April 2018 – HolbrookBlogs

Goodbye Mrs Stickler!

Today Angelfish have said goodbye to Mrs Stickler. The children have spent the afternoon doing lovely activities with her and sharing their stories. We all wish her the best for the future.

Thank you for all of her hard work at Holbrook over the past years!

[Written by Mrs Ginn]

What have we been up to in KS1!?

We had a wonderful time on our adventure last week. The children enjoyed our imaginary airplane journeys to Antarctica and Africa and luckily there wasn’t too much air turbulence! Look at the fun that we had. Which place did your child enjoy visiting the most?

Continue reading “What have we been up to in KS1!?”

Books Turned into Films! The National Literacy Trust Event

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Year 4, 5 and 6 took part in their second National Literacy Trust event which promotes reading for pleasure. The children enjoyed a day reading and exploring books which have been turned into films as well as receiving their very own book which they chose themselves.

Year Six dealt with the mature concepts and themes of The Hunger Games. They compared a battle scene from the book to its film version, thinking about how tension was created in both. Some of the children chose this book and are now extremely excited about reading it.

Year Five read and watched the story of Jumanji, using questioning to predict and make inferences. They made their own rhymes and used their imagination to create a part of the game. Some were rather scary!

Year Four focussed on the classic story of The Jungle Book and used the graphic novel version to sequence the story and write as the authors.

We would like to thank The National Literacy Trust and Whitely Shopping centre again for making this event possible and for allowing the children to choose and own their own books. We look forward to the final event based in Whitely Shopping Centre in June!

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Year 4’s Trip to The Palace! (Roman not Buckingham)

Just before the Easter break, which seems such a long time ago, Year 4 had the exciting opportunity of visiting Fishbourne Roman Palace near Chichester, West Sussex.

Discovered in 1960, it is the largest Roman residence north of the Alps, built in approximately 75AD, only 30 years after the Romans invaded Great Britain.

Year 4 pupils did not let the typical British weather dampen their spirits and enjoyed a day filled with investigation, games and mosaic bingo. One highlight was the opportunity to dress up as slaves and learn new (or rather ancient) skills and play with toys which don’t require a charger. Two lucky slaves even got promoted to the dizzy heights of royalty!

In the potting shed the children found a very grumpy gardener, not at all happy about his new role: statues, fountains and box hedging, what a waste of time.

The main attraction was, of course, the beautiful decorative mosaics, the most famous being Cupid on a dolphin, which is located in the north wing. In total, the palace consisted of approximately 100 rooms and a short film brought the palace back to life for the children who could see its wealth and splendour. An excellent way to imagine themselves in situ whilst studying their Roman life topic back at school.

Written by Miss Brenton

Year 2 Summer Term 1

Dear Parents and Carers,

I hope that everyone had a good Easter break and it has been great to see the children back in school and hearing all about their holidays. The school has been a great place to be this week with the beautiful weather and everyone refreshed after their well needed break.

At the end of last term, we said a sad goodbye to Mrs Brackstone our Home School Link Worker and Mrs White who worked closely with Year 2. We wish them well in their future endeavours. Mrs East has taken on Mrs Brackstone’s role and she will be available during school hours, Monday to Friday, to speak to parents ,either face to face or over the phone. However, we are looking forward to welcoming back Mrs Messem, Mrs Williams and Miss Birks from maternity leave as well later this term.

It was fantastic to celebrate our colours of inclusion on Rainbow day last term and we raised an amazing £375. Thank you for the many cake donations and it was a hard judging decision to pick a winner! The Class Ambassadors are going to decide how we spend the money although we have already voted to donate some of it to the Downs Syndrome Association.

SATs fever is about to hit the school and I hope that Parents will continue to support their children as they go through this time, lots of early nights and plenty of encouragement.

Keep an eye on the blogs for news of other forthcoming parent events.

Thank you for your continued support,

Mrs Zoë Dudley

Head of School

Clownfish News

Before Easter, Clownfish class were visited by the Fire Service. The firefighters taught us how to keep safe and showed us how their uniforms protect them when they are dealing with an emergency. If there is a fire, we should ‘Get out. Stay out. Call 999’ and we learnt that we should check the smoke alarms in our homes once a week. Please make sure that you check your smoke alarms regularly.

In Science, we carried out an investigation about what plants need to help them grow. We had 3 daffodil plants. We gave one plant no water, one plant had no light and one plant had no warmth and we checked on them every couple of days to see how they were growing. We measured the plants with rulers and looked carefully to see if the leaves changed. After a couple of weeks we could see the healthiest plant was the one that had been left outside in the cold. It just hadn’t grown very tall.

This half term, we will be learning about the life cycles of animals in Science. We are currently observing some young ducklings and chicks that recently hatched out of eggs. We wanted to find out which kind of bird will grow the quickest and biggest. Every day, we are carrying out a ‘Chick Check’ to measure their heights and weights. In Art, we will be learning about a famous artist called Jackson Pollack. He splattered paints on canvases to make some interesting images. We will be creating our own paintings using his style and techniques.

Year 2 SATs will be taking place throughout May so please try to ensure that your child does not miss school. The children will be taking two Reading tests, an Arithmetic Maths test and a Reasoning Maths test. We assess their writing through their on-going work in English and writing from across the curriculum. Results from these end of KS1 assessments will be shared with parents in July. It is important that your child completes their homework (which is given out on Fridays and should be returned by the following Wednesday) as we are sending home tasks that will help them feel more prepared for their SATs. If you have any questions or concerns about the KS1 SATs please talk to Miss Stedman.

Our PE lessons will be on Wednesdays and Fridays. Please make sure that your child has their PE kit in school as an increasing number of children are regularly borrowing our spare PE kit as they don’t have their own in school. Now that the weather is improving (???!!), please can you check that your child’s PE shoes fit so that they can safely take part in outside PE lessons.

Written by Miss Stedman