Windrush Valley Private School Oxfordshire – Newsletter.
Nursery & Reception
Early years have focused on the Fire Service, looking at how firefighters save lives, tackle fires and the equipment they use. Miss Williams set up a fire obstacle course in the EYFS garden, the children thoroughly enjoyed the activity and spraying the (pretend) flames at the end. Reception has focused on the sounds ‘n and ck’ this week. Their letter formation is progressing well and they are enjoying singing along to our Jolly Phonics Songs. We have been reading the story ‘Whatever Next’ by Jill Murphy. The class have thought about what they would pack to visit the moon and made their own rocket to travel to the moon. We then imagined what an alien living on the moon may look like. Nursery have been learning the sound ‘t’. They have had a teddy bears tea party in the role play area and they have created tissue paper autumn trees. There has been singing, painting and friendships are beginning to blossom between the children. In Mathematics, the children have been learning how to match items. They had to look through a pile of wellies and sort them out into their pairs. This promoted collaboration and discussion about colour and pattern.
Year 1 & Year 2
Pupils performed songs for the Harvest Festival and drew harvest pictures and did a write-up of the school festival and why we thank the farmers. Now we are starting preparations for our Nativity. Swimming and tag rugby were the focus in sports. The children had fun incorporating the skills taught for catching and throwing a rugby ball in popular games such as tag, stuck in the mud, and team races.
Year 3
In English, we have been looking at setting and character descriptions and looked closely at punctuation and how we need this to structure our writing. The children are putting in lots more expression when reading, and everybody is enjoying our class reader ‘The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark‘. We have been looking at measurements and measuring in mm, cm and metres. In geography we’ve been looking at earthquakes and how humans adapt to living in the Ring of Fire. The children are showing a sound knowledge of the physical layers of the earth.
Year 4
In English, we have been learning about the different types of nouns and for homework we are focusing on abstract, collective and common nouns. We have become designers in Art this week when studying the work of Vivienne Westwood. We have explored examples of her work and created our own croquis drawings, using sample styles. We certainly have some budding fashion designers in our midst! In PSHE we have been exploring road safety and developing a greater awareness and understanding of how to keep ourselves and others safe, when on the road or near to it.
Year 5
Year 5 have been creating concrete poetry this week. A variety of themes were chosen including balloons, kites, fireworks and hot chocolate! We have worked hard to include poetic techniques such as alliteration, onomatopoeia and similes as well as using the words to create the shape of the poem. This was challenging but fun and we have ended up with some lovely shape poems for a display. In maths, we have been tackling fractions – particularly finding equivalent fractions and comparing fractions. In PSHE we discussed the importance of British Law and considered how laws are there to protect everyone and keep people safe, happy, and healthy.
Year 6
After celebrating the Harvest Festival, we got stuck into our studies, unpicking fractions and decimals in maths. There are often misconceptions when learning about these so we spent time just talking about what they actually are and looking at how they are essentially a part of a whole. In English we read a first person account of a sergeant involved in the Crimean War and it was interesting to see how different a Victorian conflict was compared to the twentieth century mechanised war of 1914-18. It was also an opportunity to look at the Crimean peninsula and make links with the current geopolitical situation and Russia’s actions in 2014. In Science we revisited properties of materials while in History we looked at how technology changes warfare.
This Windrush Valley Private School Oxfordshire newsletter provides a summary of what the year groups and pupil classes have been focusing on during their recent studies.