and Lemmy.

21 January: Freya, Edward, Harrison, Pippa, Piper, Jesamine, Chloe, Alice, Opie, Harry, Heidi, and Ria

 

Attendance

Attendance up to Wednesday 26^th January is 93.33%. The school target is 97%.

Could we please remind you that children must be in school by 8.55 am. School gates open at 8.30 am and class doors open from 8.45 am to 8.55 am for Reception through to Year 6. Please ensure your child arrives on time for school.   Increasingly more and more children are late into their classrooms and this impacts not only on your child’s learning, but all the other children in that class and the staff teaching the class. Your child’s progress academically as well as socially is our shared priority.

Children who are late after the doors have closed, will have to come into school via the Office, they will be signed in on our inventory system and that will go down as a late mark. If your child is more than 15 minutes late, then this is classed as an unauthorised absence from school and will impact on their attendance.

If your child is absent from school, can you please ensure you telephone the school office to report their absence and the reason why, daily.

If your child is late 5 minutes every day that is 3 days lost of learning.

 

Staff Book Choice

Miss Atkinson’s Book Choice:

One of my favourite stories that I have read recently is Sky Song by Abi Elphinstone. This story takes you to a magical snowy kingdom called Erkenwald, where whales glide between icebergs, wolves hunt on the tundra and polar bears roam the glaciers. But the people of this land aren’t so easy to find – because Erkenwald is ruled by an evil Ice Queen and the tribes must stay hidden or risk becoming her prisoners at Winterfang Palace.

The phrase ‘Reading takes you to a place when you have to stay where you are,’ is certainly true in this fantasy adventure story. A real page-turner!

 

Reading Week

During the first week back we had an ‘All About Reading’ week to celebrate the launch of the Reading Hut and Book Bus! During the week, we learnt about the different genres, thought about what our favourite authors are and hosted a Reading Cafe for parents to join us for reading and refreshments. The week was a roaring success and the children are super excited about getting into the Book Bus and Reading Hut with their classes every week!

To top the week off, we were then treated to a visit from author of Granny Magic, Elka Evalds, who hosted storytelling and writing workshops with many of our children on Friday before hosting the grand opening of the Reading Hut and Book Bus.

We would like to say a huge thank you to Fiesta Party in Bedworth who generously donated the balloons for the launch and to Nuneaton Waterstones for coming along to sell Elka’s books at the end of the day.

Here’s a few comments from the children about Elka’s visit:

Esme: “I enjoyed hearing her story about the king and queen of winter and the king and queen of spring. I enjoyed adding actions to the story such as waving our arms for snow and wiggling our fingers for stars.”

Pippa: “I liked making a folding booklet to write my own story in. I liked watching the actors playing a part in the story. I enjoyed hearing about Elka’s story Granny Magic when the knitted Dalek hat led Will to whatever he was looking for.”

Vanessa: “I loved writing my poem about my parrot Lockie. My favourite line was ‘Lockie is a speaker shouting out loud.'”

David: “I enjoyed writing about my dog. I loved working with Elka so much I even bought her book. I’m looking forward to reading it.”

Evelyn: “I also wrote a poem about my new puppy Bella. ‘She is a pair of running shoes.’ It’s a metaphor to show how much she enjoys running.”

Year 6 Lewis, Eva, Courtney, Ava: It was great to see the book bus and reading hut finally open after watching its development over the past year. I look forward to being able to use them and read some new books. I want to grab the front seat on the top deck!

Year 3 children enjoying time on the Bus.

 

Mathematics

In Mathematics, many year groups are beginning to move away from working exclusively with whole numbers and starting to learn about fractions, which is such an important part of the curriculum within each year group. We are focusing our efforts on developing early number skills as part of our continued professional development, looking at terms including ‘cardinality’ and ‘subitising,’ so that we can best support our pupils in their early number development.

When children understand the cardinality of numbers, it refers to the quantity of things it represents, so they know how many ‘things’ there are altogether. We refer to this as the ‘oneness of one,’ or the ‘twoness of two’ etc. When children subitise, they recognise the amount of things in a group without counting them.

We are also collaborating with Central Maths Hub on their project, Mastering Number, which supports pupils in their ability to recognise and calculate within 20. These are very exciting times for Mathematics at St. Paul’s!

 

Nursery

Book Bus

Nursery have been eager to experience a story in our new book bus and reading hut. Two books were chosen and they sat in the bus and were able to experience the wonder of the books in a new space.

Who helps us in school?

Why do I need help? This is the question for this terms topic. In nursery we have been looking at who in school helps us. We have found out how many different people actually help us in and around school from the school cooks to lollipop people. To help us to understand this the school cook came to our classroom to talk to us about what she does, and how without her and her team, the school would have no food.

Who helps us in our community?

We have been looking at shop keepers and how they help us and also post workers and what they do in our community. To explore this we have a shop set up in our outside area where we can buy things from a shop keeper. We have also posted a letter to the school to see what happens to it and if it gets sent to the correct place.

In PE we have been focusing on using our gross motor skills. We have been crawling, climbing, balancing, running, kicking, jumping and rolling. To achieve this we have set up different challenges to see if we can try our best to complete each one.

 

Reception

We had a great time going into the reading hut to choose a book and looking at it on the book bus. We have enjoyed taking these books home to share with our grown ups too and we also enjoyed inviting our grown ups into school to share stories with us.

In PE we have been practicing our balancing skills on the large apparatus.

In mathematics we have been learning to subitise 5 (recognise an amount without counting) and order amounts to 5.

In our topic we have been thinking about our local area and who helps us in the local area. We went on a walk along Wiclif Way and Church Road to St Paul’s Church.

 

Year 1

We are looking at The Good News that Jesus brings and are thinking about whether Jesus’ Good News is only for Christians or others too. We have learned that Jesus is a friend to the friendless, that He is forgiving and brings us peace in our heart and with God.

Science:

As scientists, we.are looking at plants, in particular trees. We are studying their parts and functions, looking at local trees and their leaves, fruit and blossom. We also learnt about trees which are ever-greens and deciduous.

Mathematics:

We have been practicing our number bonds to ten a lot, adding within 10 and up to 20. We are using tens frames, part-part-wholes models and Numicons to help us visualise our number bonds and how we can add by making ten first. Following on, we are using our number bond skills to work on subtraction within 20.

PSHE:

This half term, we are concentrating on dreams and goals: what it means to stay motivated when doing something challenging, to keep trying when it is difficult, to work well with a partner or in a team, have a positive attitude and to help others achieve.

Geography:

As geographers we are looking at where we live in the world. The big question we are exploring this term is Antarctica – Where is it? So far we have looked at the continent of Europe and the countries, climate, food, currency and population. We can now name the 7 continents and have an understanding what the equator is and what the climate is like living in countries close to the equator.

Design and Technology:

The children will be exploring different ways of joining fabrics before creating their own hand puppets based upon characters from a well-known fairy tale. Throughout they will work on their technical skills of cutting, gluing, stapling and pinning.

This half term, we have introduced ‘Our Favourite Five’. These are five books that we will keep on reading throughout the weeks of each half term. At the moment, we are enjoying ‘Sharing a Shell’, ‘Whiffy Wilson’, ‘Keep out bears about’; ‘Magic beans’ and ‘Lost and found’.

 

Year 2

Year 2 have started the year off on fire! Well not quite literally but we have been learning lots about our new topic, the great fire of London. We have started to find out about the events that led to the fire and the reasons why it was so significant reflecting on our question, should we be grateful for it? We got to look at artefacts from 1666 that led us to understand where our facts come from. Maple class were particularly interested in the ‘fire hook’ that was used to pull houses down to stop the fire spreading.

In mathematics we have been deepening our understanding of multiplication and division especially with our 2s, 5s and 10 x tables. Keep practising at home if you don’t know them off by heart yet. We are now beginning to explore statistics, using tally charts, pictograms and block graphs to represent data we are going to collect.

In English we have had some exciting things happen, we started off the year with our ‘love reading’ week, exploring lots of ideas about books and discussing our favourite authors and genres. We topped off the week being able to listen to Elka Evalds our special author who then opened the book bus and reading hut.

We’ve been able to go in lots since and have even explored the knowledge nook for non-fiction texts too.

Reading is the key to fantastic writing and knowledgeable children! Our children have been exploring some new stories in their writing tasks too, a favourite so far has been the tin forest – a story where an old man builds himself an exotic forest out of metal junk which causes the real wildlife to come too!

 

Year 3

As historians in Year 3, we are studying Ancient Egypt. We are exploring the big question ‘What if you lived in Ancient Egypt?’ and the children seem fascinated by this topic so far. We even launched our topic by mummifying apples!- to show how mummification preserves objects or things, stopping them from rotting. We have looked at where Egypt is, when Ancient Egyptian civilisation took place as well as looking very closely at different ancient artefacts to find out what life was actually like. The children have also become researchers in the Knowledge Nook to find out information about all of the famous Pharaohs – feel free to ask us anything about Tutankhamun!

In English, we have been reading Cinderella of the Nile by Beverley Naidoo. We have enjoyed comparing this Egyptian fairy tale to the traditional Cinderella. We have then written our own alternative versions of the fairy tale, which we would love to share with you!

In Mathematics, we have been multiplying 2 digit and 1 digit numbers, with exchange and no exchange. This has been a tricky concept, but the Year 3 children have smashed it! We are just moving onto 2 digit by 1 digit division, which we hope the children will tackle with the same determination.

As scientists, we are exploring light. We have found out that darkness is the absence of light and have been investigating which colours reflect light in the best way.

In PE, we have been playing football and have been improving our passing and dribbling skills. We are trying to better ourselves and always maintain a positive ‘can do’ attitude, even when things are tricky.

 

Year4

In Year 4, we have started to read Fortunately the Milk. It is a whacky adventure all about a father who pops to the shops to buy some milk for his children. We have had a go at creating our own inventions that could feature in the story and produced explanations as to how they work.

In Topic we have begun to explore the big question ‘Where in the UK would you live?’ and I’m sure the children would love to fill you in on the different capitals and seas in the UK or explain to you the difference between Great Britain and the UK! As scientists we are exploring living things and how to use a classification key to identify animals and exploring how animals and plants are suited to different environments.

 

Year 5

We have continued our exciting work on our Young Leaders project. As a part of this, pupils have, or will soon be going, on a local walk to look at amenities in the local area. They will then use this information to think about what they can do to help.

We have started our exciting new topic on the Monarchy. Pupils have already looked at the events of 1066 leading up to the Battle of Hastings and considered the impact of the Magna Carta on our country and across the world. We will be continuing to look at different monarchs and consider their impact on our history.

Finally, in literacy, we have been looking at stories containing suspense. Pupils have considered how they can show emotion in their writing rather than just saying how a character is feeling. We have now moved on to Macbeth and will be thinking about the characters and key themes from the play.

 

Year6

We are getting well and truly into our topic, “ls the earth fractured or flourishing?” and looking at what humans can do to keep our planet thriving. In science we are learning about how plants and animals evolved, and the work of Charles Darwin.

In Mathematics and English we are busy revising number operations, grammar and punctuation, and learning more about percentages, fractions and decimals.

We are enjoying our new class novel, The Promise, and will be improving our creative writing by choosing themes from the text.

We are in the process of rebooking our Parliament trip and are waiting confirmation that we will hopefully be able to visit in the Summer term.

 

Clubs

Sports Clubs Update – We are in a new term now and school clubs are up and running. Multi-sports – We are focusing on team games, the next 2 weeks is hockey

• Football clubs
  Across all KS2, each year group is developing their skills with a focus on passing and moving and ball control.
• Hockey
  We are playing lots of mini games in Hockey. Any children in Year 5 ft 6 that would like to join, there are spaces still available.
• Rugby
  This week we have been going over the rules and basic skills of rugby, focusing on throwing, and kicking. There are also spaces available for Year 5 ft 6 pupils for rugby.
• Handball
  The interest in handball from the pupils is great as this is a new sport for many, keep it up. Skills learnt from other sports are being shown well.
• Dodgeball
  The children are really enjoying dodgeball and are having fun. We are focusing on throwing and retreating as one movement.
• Dance Clubs
  We still have spaces in Miss Kirsty’s Dance for Years 1 ft 2 Tuesday 8 am and Years 3,4 5 ft 6 Tuesday 3.15 pm and also Miss Shan’s Streetdance clubs for Years 1 ft 2 on Thursday at 8 am and Years 3,4,5 ft 6 on Thursday’s at 3.15 pm.

 

Parent Governor Vacancy

Nominations are now being invited for the position of Parent Governor on our school’s Governing Body.

Parent governors play an important role as members of the governing body, which is responsible for directing the conduct of the school and for promoting high standards of educational achievement. The term of office for parent governors as determined by the governing body is 4 years.

You will need to be able to commit sufficient time. We are looking for someone who can take an active role, attend regular meetings, some of which may be during the day. Attendance at Full Governors and Committee Meeting each school term will also be expected.

Training is available for all governors and those new to being a governor are encouraged to attend induction training. All of our governors are expected to follow the Code of Conduct.

If you would like to stand for election please pop into the school office to pick up a nomination form which needs to be returned to the school no later than Friday 24th September (i.e. you must get two parent/carers to nominate you, and you must sign to state that you are accepting the nomination).

Nominations must be from parents or carers with children at the school. Parents/carers being nominated are invited to provide some brief details limited to no more than 150 words suitable for inclusion in a ballot paper should there be more than one nomination. More than one nomination will result in voting papers being sent out to all parents/carers with details of the ballot procedure.

We actively encourage applications from those of a Black, Asian and minority ethnic background and those with disabilities.

 

Parent/Teacher Virtual Consultations

Letters will be emailed to you tomorrow (28/1). Virtual Parent/Teacher consultations will be week commencing 7^th February from 1.30pm – 6pm. Please visit stpaulsnuneaton.schoolcloud.co.uk as from Monday to book your child/ren’s appointment times.

 

Triangle Club

We wish to inform parents, that due to low numbers, Triangle Club will not be open during half-term week. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Please note Triangle club now has a new phone number, with immediate effect 07825 853575.

 

School Meals – Change of Menu

Please see school meals section of the website.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all Parents/Carers for their kind donations to The Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal, we raised an amazing amount of £591.28.

 

Dates for your Diary 2022

• Friday 18th February : School breaks up for Half Term
• Monday 21st February – Friday 25th February : Half Term
• Monday 28th February : School Re-opens
• Monday 4th April – Wednesday 6th April : Year 4 PGL Residential Trip
• Thursday 7th April : School breaks up for Easter
• Friday 8th April : Inset Day
• Monday 11th April – Friday 22nd April : Easter Holiday
• Monday 25th April : School Re-opens
• Monday 2nd May : Bank Holiday
• Monday 9th May – Wednesday 11th May: Year 5 Castleton Residential Trip
• Friday 13th May – Monday 16th May: Year 6 Manor Adventure Residential Trip
• Friday 27th May – School breaks up for Half Term
• Monday 30th May – Friday 3rd June : Half Term
• Monday 6th June : School Re-opens
• Wednesday 6th July : Induction Day
• Wednesday 20th July : Break up for Summer Holidays
• Thursday 21st July : Inset Day
• Friday 22nd July : Queen’s Jubilee (extra day given to schools)
• Monday 5th September : Inset Day
• Tuesday 6th September : Inset Day
• Wednesday 7th September : School Re-opens
• Friday 21st October : School Breaks Up For Half Term
• Monday 31st October : Inset Day
• Tuesday 1st November : School Re-opens
• Friday 16th December : School breaks up for Christmas