PARK HILL PREPARATORY SCHOOL THE DEERSTALKER ISSUE 182 - 4th november 2022

From the Headmaster:

I made the mistake once, a genuine one at that, by suggesting that New Zealand’s most recognisable musical export were from the other side of the Tasman. The fact I did it in earshot of someone hailing from the North Island resulted in an uncomfortable encounter.

The sun shines on the black clouds hanging over the domain

Even when you're feeling warm

The temperature could drop away

Like four seasons in one day….

It seems we have indeed experienced four seasons each day this week…hence my antipodean themed first paragraph.

The week appears to be concluding with a very welcome blue sky (It's stopped rainin' everybody's in the play, And don't you know, It's a beautiful new day, hey hey) and crisp air which bodes well for what promises to be a busy half term ahead.

It was a particularly enjoyable morning on the games field, lots of mov-(ing on up) -ement (nothing can stop us now…) and preparation for netball matches and rugby festival this November.

As I made my way around the classrooms this week I was regaled with haiku’s, flipped stories, who knew that Little Red Riding Hood was in fact the trouble maker? (Something’s come along and it’s burst our bubble…) as well as poppy making and hypothesising before creative writing.

Busy and happy children exploring and engaging with the learning. A particular highlight was the very Halloween themed learning in Reception on Monday as the children thoroughly enjoyed the thought and consideration that had clearly been expended on the impressive resources and activities. `Some ‘wizard’ activities with children ‘spellbound’ with all that they were doing, clearly some witchcraft at play (although you know it’s strictly taboo…) as the children were engrossed with their learning.

All these things combining to make it a truly terrific first week back.

Do enjoy your weekend and a house point for each song correctly identified…

Alistair

Remembrance Service - Thursday 10th November, 9am

We do hope that you will be able to join us for our Remembrance Service assembly on Thursday. Always a moving event, we consider it our responsibility to ensure that we will remember them. We would also ask that poppies are worn, along with a particular attention to uniform, with blazers compulsory for Reception to Year 6 children.

Lost Property

With a little rise in lost property being reported I would be grateful if you could double check bags and belongings this weekend. Some children are missing blazers that have been named as well as sports kit and jumpers. Occasionally items are worn and taken home erroneously and with blazers being a particularly expensive item I would be grateful if you could help us with the potential return of belongings.

All lost property will be collected in the main office. Any items that are named will be returned by us directly. Any unnamed items will be stored in the office.

Pay360 - Clubs, Wrap Around Care, Trips and Visits

We would be most grateful if you could login to your Pay360 account this weekend and check/clear any outstanding amounts. We do appreciate that some of you are facing a number of challenges with Pay360 which we are working to resolve. Please do contact us if you have any queries or require support with the login process.

Key Dates

Thursday 10th November – Remembrance Day Assembly (9am)

Monday 14th November – Odd Socks Day (Anti-Bullying Week - celebrating differences)

Thursday 8th December – Christmas Performance (Whole School and Nursery involved, 10.30am)

Thursday 15th December – Carols by Candlelight (5pm)

Friday 16th December – Last day of term (School and Nursery closed from 12.30pm)

School Photographs

This is just a reminder that the whole school group photograph taken earlier in the year is still available to view and order via the Tempest ordering website. A link is supplied below which will take you directly to your photograph and allow you to browse the different products available and place your order should you wish.

Order link

If your order is intended as a Christmas gift, then we recommend placing your order before 1st December to give you the best chance of receiving your photographs back in time.

Park Hill Pre-Loved Uniform

Our busy bees at Park Hill Preloved are moving the second hand uniform shop to a new on-line platform. From Monday you will be able to order the bits you need by going to Uniformerly – Buy, Sell and Give Away outgrown school uniform to other parents at your school ♻️.

👉👉Uniformerly - Preloved Uniform 👈👈

The aims of the shop are to promote the reuse of uniform, raise funds for the school council school project and their chosen charity and provide families with the chance to get some uniform bits at a low price.

ODD SOCKS DAY

On Monday the 14th November, the Park Hill children are invited to wear odd socks to school as a gesture to celebrate our uniqueness and individuality. Throughout the day the children will encounter discussions and lessons where they will learn about self-confidence along with what it means to play their part in creating an inclusive and tolerant society.

For these events the School Council would normally invite the children to make a small financial donation to their funds, this time they are asking for a donation which can be given to a local food bank.

On Monday 14, please let the children wear any socks they wish and then bring an item(s) from the list below which can be donated.

Here is a link for more information about what can be donated

Link - Information-donation

CAKE SALE

To finish odd socks day and ensure the message behind the day remains in the children’s minds, the Eco Club will be running a cake sale at the end of the day. To facilitate this we ask if the children can contribute with items to sale from either home baked or purchased cakes and other goodies, the Eco Club will then use these as stock for their shop to sell at 3.30pm. As important as the sentiment behind the cake sale is important, the mathematics and enterprise skills behind running a shop is an important skills for the children to explore. Please can any items be bought into school on Monday and dropped off in the playground in the morning.

CHRISTMAS SHOE BOX PROJECT

This year the School Council will be running a Christmas Shoe Box project. More information will be shared with the children next week and full instructions will be in next weeks Deerstalker.

Class News

Year 6

Starting with a bang, the Year 6’s were immediately thrown in to an escape room scenario to get them back in the mind and thought processes of school. 7 puzzles were placed around the room requiring lateral thinking and observation skills. Quite the way to start!

This term’s English work began with a new book, Ways to be me. Written by Rebecca Westcott and Libby Scott; an 11 year old girl who is both an author and autistic and whose experiences are used to shape the main character of this story. We have begun to analyse our main character, Tally, and how she deals with the changes of entering Year 6, discussing her experiences, her reactions, and motivations. Using the book’s ideas, we have started rewriting sections, including our own version of Red riding hood (the key play in the book).

Maths has seen us begin to manipulate fractions, both adding them and subtracting them. We have also looked at equivalent fractions in both shapes, and when written down - many methods were discussed for how we solve questions involving this, and two methods (one from me, and one from the pupils) were agreed upon.

As we are often not at school on halloween, we took advantage and had a science lesson on density through potion making, getting items floating and change colour when shaken.p

Year 5

In Year 5 this week the class have moved on to studying poetry. Kicking this topics off with the fun kenning poems and moving on to cinquain style.

Timestable Rock Starts is back in Year 5 and we return to developing a higher level of number skills, notably with a focus on multiplication and division.

For humanities, we are finishing off our learning about WW2 along with preparation for assembly next week by studying the meaning and message behind remembrance. Next week we will be utilising our new poetry skills and sharing these during the Remembrance Assembly.

Year 4

It’s been a lovely first week back after half term. We finally finished our Krindlekrax book and we were all delighted that Ruskin (our protagonist) became the hero we all hoped he would become. Next week, we start our new book and begin our next adventure.

In Maths we have been revising and extending our knowledge and understanding of formal column addition with regrouping. We have been using ‘Hit the Button’ to brush up on mental maths before using our number bonds to work out our calculations.

This week we begin our new Humanities topic - ‘Ancient Egypt’ where we will being travelling back in time to find out all about the pharaohs, the pyramids and the River Nile.

A fantastic first week and the children engaged and working hard in all lessons. Well done Year 4

Year 3

Year 3 have had a busy week learning to tell the time and work out differences with time problems. We found that it is really useful to focus on minutes past the hour, only moving onto minutes ‘to’ the next hour when that is secure.

In English we have started to read ‘The Sheep Pig’ by Dick King-Smith. In the first chapter we have predicted what is going on, looked at different dialects in the text and reminded ourselves of similies to to make our writing more powerful.

In art we have been learning about why and how the poppy was introduced for remembrance and the meaning behind it. Using oil pastels we made our own poppies blending orange, red and black while listening to music from WWII. Well done Year 3.

Year 2

What a fantastic week in Year 2!

Starting off the week with a spooky number hunt in Maths and potion making in English it was a brilliant way to celebrate halloween. This term's English work began with some letter writing where the children learnt how to write a letter in the correct format and identify important the features in them. We will continue through with this learning next week where a letter will be sent home to parents (keep an eye out)! Maths has seen us begin to add and subtract across the 10's.

Although some of us found it quite challenging to begin with, but with persistence and resilience (which was emphasised in assembly) we ended the week with fantastic independent work completed to a high quality. In science we began our new topic of electricity where we looked at electrical safety in preparation for circuit building in the upcoming weeks! What a wonderful week in Year 2, I am so proud of every single one of you!

Year 1

An interesting first week back for Year 1 with much to share. At the start of the week the school and teachers seemed to have been magically transformed inspiring much discussion and speculation from our class.

So many celebrations to consider, birthdays, Halloween and Bonfire Night.

We have been drafting onomatopoeic poems to describe the wonderful sounds of firework, exploring the eye and its function in our body and delving into addition.

Year 1 wrote some beautiful reports about our school with highlights being that we are imaginative, we have nice friends and can always make new friends, work hard and help one another!

Science this week as a treat because we answered the question - can we see without light? Exploring through a bear cave experiment that I am sure Year 1 would be happy to talk about.

Another reason to be proud of our Park Hill Year 1 is that we have decided to learn British Sign language and will be learning and using a sign a week starting with hello.

Reception

We started the week with a spook-tacular day to celebrate Hallowe’en. We used Julia Donaldson’s brilliant book ‘Room on the Broom’ as inspiration for our literacy lessons and made mini broomsticks with all the characters on board. In our mathematics lesson we followed ghoulish recipes to add the correct number of worms, spiders and googly eyes to our cauldrons and playdoh cupcakes as well as matching shaped spiders to the shaped webs they had spun. We improved our fine motor skills and finger strength by cutting Frankenstein’s monster’s hair and using vampire fangs as tweezers to pick up pasta bats to add to another cauldron. We finished the day by learning all about the bones in our body, as part of our ‘All about healthy me’ topic - we put together a life size skeleton and made accurate and artistic cotton bud skeletons. We also enjoyed some sensory fun with toy eyeballs, skeletons, bats, bones etc.

We continued our broomstick based literacy later in the week by completing the sentence ’Is there room on the broom for a ……….’ and choosing a new animal to join the witch and other creatures on board.

In mathematics we have also been learning about circles and triangles - how to distinguish between them for sorting and to describe their properties using mathematical language. Then we used our new-found knowledge to appreciate Kandinsky’s work with shapes which inspired us to make modern art of our own.

On Thursday at woodland school, we went blackberry picking in the park but, instead of eating our forest treasures, we crushed them to make ink and painted bark, leaves and twigs.

We finished the week by making salty firework pictures as an early Bonfire Night celebration.

Phew - time for the weekend!

Second Steps

The children have come back after half term ready to get stuck in. There was a lot of excitement about going trick or treating Monday night & we heard all about their Halloween adventures and costumes. One child said, “we didn’t go trick or treating but it was exciting when we gave treats to children who knocked on my door”

We have hit the floor running learning about Fireworks and why we have fireworks night. The children have been learning about Guy Fawkes & how he tried to blow up the House of Lords but was caught. We celebrate catching him by having fireworks on the 5th November. We have a lot of logical thinkers in Second Steps. We asked them why we have to wait till night time to have fireworks and sparklers. Alice said “we have to wait for night time when it is dark so we can see them”.

The children made their own fireworks pictures by making beautiful patterns with crayons, when they had finished they painted over their drawing with black paint so the crayon showed through and learnt a very tricky word ‘hydrophobic’ meaning that the wax from the crayons repels the liquid paint. The children also made their own paper sparklers using coloured tissue paper and straws. They showed great fine motor skill and concentration rolling the tape around the straw.

This week we have been focusing on the letter S. Using Jolly Phonic to help us hear the letter sound and associate it to different objects. The children found a spider, snail, scissors, a letter S from the magnets, snake, sun. Some of the children them focused on rhyming words associated with the S objects they had found. Snail rhymes with scale, sun rhymes with bun. Great work.

Our music lessons this week have been introduced to the song we will be singing at the end of term performance. I’m sure you will be hearing it at home very soon. The children enjoyed playing percussion instruments, following a beat and listening carefully for when it was their turn to play their instrument.

We have a new class friend, Second Steps have named him Timmy, he is a cuddly mouse and he will be coming home with a child for the weekend because Timmy wants to know what you do at the weekends. On Monday, or your fist day back after the weekend, you can do a special show and tell with Timmy. We can’t wait to see all his new adventures.

Miss Finch, Mrs Guniz.

First Steps

It’s been great welcoming the children back after the half term break. They have settled back into school life very quickly and enjoyed exploring the new toys and activities.

This weeks topic is bonfire night and the children have enjoyed learning a new game called “fizzing fireworks” which is a listening game. They have all done incredibly well and we are all really impressed with the children’s listening skills during the game. We have also used our coloured scarves for scarf dancing to “zoom zoom zoom” and “ 5 pretty fireworks”.

We have created our first maths display and the children have been working really hard making shape rockets using squares , circles and triangles.

In our outside area the children have been making good use of our new sand in our sand tray, they have been making sandcastles using the buckets and containers and the spades to “pat” the sand.

We have now introduced two special helpers each day into First Steps, the children have been very helpful and have been helping the adults to set up for snack and lunch. We have incorporated our maths skills into this and the children have had the challenge of counting out the bowls for each table. They have been amazing and we are excited to continue this new routine.

We have also named our new class teddy who is called “Fuzzy”. Every Friday one child will take home Fuzzy for the weekend and will bring him back on Tuesday. We will then share with the class the adventures they took Fuzzy on. The children are really excited to find out who is taking them home tomorrow.

We are looking forward to our parents meetings next week.

Miss McCarthy and Miss Marta

French

This Week’s weather was the ideal context for our new theme for this Autumn second term: “La météo: Quel temps fait-il?”

In Year 2, we have sang along our weather song, we have looked at all the different weather conditions, we looked at complex sounds in key words like “soleil, neige, froid, chaud” before Children got to complete a matching activity where they had to read short simple sentences describing the weather and matching it to the correct image.

We concluded our lesson with a fun outdoor Météo game. Children had to listen carefully to the weather description and compete in pairs to find the hidden weather card.

In Year 1, for this first week children are learning to tell the weather.

After singing along our weather song “ Que dit La météo?”, children practised telling the weather by answering the questions « Est-ce qu’il pleut ? Est-ce qu’il neige? Est-ce qu’il y a du soleil? Est-ce qu’il y a du vent? Children are learning to tell the weather in both the affirmative and the negative form.

Children also joined in a memory weather game where they had to first memorise key vocabulary “Le soleil, La pluie, les nuages, le vent, la neige” through a drilling session then listen carefully to the instructions and either match the word to the image or the image to the word.

This week Year six have been experimenting with various expression to tell the weather.

After enthusiastically singing along « Quel temps fait-il? » song, children recalled some sentences used last year to describe the weather and looked at new expressions. They then completed a matching activity and for the correction, children had to work in pairs choosing an image and asking their partner the question « Quel temps fait-il ? » and checking if their have matching answers.

Children also looked at sentences made up with scrambled words and they had to work out the order of the letters for each sentence.

Music

Deerstalker Contributions students are getting ready for Remembrance assembly and Xmas production. Today Mario brought in a violin and learned how to play a song in five minutes. We need to rehearse a little bit and you will be in for a treat.