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Whitkirk News! 7th OCTOBER 2022

A message from Miss Quarmby

Thank you so much to all our family members who were able to join us for our Learning Together mornings. We're delighted that so many of you were able to come along and join in with some maths, and it was wonderful to hear lots of positive feedback. We really appreciate your continued support, and it's always a joy to invite people into school to see the fabulous things that are taking place. We have planned two more of these sessions throughout the year: one in the spring term, and one in the summer term (dates can be found on the school calendar overview).

Each year, we have a school development plan which we work towards as we strive to be the best that we can be. This year, we have shared this with our pupils, so that they know what we are working together to achieve. You can find our pupil friendly overview below. One of our key areas is focusing on improving writing across school. Mr Sadler and Miss Dougan have been spending time in classes this week looking at pupils' writing, and opportunities for children to regularly practise their skills. They have been particularly impressed by the learning that UKS2 are producing. I think we have some budding authors in the making and I can't wait to read their wonderful creations!

Child-friendly school development plan

Thank you to everybody who has supported their child(ren) to apply for one of our leadership roles in school (School Council, Eco Warriors and Reading Ambassadors). We have had a really positive response and Miss Emery, Mr Sadler and I are looking forward to working with our great leaders of the future. Today is the deadline for any final letters, and for teacher nominations, so results will be shared next week, ready for our first meeting in the final week of half term.

Finally, thank you to everybody who took the time to vote in our secret ballot for parent governors. We are delighted to have Jennifer Beckett and Rachel Turner joining our school governing board. Ian Foy (Chair of Governors) and I are looking forward to meeting with both Jennifer and Rachel and showing them around our school ahead of our next governors meeting in December. I hope everybody has a fantastic weekend, and I look forward to seeing you all on Monday.

New Reception starters 2023

We are looking forward to meeting lots of prospective families over the upcoming weeks and months. On Tuesday 11th October and Thursday 13th October we are inviting families into school to see our EYFS indoor and outdoor learning environments, meet our EYFS team and members of the leadership team. If you know anybody starting school in September 2023, please pass on the word, and invite them into our wonderful school.

Harvest Festival:

Harvest is just around the corner, and for new families joining us, we visit St. Mary's Church each year to celebrate Harvest. This year, this will take place on Thursday 20th October at 9:30am for Reception and KS1, and 10:30am for KS2. Each year, we are overwhelmed by your generosity of non-perishable gifts, that we then donate to a food bank. If you are able to bring a small food donation, please pass this to your child's class teacher between Monday 17th October and Thursday 20th October.

PTA Update

IPAD FUNDRAISING

We always like to start the new school year with some good news, and this year we are pleased to be able to start by letting everyone know that our iPad Appeal last year made a whopping £1,899.08! We have now passed these funds over to school for them to use to purchase new iPads for use in school.

DATES FOR YOUR DIARY THIS TERM

  • Wednesday 19th October 5pm-6:30pm – Spooky Halloween Disco
  • Saturday 26th November 11am-2pm – Christmas Fair

JOIN US!

If you can spare some time to help the PTA we would love to have your help - whether you can spare 5 minutes to create and share a post on social media, 10 minutes to call into a local business to collect a raffle prize, an hour to help set up at a school disco or even 3 hours to man a stall at the Christmas Fair – every minute helps!

To find out how you can get involved please join our chat on WhatsApp using the below link https://chat.whatsapp.com/LGlhTPqT89n1CQ1hcPM2RZ or send a message via our Facebook page Friends of Whitkirk Primary PTA | Facebook.

Attendance

This week the class in first place with 99.23% are 2KD; well done to you all! That’s three weeks in a row you have been top spot. In second place are 3/4CO with 97.41% and in third place we have 5JC with 97.04%.

The whole school attendance for Whitkirk this week is 94.12%, taking us significantly below our whole school target of 97%. Let’s push next week to get our whole school attendance back up to our first week high of 97.8%. We can do it if we all come to school when we can and on time!

At Whitkirk Primary School, we believe that excellent attendance leads to excellent achievement in both curriculum progress and also in social and emotional development. School attendance remains one of our top priorities.

Let's see what's been happening in our classes this week

EYFS

It has been a very busy week in Reception. We started the week by learning about Harvest and harvesting our reception garden crops - we were amazed by how big the carrots were! The children then designed and set up their own farmers market to sell crops, and they decided how much each piece of produce must cost and created their own labels. The children also created their own scarecrow to scare away any animals that may want to nibble our previous squash that are still growing in the garden.

Our Big Idea this term in Reception is ‘What makes me, me?’ Throughout this term, the children are learning about what makes them unique and different. This week the children had a special delivery: a new baby in the role play area. The children welcomed Ravi and discussed how they should look after him. As they discussed this, they noticed something special about Ravi: he has a hearing aid. This helps Ravi to hear. The children then discussed how they can communicate with Ravi. They suggested that we learn how to sign so that we can speak to Ravi. This week we have learnt how to sign words such as mum, dad, hello, goodbye and thank you. The children have shown great understanding and compassion when looking after Ravi. Well done, Reception; you have made the EYFS team incredibly proud this week.

Key Stage 1

What a super week in Year 1! In Talk For Writing, we have begun planning our letter to Paddington to tell him all about what it is like to live in Leeds. We have drawn upon some knowledge from our Geography Big Idea and applied some of our vocabulary such as map, weather and city.

In Science, we have been looking at Our Changing World and the changing seasons. We discussed how we are in Autumn and what changes we can see, including leaves falling off the trees and a definite change in temperature! We went on a scavenger hunt around school to find autumn leaves and describe them using adjectives. We decided leaves in autumn were golden, crisp and crunchy!

We have also held discussions about Harvest and being thankful. We have enjoyed singing practice for our upcoming Harvest Festival.

This week in Year 2, we have written fantastic letters about our local area using a range of sentence types. We have learnt all about the germination of a seed and have drawn seed cycles in our Science books. Our seeds are just about to flower in the classroom. In maths, we have been adding 2-digit numbers and we loved having lots of fantastic helpers. In music, we have been learning some exciting harvest songs. We can’t wait to visit St Mary’s church to perform our new songs!

Lower Key Stage 2

What a week in LKS2! On Tuesday, we held our first Learning Together session of the year. An enormous thank you to all the parents and carers who were able to join us for this! We all really enjoyed welcoming you into our classrooms to give you an insight into what a Maths learning session looks like in LKS2. We can’t wait to invite you all to the next one!

In English, we have been developing the knowledge and skills to become confident writers when creating our character descriptions next week. We have built up a bank of expanded noun phrases and figurative language which we will use in our writing. Our key phrase of the week has been, “Painting a picture with words”, which is just what we’ll be doing when we begin our descriptions next week.

As Geographers, we have continued our journey around Europe. This week, we focused on the physical geography of Italy and Poland, making comparisons between the two countries. As Scientists, we have continued to deepen our understanding of the digestive system. We had lots of fun creating a very messy model of the digestive system, ensuring we identify which parts of the system are mechanical digestion and which are chemical. Another enormous well done to all the children for an absolutely brilliant week! Well done LKS2!

Upper Key Stage 2

Year 5 have had a fabulous week, beginning with our wonderful Learning Together session! We really enjoyed showing off our mathematical skills with parents and we cannot wait for the next one! In maths, we have moved on from multi-step addition and subtraction problems to our multiplication topic, starting with common multiples between numbers. English has involved fronted adverbial phrases, incredible expanded noun phrases and our new focus on relative clauses, all in preparation for our diary writing next week. We put our comparison skills to the test in both Geography and Science this week, comparing life in and outside of the tropics as well as why the UK has four seasons and why they change! In art, we have delved into the life and work of Kurt Schwitters, creating our first double page spread before we recreate his work in our next lesson. We are really proud of how hard Year 5 have been working and we are so excited to see where we can go!!!

This week in Year 6 has been all about working together and showcasing our learning. On Monday morning we opened our doors to all our parents and gave them a glimpse of our marvellous maths skills. The children were fantastic. They explained their learning exceptionally well, which certainly made up for Mr Stout's nerves as he modelled long multiplication in front of all the parents! This week we gave our science skills a rest as we learnt all about food miles and the impact of importing foods from far off places in preparation for Harvest Festival. In writing we added the finishing touches to our explanations of the human circulatory system before we send them off to be judged by Dr Sam Hart (Mrs Hart's son) who specializes in cardiovascular medicine.

Stars of the week

Have a lovely weekend. We will see you on Monday!

Created By
Natasha Walker
Appreciate