PARK HILL PREPARATORY SCHOOL THE DEERSTALKER ISSUE 178 - 16th septEmber 2022

An excellent start to the year has been had in our Year 6 classroom. Rules have been created, stories have been started, sums solved, and new discoveries made. It’s been a whirlwind!

Our first book is called ‘once’ by Morris Gleitzman and chronicles the adventures of a boy called Felix and his friend called Zelda as they try to survive Nazi occupied Poland. A tale of bravery and resistance in the face of the most unimaginable misery. We have discovered how a child would view the events occurring; the loss of innocence and the rise of strength.

Maths has been focused on numbers and operations, looking at how we can more easily solve complicated questions. Multiplying and dividing by 10, 100, 1000, estimating answers and checking them, adding and finding the difference, subtraction, and place value have all been covered in our first two weeks. We’ve worked out negative numbers through weather, solve additions using games, and competed to work out missing number problems.

Let science commence with forces and motion. Newton has infiltrated our classroom and is spreading these tales of 3 laws that govern the ways things move. Social media the topic of the term in Computing, and we have begun our creation of posters to demonstrate the positives and negatives of using them.

Phew…what a first two weeks!

It has been great to be back in the classroom after the summer break. The Year 5 children have been on good form these last 2 weeks, stepping up to the early challenges they have been tasked with.

In English the children have been refreshing and fine tuning their creative writing skills, this is building into their first piece of writing for the term. In maths lessons, the knowledge and skills gleaned from the outstanding Mrs Forsyth in Year 4 has allowed the children to make rapid progress through the early stages of Year 5 maths curriculum. Calculations utilising the 4 main operators and place value mastery have been the topics which have now been covered.

This week the children have had the opportunity to put their case forward for one of the school leadership positions, with the class Student Council representative now agreed, the other positions will be decided next week.

Year 3 have enjoyed making a start on The Iron Man and using Ted Hughes style of writing as an inspiration. The short sentences at the beginning of chapter 1 helped in building up the mystery and we enjoyed writing our own versions.

In Mathematics we have continued our work on place value including reading increasingly larger number in the millions! Artistically, we have enjoyed drawing our portraits looking at the layout of the face and how to draw in proportion.

In Science, Year 3 are looking at classifying animals with their diets, using Venn diagrams to help.

We are thrilled to say our new classroom is moving along well and we are looking forward to moving in.

What a wonderful start to the Year! With having the responsibility of their own desk and stepping up to new challenges the children in Year 2 have been brilliant.

In Maths we cracked on with some work on place value and it is astounding the knowledge some children have carried forward from Year 1! With lots of work using the tens frame, counting up and answering some challenging problem solving questions we’re proven ourselves to be math wizards. In English we’ve looked at the various grammatical aspect of our writing and the children have written some amazing descriptive sentences.

On Friday we had the voting for our school representatives and I am pleased to say that Ayla Khayat will be our school council representative in year 2, and our librarian will be Valentina Docherty. Decisions on the other roles will be coming up in the next week!

Year 1 have settled beautifully into a new classroom, routine and curriculum. They have been delving into place value over the past week, counting forwards using number tracks, linking numerals with number words and counting reliably from larger groups.

In literacy we looked at the Tiger who came to Tea, a classic which prompts wonderful discussion and writing opportunities.

Our Science topic this term is plants and animals and I appear to have a class full of scientists! They were able to answer the questions, what is an animal? and then what is a plant? We continued our study at Woodland school identifying the plants and animals around us and considering why we might have them where we live. Or even why we might not have carnivorous plants or tigers where we live!

Our first swim this term went very well, with much confidence and independence seen from all the children.

Well done Year 1 - I am very proud.

In Reception we have welcomed two fabulous extra friends into our new class family. Everyone has been getting used to their smart school uniform and a slightly more formal classroom environment. So grown up - just look at the gallery of first day photographs!

We have started as we mean to go on, tucking into our first topic, ‘All About Me’, by sharing information to help friends get to know us….all the members of our families, our favourite colour, food, television show…

We have also started to learn to write our names in Park Hill’s smart handwriting style, to read letter sounds and even to take reading books home every day!

In mathematics, we have been looking at the properties of items (such as size, colour, shape) and matching in pairs or sorting into larger groups. Sometimes we have even chosen our own properties to sort by.

Across the broader Park Hill curriculum, we have had marvellous music lessons, perfect Performing Arts adventures and super sports sessions. We have even had our first lessons entirely in French - très bien!

We haven’t just been in class though - we have traveled by bus for sports lessons at Ditton Fields, ventured to Richmond Park for Woodland School and visited the church for Assembly……even our music lesson was outside in the sun!

All in all, it has been a wonderful start to the new academic year - roll on next week!

What a lovely start we had have in Second Steps. The children have settled really well and they are enjoying their time in nursery. We are already seeing friendships forming between the children which is so lovely to see so soon in the school year.

We are practising our class rules and learning new routines. The children have enjoyed learning the ‘Days of the Week’ song so we know what day it is, then changing our daily board. Learning about green and red decisions and which ones we like to have in our class. The children have been trying really hard to make all their decisions green.

We have had two very successful trips to Richmond Park, the children discovered different creatures in the park, saw squirrels, bugs, a huge stag in the distance and found some centipede eggs hiding in a fallen log.

We walked with Reception and Year 1. The older children looked after us and made sure we made it there and back safely.

Second steps have talked about their families; who is in their family, how may people are in our family and who do we like to play with.

After learning all about their families the children drew beautiful family portraits with all their family members.

One of Miss Finch’s favourite activities is play dough. The children are learning the names of all the different ingredients and helping to measure them out and mix them all together. The children enjoyed feeling each ingredient to discover what it felt like. They said the salt felt rough but the flour was smooth but they learnt that the hot water has to be mixed in by the teacher.

So far we have made purple play dough with lavender essential oil and red play dough with rose essential oil.

The children have been choosing their favourite activities and toys. So far the most popular have been dinosaurs, water play, sand play, animals. We will be following the children’s interests to inform our planning and future activities. The dinosaurs will be having a trip into the sand pit next week. The sea creatures will be playing in bubbles and the farm animals will be playing in the mud.

The children have enjoyed their sports lessons with Mr McArthur building on their gross motor skills and core strength.

Miss Tomeskova’s music lesson have been a real hit and the children have shown amazing listening skills and rhythm.

Here’s to many more weeks full of fun and laughter and learning.

Miss Finch, Mrs Guniz.

We’ve had a great week in First Steps we have been learning about transport and have learnt some new songs and also enjoyed singing your favourite “ the big red bus”.

We have made a trip to Richmond park for our woodland school and had lots of fun exploring our surroundings, we went on a hunt for sticks , stones and pinecones. The children enjoyed naming the colour of the cars as we was walking to Richmond park and were very talkative about their surroundings.

We’ve also baked biscuits together which we have decorated and have taken home, the children enjoyed measuring out the ingredients and mixing them together. The children were very tempted to eat them once they were cooked they smelt delicious !

We’ve also explored science this week and have made a magic milk experiment , the children were fascinated by the changing colours in the milk and enjoyed mixing the colours together to create their own.

We’re looking forward to another woodland school session next week !

Miss McCarthy and Miss Marta