From the Headmaster:
Safety of our children - Before I start with the usual celebration of this particularly enjoyable week, I need to pass on a number of concerns about the safety of our children on the pavement and crossing Queens Road. Given a number of incidents with cars endangering families on the pavement and vehicles blocking access to neighbouring properties which in turn causes congestion along the front of the school.
Walking to school really should be a safe and pleasant process.
Therefore -
-please do not park or drive on the private land and drives of our neighbouring apartment blocks,
-please do not park on the yellow chevrons in front of the school
-please take care when parking in the bays and watch out for pedestrians
The Deerstalker -
It never fails to make me smile. Standing in front of everyone in that utterly privileged position of looking out at a sea (or should it be a library?) of book characters.
The colour, the smiles the sense of excitement was palpable as we celebrated World Book Day this week.
I will let the pictures do the talking this week.
Enjoy your weekend.
Alistair
In the news…
I think it fair to say that events from the last two years, the ease of access to news 24/7 and unfathomable scenes in Ukraine do affect us all. With thanks to Mrs Walsh for forwarding the BBC article, I would like to encourage you to read through these articles as I think we could all do with strategies when dealing with what can feel like a pretty grim news feed.
TedTalk and Appeal from Jessica, Year 6
I would ask that you read this very powerful and humane request from Jessica. We all need to read this, it is an extraordinarily powerful composition.
Imagine if you were a refugee or someone in your family was a refugee. Wouldn’t you love someone to help them? And be more understanding towards your family?
Back in 2020 like many of you, I was not that knowledgable about refugees. Lately, I have been constantly thinking about people fleeing countries and finding homes to live in. I have been trying to find out how many people have had to leave their homes to find safety in another country.
At school we read “Oranges in No Man’s Land” by Elizabeth Laird. It’s the story of a family who live in Beirut during the war and the girl has to cross no man’s land to get medicine for her grandmother.
I then read “No Ballet Shoes in Syria” by Catherine Bruton. The story is about a girl and her family who seek asylum in England to escape the bombing in Aleppo in Syria. She is very good at ballet and when she comes to England she joins a ballet school which is run by a lady, who escaped from the Nazis during World War II. Her best friend, who is English and rich, gives her ballet uniform so that she can do the classes. The lady who owns the school doesn’t charge for the lessons and allows the family to live in her house.
Last Summer, we watched on television the pictures of people in Afghanistan, desperately clinging to the bottom of the planes that were taking off. They wanted to escape from the Taliban, who took over their country.
Picture how desperate you would have to be to cling to an aeroplane in this way. Many Afghan refugees came to England, but are still waiting for housing. They brought nothing with them, except the clothes they were wearing, or if they were very lucky a small suitcase or a bag.
We also hear on the news about refugees who try to escape on cargo ships, or very small boats, and some of them drown in the English Channel when they try to get to England. We need to be a welcoming country and give these people the support they deserve.
According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees even before the war between Russia and Ukraine there were 82.4 million people who have been forced to leave their homes. 26.4 million are now refugees and half of those are children.
This week, we have watched the terrible news in Ukraine. Now 1 million people have fled to Hungary, Poland, Moldova and Romania. They have nothing. The children have no toys. They are separated from their fathers and sometimes their siblings.
Let me ask you a question. How would you like it if you had to give up everything and go to a different country?
Every child deserves the chance to thrive. But often wars get in the way. Children face fear, hunger, death and danger. They can’t go to school because they are girls. Or suffer from diseases because their government hasn't made healthcare available to them.
Can our lives be summed up in minutes? No, probably not. But theirs can; horror, sadness, destruction.
When I grow up, I want to make a difference in the world so that every child can grow up in peace knowing that they are safe, warm and well fed. Everyone can make a difference. We just need to try together.
Jessica, Year 6.
Jessica will be collecting for the British Red Cross DEC Ukraine appeal each morning next week and you can also donate through this link -
Class News
Year 6
Coordinated outfits and coordinates were in fashion this week as we sunk and targeted maths across the four planes.
The highlight was certainly opportunity to visit our buddies and share our stories with the nursery children and spread our love of books.
Talking of which, we finally got to the conclusion of Holes and just what happened to Stanley Yelnats. A book thoroughly recommended by all of us in Year 6.
Year 5
In Year 5 this week the children sat through an mock 11-Plus Maths exam. While it is always great to acknowledge all of the answers you get correct, the focus this week was to scratch our heads a bit and ask how and why we managed to get some incorrect. We practice a Growth Mindset philosophy in Year 5 and across Park Hill as a whole, a key aspect of this is to be brave and confident enough to make mistakes while knowing that the only repercussions is a chance to learn, try again and grow stronger as a person.
In response to World Book Day, the children visited both the First Steps and Second Steps classrooms to sit and enjoy time with the Nursery children. It was beautiful to see both sets of children read together while enjoying building new friendships, it was a fantastic celebration of appreciating books and reading.
Year 4
An incredibly busy week in Year 4, we have been focusing on decimals in our Maths lessons and we have also been brushing up on our mental arithmetic, which was incredibly useful today when we practised the three R’s in Victorian School.
In our English lessons, we are continuing reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream and have had lots of fun acting out the different characters to fully immerse ourselves in the plot. We are beginning to understand why it is considered one of Shakespeare’s best loved comedies.
The class excelled themselves with their wonderful World Book Day costumes - I’m continually impressed by their love of reading which was evident in the wide range of texts they brought in on Thursday.
We have had such a fun day at Victorian School - although Miss Prism And Mr Killjoy were rather strict. After a morning at an 1850’s school and a tasty packed lunch, we spent some time looking around Gunnersbury Park Museum and enjoyed a tour of the Victorian Kitchens, where we discovered a chef could earn a rather good wage of £22 per year if they became skilled in butchering cows, pigs and even turtles for the Rothschild Family dinners. On the Year 4 Showbie Parent group, I have uploaded lots of photos from the day.
Year 3
What an exciting week, with the highlight being Book Character Day. Using a bit of green screen magic and creativity we explored our characters thoughts and feelings. In Mathematics we have spent time learning our 2D shapes and their properties ending with a pentominoes investigation using unifix cubes and stretching our problem solving skills.
In art this week we explored Anglo- Saxon illuminated letters and why they were considered important, used by kings and painted by monks. Listening to medieval music we worked as the monks would have illuminating a letter from our name.
Year 2
A brilliant week in Year 2. We've done so much these past 5 days and some of us achieved some great milestones in our learning!
Maths was a focus on fractions where we looked at shapes and numbers. Although we didn't have our iPads handy, we played a game to learn our fractions and got some great work done!
In English we built on our fantasy story writing plan where focused on the description of a setting! With great adjectives adverbs we were able to write a fascinating descriptive piece with lots of detail! I'm so impressed Year 2! Our creative ideas are brilliant!
In continuation from last week's science lesson we looked at the human body and our bones. We now know all the various bones in our body and how to keep healthy with the food choices we make!
Brilliant week Year 2!
Year 1
Deerstalker for w/c 28th
Year 1 have had a wonderful week exploring capacity, volume and the properties of materials.
We combined our knowledge into a fantastic experiment on Wednesday where we were testing assorted materials to see which one could be used to make an umbrella.
The children had to ensure that the test was fair, and use their scientific enquiry skills such as asking questions and watching closely.
World Book day was a phenomenal success, the children explored new authors, learnt a great deal about their contrasting characters and created an information book to share their information.
Reception
Goodness - what a busy week it has been in Reception!
It seems as though we have spent the week as members of the media sector…On Monday we made video recordings of our half term or weekend news, complete with news desk and clapperboard. Then we became journalists….writing that news down on Tuesday before reporting about the Arts on Thursday as we described the book characters we had dressed up as for World Book Day!
World Book Day gave us so many more opportunities including visiting other teachers in their classrooms for a story, sharing our favourite books in class and dressing up and displaying our characters during Assembly.
It hasn’t all been literacy based learning though…We have moved into the next phase for mathematics, building 9 and 10 in many different ways and learning to identify both numbers without always counting. We have also focused on all the signs of Spring around us from longer days and changeable weather to new life in the animal and plant kingdoms.
Phew!
Second Steps
This week in Second Steps we have been none stop, with celebrating pan cake day, world book day and starting our celebrations for St Patrick’s day.
We started the week with making pancakes, in small groups we mixed together oats, bananas, a little bit of baking soda, vanilla extract, milk and butter. We blended it all together and slowly poured the mixture out to make small circles. We watched them books and they started to turn a beautiful golden brown. We had them for pudding with fresh lemon and honey, they were the highlight of their week.
We also made our own pancakes with the play dough, we rolled the dough in flour and ‘cracked the eggs’, we mixed it up with spoons and a whisk. The children rolled the dough out, cut it up and put it into the pans, they all tried flipping the pancakes.
For woodland school this week, we celebrated St Patrick’s day. We cleaned out our plant pots, collected fresh soil, and planted shamrock seeds. We watered the seeds and soils and spoke about how long their will take to grown. We spoke about how their are lucky and how they believed shamrocks would protect you from danger.
World book day was so much fun, we had princesses, Wally, wizards and witches, unicorns, pirates, dinosaurs and so much more. The children all brought in a book of who they dressed up as, Maxi dressed as black rock from ‘The Secret of Black Rock’ by Joe Tood-Stanton, he had all the different creatures that live on Black Rock hanging off his costume. Mia was Hermione Granger, she had her very own wand and everything, In the afternoon, she was in the mud kitchen and was making her magical potions. We read some of the books with the children, we ready about Gadabout the Great and his flying doctor crew, we also read about Too
Tyrannosaurus drip and his love of swimming and water reeds.
We have been learning about recycling as it is coming up to World Recycling Day. We have been reading ‘Someone Swallowed Stanley’, Stanley is a plastic back that gets thrown into the ocean and he is eaten by a whale and a turtle. We spoke about how to save the animals and how to recycle plastic bags. We spoke about our different colour bins and what each one is used for. We then spoke about how long it takes different materials to decompose, we used different colour cubes to represent days, months, years and etc. We learnt it takes 50 years for nappy, 200 years for plastic straws and 5 months for orange peel to decompose and for the materials to start to breakdown.
The children continued on their own interests from last week and went around the classroom measuring different items and objects. The children would write down the number they see on the tape measure, they would measures the height on and object and the width of an object too.
The children continued on learning their song Hey little frog!. Second steps really love this school, they enjoy jumping around and learning the life cycle of a frog.
We celebrated St David’s day and decorated the classroom with daffodils, we had a pot of daffodils in full bloom and some that are still a bud. We had an a variety of different drawings, rainbow daffodils and abstract drawings.
We are also very excited as we have a special visit from the Kingston Police, they will be coming into see Second Steps on Monday as part of our ‘People Who Help Us’.
Miss Wood & Miss Finch
First Steps
What a busy week we have had in First Steps. We have started our week looking at pancake recipes. We used our check list if we had all the ingredients like butter, eggs, milk, flour, sugar. Then children pretended to flipping pancakes in the pan. And we have created our cardboard pancakes spreading butter (glue) and adding toppings (yellow glitter; banana and honey, red glitter; strawberries, brown glitter; chocolate chips). Children were very pleased to take their pancakes home.
6 First Steps children went to Richmond Park as part of our Woodland School activity. We had super fun in the park; jumping in muddy puddles, climbing on logs, looking for daffodils and crossing the bridges. It was one fine day to remember forever.
The children dressed up as their favourite book character to celebrate World Book Day. It was lovely to see them in their costumes. We read some of their favourite books during the week to find out more about their interests. Lastly, Year 5 children came in First Steps and read many stories to their reading buddies. It was precious times for our little book worms.
In PE lesson, the children enjoyed playing parachute games with their teachers and peers. They waited for their turn to go under the parachute.
Wishing you a colourful weekend!
Mrs Guniz - Mrs Mousi
Eco Committee
The ECO committee supports Greta Thunberg and celebrate the wonderful Matilda’s costume for World Book Day.
However when asked if they would like to have a school strike for climate change their unanimous answer was no because they love our school so much.
French
Year 5&6
This week we have carried on with out theme for this month “Food”, this time discovering the action verbs used to prepare food. Using visual aids, we have signed and drilled the new vocabulary, played a miming game and completed a matching activity.
We have also watched a short extract video from the movie “Ratatouille”, guessed the name of the dish, its origin and the ingredients used to make this dish. Then, children had to read a Ratatouille recipe and underline all the verbs covered during our lesson.
Moving to the grammar part, children had to analyse the verbs used in the recipe and decide which group they belonged to ( 1st group). We played a game of “ stand up if it’s 1st group verb/ sit down if not). Together, we recalled the 4 steps to conjugating 1st group verbs in the present tense before they got to pick a verb and practise conjugating it themselves. We, also, looked at the spelling of verb “Manger” with the personal pronoun “nous”.
For the phonic part, we have looked at silent consonants at the end of French words and for closure children have enjoyed listening to the French song “Ego” in an effort to encourage and expose them to more French outside of school.
PE & Games
In sports science the Year 6's have finished leading their own training programs. They have linked and learnt the different challenges that come with the delivery of these training methods through feedback and will act upon them in the coming weeks to show further understanding. The year 5's have finished presenting the different training methods to their peers and have started to put things in action by starting to create a training program using the different methods they have learnt. The year 3 & 4's are practically identifying and linking the variety of training methods.
In P.E we have continued to develop our hockey skills for our upcoming fixtures in the coming half-term with a big focus on formation, creating space and communication. Reception and 2nd steps are learning different tagging games with a focus on attacking and blocking the space. First steps are learning how to share equipment and play together as a team in different parachute games.
Latin
The children are very busy looking ahead to the Latin assembly.
Year 3 learns the animals and some descriptive adjectives while practising the song "Senex Marcus fundum habet".
Year 4 focuses on words for family and prepares the puppet show "Meet the Roman family".
Greek mythology was part of Roman civilisation, and the Y5 pupils watched a video and learned all about the Twelve labours of Hercules. They did practise performing in Latin the achievements of this extraordinary hero and learned many new words we still use today.
Vocabulary related to medicine and parts of the body is the topic of Y6, and the children deliver the dialogue for the performance very well.
Optime!
Magistra Mrs Mousi
Images from the Week
Covid-19 Regulations
You will be aware that there has been a significant alteration to the Covid-19 regulations announced this week.
Key Dates
Whilst the dates for the term can be downloaded from the website, I would like to draw your attention to the following events –
Parent Consultation Meetings running throughout the first two weeks of March.
Monday 14th and 21st March – Adventure School Expedition (Yomp) (Y6, Y5 and Y4)
Thursday 10th March – Inter-House Poetry Competition
Thursday 17th March – Inter-House Quiz
Friday 25th March – End of Term
Social Media
#confidentcurioushappy
There are also some wonderful images from our Little Adventurers available through their own instagram page -
Useful Links -
Credits:
Alistair Bond