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PARK HILL PREPARATORY SCHOOL THE DEERSTALKER ISSUE 169 - 29th april 2022

From the Headmaster:

I do find myself occasionally inadvertently humming a particular song at this time of the week.

At the risk of showing my age, and without spoiling any fun, I will share with you just what lyrics are rumbling around -

‘Waiting for an underground train to rumble underneath my feet

Bang goes another day

Where it went, I could not say

Now I'll have to wait another week…’

It was super to be back teaching athletics on Tuesday morning with the prospect of ILG athletics, sports day and regional events on the horizon. I enjoyed seeing letters go out for triathlons and to see images from the kayaking. Likewise the maths quiz and to hold conversations about art exhibitions and trips to the seaside. Just super to be back to the events that will make new wonderful memories.

So that’s where the week went, I can say after all.

Enjoy your long weekend.

Alistair

Inter House Maths Quiz

Quite the mental maths challenge on Thursday morning as the children flexed their mathematical muscles on some very challenging questions.

As you can see, the children worked hard to overcome the conundrums with St. Andrew’s the final champions!

Kayaking

Much fun was had at Thames Young Mariners on Monday, with our intrepid adventurers making waves…

Park Hill Pre-Loved Uniform

Park Hill Preloved, our sustainable uniform shop is now up and running. Our goals are to reuse uniform and club equipment long after your little ones have grown out of it. We will be working with the school council to raise money for their chosen charity and to support school projects (think gardening equipment, new climbing frames etc...). For the remainder of this academic year all proceeds from Park Hill Preloved will be donated to Kingston Hospital Charity (Pediatric fund) which was the chosen charity for the wonderful charity event that took place over Easter.

From September 2022 we will be donating 1/2 of the money raised to support the chosen school project and 1/2 to the chosen charity. The choosing will be down to the school council. We will update you on these once the council is voted on in the next academic year.

You can donate any uniform, club equipment and football boots directly to any one of us or you can bag it up and hand it in at the school. Please make sure your donations are in good condition.

Any uniform that you have that is not relovable may be recycled into memory gifts. Please speak to Lee if you have uniform that may be reused in this way (we don't want to end up with a mountain!).

We have set up a google form with a list of all our Park Hill Preloved stock. The link to this can be found below. Please add a comment with your child's name, class, what you want to purchase and how we can contact you. Pop the cash in an envelope labeled Park Hill Preloved and your childs name. We will deliver your uniform to your child's classroom. Please can you make sure that your envelope makes it to one of us (Cashless options coming soon hopefully!).

Class News

Year 6

Welcome back! A great number of concepts and ideas have already been covered in Year 6 within the first week and a half!

English has seen us move in to our final book, ‘The infinite lives of Maisie day’. We have been exploring third person limited, internal dialogue and multiple reality stories. I do wonder how it will all end…

Maths has been all about graphs and circles, formulas and data. This data has been analysed, presented at graphs, and used to create problems.

In science, we have begun our work on conception, looking at how babies grow in the womb. RSE has also begun, with this session being split between boys and girls. Some very good discussions have taken place already.

Year 5

We kicked off Year 5 this week with a trip to the River Thames for an afternoon of kayaking. For some children it was their first time paddling and it was no surprise to see that after a few minutes they were chasing each other around playing various games under the instructors careful supervision.

Back in the classroom, we have pushed on with our maths projects where we have focused on volume. We have calculated the volume of a range of cubes and cuboids both on paper and using objects around the school.

In English, the children have split their time working on their story sequels and also their increasing impressive TED Talks style scripts in preparation for the 13th May event.

Year 4

Another busy week in the classroom. In English, we’ve reached the island in Kensuke’s Kingdom and the children have worked hard extracting information from the text to build up an accurate description of the island. Not content with looking at the description, the children decided they could improve the figurative language and created their improved description of the island. The question on everyone’s lips … is Michael alone on the island?

In Maths, we’ve been using and applying decimals this week. We’ve been working in cafes and theme parks, adding up entrance fees and taking orders at the cafe. The class have been adding and subtracting decimals and making sure the customers get the right change.

In Science, the children have been learning about Electrical Safety before we begin our circuits work.

Well done Year 4 - you’ve worked very hard this week.

Year 3

Year 3 have had an exciting week being detectives working out the mystery of the flying frogs in their English work using the beautifully illustrated book ‘Tuesday’ by David Wiesner as a stimulus. We then looked at language used in a Non- chronological report leading into writing up our police reports after hot seating as both the detective and a witness. Using talk to text on Pages we recorded our report digitally and then worked with a partner to edit the text.

In Mathematics we have revisited ordering and reading numbers leading into addition and word problems. We even managed to discuss how to read billions!

In humanities and art we have moved onto The Vikings, learning about how they made their way to Britain using our sketching skills to draw Viking warriors.

Year 2

Deerstalker Contributions

Great week in Year 2! We started off the week by planting some seeds in our very own pots and now we are watering and taking care of them everyday in the hopes of seeing some seeds germinate into beautiful flowers in a couple weeks. It's particularly exciting when we can take pictures of them to create a time lapse of the whole process.

Our mathematicians in Year 2 have shown their amazing ability to solve word problems in our Interhouse maths competition! Well done St Andrews for coming out on top!

In English we have been looking at instructional texts and understanding all about how to read and understand various ones. We ended the week with the children making a cheesecake by following the instructions!

Well done Year 2! You've had a fabulous week!

Year 1

This week in mathematics we have been learning all about equal groups, (which have the same number of objects in each group). We have explored how to recognise equal and unequal groups, how to make an equal group and also how to add equal groups, showing this as repeated addition.

In literacy we have begun to focus on phase 6 phonics looking closely at suffixes and changing nouns from singular to plural. Then exploring the Katie Morag books by the author Marie Hedderwick. We start with Katie Morag and the Two Grandmothers comparing our supporting characters and describing our main character.

We have continued to delve into the mysteries of hearing. Learning what sound is, how it is created, how it travels through the invisible matter all around us, and considering how we investigate changes in sound. This week we looked at soft and loud environmental sounds. Learning which sounds were the loudest and considering what created them. Interestingly, most loud sounds were created by humans or machines!

Reception

We have had a really interesting week in Reception…

We have learned about St George, his bravery and how special he is to England. He is also important to all the Park Hill pupils in his house. To celebrate St George’s feast day we took part in the whole school Inter-house Mathematics Quiz. Everyone did really well and showed what amazing mathematicians four and five year olds can be! In mathematics lessons we have used numbers to 20.

We have also learned about the lifecycle of a frog. We are now looking out for frogspawn and frogs everywhere so that we can see nature in action.

For woodland school this week, we stayed at Park Hill and helped tidy our bark areas and mud kitchen before helping to plant out seedlings to make the school environment greener.

Second Steps

Second Steps have had a great week. As usual we have been chocker block with activities

Following the children’s interests we have been discovering different lifecycles. They wanted to learn about tadpoles/frogs and caterpillar’s/butterflies.

We broke down the different stages of a frog lifecycle. Looking at the pictures and thinking logically about what growth stages came next. The tadpole grew tiny legs then became a froglet when the legs grew bigger and the tail got shorter, right up to growing into a frog. Then the lifecycle starts all over again.

The children have enjoyed pinging the toy frogs into the pond. Working out how hard of softly to press the frog to make it jump and working out how far the frog needed to jump. The children decided to use the tape measures to see “what number the fronts needed to jump to get in the pond”.

We were super excited about collecting our caterpillar’s from the post man when he knocked at the door. We will be making a diary to monitor their growth all the way up to emerging as butterflies.

We looked at different butterflies and the children noticed that both wings were the same, a mirror mage of each other. The children drew their own butterflies looking at the patterns they drew on one side and copied it on the other side to create the mirror image.

Linked to the children’s growing and changing interests we planted peas to see how they change from a tiny dried pea to a tall plant growing flowers and it’s own peas. We compared the difference between the peas we eat and the dried peas.

The children said “it is as hard as a stone”, “it is wrinkly”, it doesn’t smell of anything”, “they are not green like the ones we had for our lunch”

The peas we planted were grown last summer after they had past their best, we couldn’t eat them so we picked them, took them out their pods and dried them out in the sun so we could replant them.

We have had a lot of great critical thinking and problem solving while constructing and playing with the giant marble run.

After showing the children how to fit the pieces together we let them explore and discover the best ways to get the cars down to the ground. Then they had to work out which cars would fit and which ones were too big. Secondly how to stop the cars coming out of the holes on the posts by either making the run longer, blocking the hole or making other run that overlapped each other. After working all this out the children had great fun running cars from top to bottom and rebuilding it.

We have been learning about the letter H. Upper case and lower case, learning we use an upper case at the beginning of a name, H for Henry for example. Searching round the classroom and school grounds to find items beginning with H to put in our Letterbox.

The children were able to identify lots of ‘h’ sound words from memory. Linking the sound to a word.

Can we please ask that your children only bring in toys for Show and Tell on a Monday.

There are lots of toys coming in through the week and we don’t want them to get lost or broken.

If you have had a trip at the weekend or your child had done something amazing at the weekend please feel to add it to Tapestry and we can show that for Show and Tell. Thank you

Miss Finch, Miss Wood.

First Steps

First Steps have been learning about the Mini beast this week. We have discovered many facts about ladybirds; they live for one year long, a group of ladybirds is called ‘loveliness’, they have hidden wings and they help us to look after our gardens. In light of these facts, children have painted their very own ladybirds and counted the dots they have painted.

We have been reading the story ‘What the Ladybird Heard’ and children enjoyed retelling the story using the props in the outdoor area and demonstrated many animal sounds. Some children showed interest to find out the letter ‘t’ and we went for a ‘t’ hunt in the class. They have found: tiger, triangle and tree. All the children enjoy learning about the authors of the books and Eric Carl & Julia Donaldson are our favourite authors so far. Please do talk about the authors of the books while reading at home.

In Woodland School, a group of children had a journey to Richmond Park with their magnifying glasses and bug check list. They searched for different bugs and put a tick on their list when they had found one. We have continued this activity in our class and learned different bug names.

Ms Tomaskova brought a brand new musical instruments set in our class this week and each child had a chance to play an instrument. First Steps displayed amazing listening skills during the music session and have created an orchestra to perform a few nursery songs. Well done you all!

Our home corner has started to enrich with parents’ donation boxes and containers (rice box, spice bottle etc.). Please feel free to bring more boxes and containers, the children are having so much fun using real life resources while playing in the home corner.

Wishing you a sunny weekend!

Mrs Guniz, Mrs Mousi, Miss Howell

French

Year 5&6

These last two weeks children were introduced to our new topic for this term “ Les vêtements” and our new song from Edith Piaf “ Je Ne regrette rien”.

Last week, we started our lesson by watching an educational video “ Qu’est-ce que tu portes?”. Children had to name the item of clothing that are taken from the English language then we watch the video again and this time they had to memorise and name the rest of the items. After drilling the new vocabulary we played a memory and a vocabulary battle game after which children had to sort the clothes according to their gender.

This week we started our lesson with a little warmer. In groups, one student had to name an item of clothing in English and the other students had to say the word in French then we practised making sentences using the form “ je porte …”. Children were provided with different images and they had to describe what the person on the picture was wearing using a help sheet.

Moving on to the grammar part, with the children, we have analysed the conjugation for the verb “Porter” recalling the 4 steps to- successfully- conjugating 1st group verbs in the present tense.

For the phonics, we have looked at the sounds: /an/ - /on/- /eau/- /au/ and silent consonant at the end of French words.

Year 3:

This term we are starting a new topic “ Les vêtements”. We started our lesson by watching a video “Song- Promenons-nous dans Les bois”. Children had to name the item of clothing that are taken from the English language then I read the story “ Je m’ habille et ….je te croque” and this time, children had to memorise and name the rest of the items worn by the wolf as well as the order he had put them on.

After drilling the new vocabulary we played a game “stand up if you are wearing …..”. This game helped children further drill and memorise the new vocabulary before completing a matching activity. We also revised colour vocabulary in preparation for our next lesson.

Images from the 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 –

13.5.22 - ISA Triathlon

17.5.22 - Art Exhibition

21.5.22 - Shrewsbury House Football Tournament Y2

12.5.22 - Y34 Mosque Trip (tbc)

27.5.22 - ILG Athletics (Lee Valley)

30/5/22-3/6/22 - Half Term

8-10.6.22 - Y3/4 Residential (St Felix, Southwold)

13-15.6.22 - Y5/6 Residential

(St Felix, Southwold)

16.6.22 - Whole School Photo

18.6.22 – Parent Social 3pm-7pm

25.6.22 – Sports Day and Prize Giving (9.30am, St Mary’s University)

27.6.22 - Reports to parents

7.7.22 - End of term production

8.7.22 - Wimbledon Tennis Visit & last day of term

Social Media

#confidentcurioushappy

There are also some wonderful images from our Little Adventurers available through their own instagram page -

Useful Links -

And this is the song…I must be old.

Created By
Park Hill
Appreciate

Credits:

Alistair Bond