Friday 10th July 2020

Next Academic Year

It has been wonderful to see so many children return to school for visits this week and we cannot wait until all children are back at school. We know that you will have many questions about what September will look like for your children. Current class teachers are meeting with your child’s new teachers to ensure they have a clear picture of your child’s learning needs, what activities they enjoy at school and what they need encouragement with to ensure a smooth transition back to school. You should expect a short video and a booklet from your child’s new teacher next week that will support them in knowing what to expect when they return to school. A parent handbook will also be shared with all families next week, which will give you the information you need with regards to children returning to school in September.

Music: Update for Reception Children

The Summer Term is normally when Reception children would make the choice of instrument they wish to learn from year 1. As you will be aware, the instrumental element of the curriculum has been suspended for this term and we did not feel it was appropriate to get children’s hopes up through choosing their instrument when we had no idea when we could start the lessons. However, we do hope to resume this in some way from September and the school is working hard to work out exactly what this might look like. With this in mind it is planned that this year’s reception cohort will choose their instruments in September. We will be in contact to explain the process then.

End of Term Reports Teachers have uploaded children’s reports to Tapestry already for you to read. We know this year has been far from typical and that for a significant amount of the time, children have been unable to attend school. However teachers have reflected on the achievements of your children before lockdown and through the contact they have had via Tapestry, Google Classroom and telephones calls. We are immensely proud of all of our wonderful children and their achievements and look forward to getting them back into the classroom so we plan for their next steps in learning.

Parent & Pupil Surveys Thank you to everyone who completed the surveys last week. Your comments are really helpful when planning ahead during these uncertain times. It is so important for us to have the children's views and your views. This is the last survey for the term and your opportunity to highlight anything you would like us to take forward in September. We have welcomed your feedback and input throughout the lockdown and reopening of our school. This has been a great help in shaping the way we work and develop our processes. Parents survey - 10 July 2020 Children survey - 10 July 2020

Congratulations! A huge congratulations to Miss Jahan from Penguin Class, who will be getting married over the summer break. We hope Miss Jahan and her husband-to-be enjoy their very special day and wish them both a lifetime of happiness.

Reception News

With the end of our Summer Term nearing, the Lions and Tigers have continued with their endless enthusiasm and energy for playing and learning. We have continued exploring our core text ‘The Green Ship’, storyboarding the first half of the story and exploring the text through play. This week we continued our voyages to Egypt and the Arctic and they have produced some fantastic storyboards. In maths we have been learning about patterns within shapes and numbers and they have been busy creating their own patterns. In our weekly science experiment we have been creating more

wonder, this week we looked at absorption and colour mixing with the walking water experiment. Well done to those students still engaging with the home learning, we have really enjoyed looking at all of the excellent work you have produced

Year 1 News

It has been such a happy week in Year One. In Science, we made paper aeroplanes, predicted which one would fly the farthest, and then measured, recorded and analysed the results. Children in school planned, rehearsed and performed a play version of ‘Taking Flight’, and children at home created their own projects on the story. There was lots of creativity and variety in these submissions, so thank you for all of your hard work! In Maths, the children have done lots of work around the book ‘One is a Snail, Ten is a Crab’, imagining that numbers can be represented as the number of feet an animal has. We wrote our own number problems for friends to solve and found all the ways we could make 20 using different animals!

Year 2 News

The penultimate week of the year already but there is no let up in the quality of the work from the Elephants and Orangutans. We have had more amazing independent work from children in our maths challenges, especially in the Aural test and with impressive problem solving. In PSHE this week we have been thinking about how we can rebuild relationships with those we haven't seen in a long time because of lock down, so we decided to write a postcard to those we miss. In Science this week, we have been

exploring and investigating the food and diets of animals. We have been grouping animals and creating lists, based on what they eat. In Art this week, we have been tapping into our creativity by making dragons out of egg cartons, using the theme of the story ‘Tell me a Dragon’ as inspiration.

Year 3 News

What a great penultimate week of learning in Polar Pandas! In English we have been writing newspaper articles about it was great to see lots of you using your ICT skills and typing up your articles. Orundellico's decision to return home. We also used our origami skills from Hackney History Week to build boats of feelings. We spent some time researching Charles Darwin and how he links to Jemmy Button's story. We have continued to be challenged and enthused by Mr Gaffney's maths challenges and have baked and tasted lots of yummy bread for design technology.

Year 4 News

With just one week to go until the end of term, we have seen wonderful work from year 4. In English we have been reading about an inspirational person called Wangari Maathai wh set up an organisation called the Green Belt Movement, planting trees all over the world. We have been imaging the change that we’d like to make if we had the chance, and writing letters to our local MP! In maths we have been learning about Roman Numerals and negative numbers. It’s been great to see so many of you submitting work in our other subjects too this week. A highlight has been learning about conductors and insulators of electricity in science. We weren’t able to conduct an experiment in person but made up for it by using an online simulator which was lots of fun.

Birthday Wishes We love to acknowledge this special day for children at school and we know for many of our children they will not be able to celebrate it as they would want to at this time. Here’s to those of you turning a year older this week!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Reception Eras 11th July

Year 1 Miray 7th July Kameil-Elijah 8th July Caedrian 12th July Ibrahim 13th July

Year 2 Mariah 7th July

Year 3 Rhylee 10 Jul

Year 4 Elsa 9th July Coco 9th July

Wishing you all the very best and good health. Yours sincerely,

Colette Harrington Interim Headteacher