You can follow us ...….. Newsletter No: 20

Friday, 2nd March 2018

CoMPasS

Registered Charity No: 1141329

The Beast from the East arrived this week with extreme ferocity. At Clifton, we used

it as an opportunity to have a tremendous amount of fun by wrapping up warm and

playing in the snow. Throughout the week, the children will have created memories

that will last a lifetime – they will always remember playing in the snow at school. It

has been so lovely to hear the sounds of laughing and giggling and the sounds of

children being children. Wonderful!

Huge thanks to our teachers and teaching assistants who have fought their way to

school, staff who have covered for each other, it has been a true herculean team effort

from the Clifton team. My sincere thanks to the Estates team, who have worked

tirelessly all week, clearing and gritting paths, playgrounds and car parks to make it safe

on campus for the whole school community.

This Week has been Book Week, and it has been amazing walking around school today

looking at the sensational costumes for World Book Day. The children all looked

stunning, dressed as their favourite book character – well done all. Particular thanks to

Miss Platts, our Literacy Co-ordinator, for organising such a fantastic week.

We started the week with an inspirational visit to the school by Linda Chapman,

author of “My Secret Unicorn2, “Skating School” and many other titles. During her

highly interactive visit, Linda explored where ideas come from, read from her books

and helped the children to develop characters and storylines. Thank you Linda for

your enthusiasm, we all enjoyed meeting you.

We have had some wonderful entries for our Extreme

Reading competition, thank you for all of your

contributions. Our year group winners are Harry,

Viktoria, Sam, Maddie and Lottie (accompanied by her

brother Isaac) – congratulations!

As well as the excitement of the snow outside, the children have continued their

learning journeys at school. Reception have been to the theatre to watch ‘Dear Zoo’,

RA have been engineers, taking apart many items, including computers. RB have had a

challenge from their ‘Challenge Chicken’, to build a plastic cup tower – what a

challenge. The children were much better than I was. Year 1 enjoyed writing stories,

producing films and puppet shows and sharing books with other year groups as part of

their Book Week activities, Year 2 had fun in the snow, recreating the trans-siberian

railway line on the astro turf, problem solving and designing Nutcracker puppets and

Year 3 have been looking

at Constellations. Year 3

also visited the library at St

Olave’s for some buddy

reading with the J1s, thank

you to Mrs Lockett the

librarian at St Olave’s and

J1 for looking after our

Year 3s so well.

Best wishes for the

weekend.

DIARY FOR WEEK COMMENCING 19th

FEBRUARY 2018:

Mon Y3 Ukueles Club (lunchtime)

Y1 Netball Skills

Y2/3 Speech & Drama

Y2/3 Tennis

Y2/3 Chess

Y2/3 Creative Film Club

Y3 Tag Rugby

Tues

Y2/3 Choir (lunchtime)

Y2/3 Karate

Y1/2 Creative Crafts

Y2/3 Chess

Y2 Active Club

Rec & Y1 Mandarin Chinese

Y3 Swim Club CANCELLED

Wed

8.40am 2H Assembly

Year 3 Greek Day

Y1 visit to Beningbrough Hall, return approx. 3.00pm

Rec/Y1 Yoga Bunnies (lunchtime)

Rec Speech & Drama

Y1/2 Sign Language

Y2/3 Yoga

Y3 Construction Club

Y2/3 Mandarin Chinese

Y2 Art Club

Y3 Garage Band Club

Thurs

8.40am 1T Assembly

Rec Arts and Crafts

Y1 Construction Club

Y2 Tag Rugby

Y3 Hockey Club

Y2/3 Book Club

Y3 Speech & Drama

Y3 Basketball Fri Y2 Visit to The Arboretum,

Castle Howard, return approx. 3,00pm

Y1 Football

Y3 Story Club

Parent Consultation Evenings –

Monday 19th March and Tuesday

20th March 2018

The sign up lists for Parent Consultations are now

available in the atrium.

Please note the sign up lists for Nursery are in

Nursery. If you drop off and collect from the main

building, please contact the office to arrange your

appointment.

Question….discover….find... explore!

The only way to find out how different items work is to take

them apart!

This week RA have shown incredible levels of engagement,

perseverance and involvement in their learning. Team work and

collaboration have been required in joint efforts

to dismantle different electrical items. Using

screwdrivers and other tools, the children

worked their fine motor and hand eye

coordination skill to carefully take apart the

items to discover what's inside. This raised

many interesting questions about what are

the parts used for and descriptive

language about what they look like.

I wonder if you can continue on

with this challenge at home?

Year 1 have had a

very varied week this week. We

began Book Week with a visit from author Linda

Chapman on Monday who

inspired us to have a go at

making our own stories. We have been making

films, puppet shows and writing our own books, as well as sharing books with buddies

from another year group. Then with the arrival of the snow on Wednesday we enjoyed playing in the snow and sledging. The two classes joined forces and

we did some maths together discussing different ways of sorting data. We learnt about tally charts, pictograms and

bar graphs. We made a human bar chart together and worked in pairs to record our results in different ways.

The snow has caused a lot of excitement in Nursery this week. The children had so much fun on Wednesday using improvised sledges to slide down the bank on the field. They loved it and were brilliant at taking turns too!

It has also been Book Week and we have enjoyed listening to lots of our favourite stories. The children even helped to change the books for the book shelves and they carefully chose a new selection of books for Nursery and arranged them on the shelves. We know how much benefit is gained from reading to children and this is something that we do every day. This article from Australia explains the benefits of reading to your child at home. https://theconversation.com/research-shows-the-importance-of-parents-reading-with-children-even-after-children-can-read-82756

Today I read the story of ‘Something Else’ to the children, which is a poignant and enchanting story about belonging and being different. Books are a great way of helping children to learn about our school values and to illustrate important ideas. The children all

came dressed up as book characters today and they looked fabulous in all of their costumes. Some children chose to go to our Superhero Assembly and everyone was so impressed with how well they listened and joined in. Lottie was really proud to win the Extreme Reading Competition and Harriet, Jonathan and Norman were excited to see their brothers and sister come up to get an award!

Mr Hardy and I spent a fun filled afternoon today in Nursery, so that the staff could spend some time together as a huge thank you for all of their incredible work and commitment which was recognised recently when we won the TES Prep School of the Year.

St Peter’s F1 Team

Assembly

We were delighted to welcome

pupils from St Peter’s to our

Monday morning assembly to

talk to us about their project to

produce a vehicle, which will

travel over 20 metres in the shortest possible time.

The team will be taking part in an event at Silverstone and we

are all hoping they will be one of the final three to travel to

Singapore for the finals! The children had their reaction time

tested too which is an essential

asset to getting the car off the

mark!

Admist all the fun we’ve had outside in our winter wonderland, Year 3’s

learning has blasted off into outer space this week and towards the

twinkling stars and constellations

in our night sky. The Greeks

were famous for many things,

including naming some of our

most famous constellations! We

have also met some constellation

characters in our class text ‘Who

Let the Gods Out’ so we decided

to find out more about them. We

learnt so many amazing facts

during our surprise visit from the

Cosmodome last Friday and after

researching more on Monday we

are bursting with constellation and

star facts. Did you know there are

88 constellations and that the

atmosphere blocks us from seeing

a lot of the stars in our solar

system? We learnt all about the

life cycle of a star and showcased

our learning with some fantastic

crafty posters – please come in to

our classroom to have a look! In maths, we have been taking our learning

about shapes in the night sky and applying them to 2D shapes. We have

been recapping all the properties

and vocabulary surrounding lots

of 2D shapes and carrying out

some investigations, did you know a star is an irregular decagon! We kick-

started Book week with a visit from the lovely Linda Chapman. To celebrate

we’ve been reading some star

books and decided to create our

own constellation booklets. We

have also been celebrating the joy

of reading with different children

around the school, including a trip

to St Olave’s library where some of

the J1 children showed us around

and we partnered up with a class

lower down the school for some buddy reading. You all looked

amazing in your book week outfits,

thank you parents for all your

effort with your

creations!

Coming up next week…

We are very excited about our fabulous Greek Day on Wednesday 7th March

where we will travelling back in time to experience life as an Ancient Greek!

Don’t forget your Greek togas! As well as preparing for our Greek day we will be

continuing to explore 2D shapes and using similes, metaphors and alliteration to

create some sparkling star poems!

Parents Book Club

Next book club is on Saturday 21st April from 8.30am ish. St Olaves Dining Room

Books to be discussed are:

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine - by Gail Honeyman and A Man of Parts by David Lodge.

All parents welcome.

Many thanks

Sophie

On Wednesday 3P held a successful bake sale to raise money for the Paediatric Cardiac Unit at Leeds General Infirmary.

Thank you to all the parents in 3P who donated their baking efforts for the event! The cakes were delicious and went down a treat in the snowy weather!

The total amount raised was £125.78.

Thank you so much to everyone who bought a cake or made a donation!

3H Class Assembly – Thursday 22nd March

3H’s class assembly will now take place at 8.40am on Thursday 22nd March in the Rayson Room.

You may have seen a pile of plastic cups outside RB this week but it is all in the name of construction! Our challenge chicken left us 100 cups to build something without them falling down. RB adored this challenge so

much and practiced so hard, that other classes donated their unused plastic snack cups resulting in 400 by the end of the week! It has involved excellent communication, team work, resilience and managing our emotions when it comes tumbling down! The children even set a competition to see who built the tallest structures. They measured them using the metre stick and recorded their results. Amazing engineering busy bees.

We have been making the most of the glorious snow in 2M

this week. It must be fate that we happen to

be learning about the Trans-Siberian railway

as part of our topic and now we feel like we

are well and truly there! Besides making

snowmen and having fun sledging down the

banks.

We have worked collaboratively with 2H to problem solve and work as a team to find ways of

getting from A to B and sharing our snow equipment. We also tied this in

with the current winter Olympics, taking

place in PyeongChang. We watched

some of the highlights and found out a

little bit more about some of the exciting

sports that make up the games, sparking

lots of new interests! A fun, exciting

week had by all!

Music Awards

Housepoints Value Champions Manzo, Freddie, Arthur, Torben, Teddy, Hettie, George,

Robert, Alex and Una

Learning Superheroes

Monk

George Taylor has lost his tracksuit bottoms.

They are named Ben Taylor, please look out for them. Thank you.

Viktoria and Holly

Jake, Will, Rufus, Kaan, Joy

Elise, Juliette-Rose, James,

Jacob and Alex

Reception and Year 1 have been getting to grips with racket and ball skills in PE. Using both the hand and

a racket to balance and hit the ball. They have discovered that good footwork, control and concentration are important on the journey to success!

2H have been very busy

again this week! We have

been researching Russia for

our assembly, practising

ballet moves and also

starting to make our

Nutcracker puppets, to use

when we make animation

films.. the resulting films

should be very exciting!

What an exciting Book Week at Clifton!

The snow has certainly not deterred us this week and the children have still managed to find time (between all the sledging and snowman building) to read, make and explore books!

On Monday we had the pleasure to welcome children's author Linda Chapman into school. What a fantastic way to start Book Week! As well as reading from her own books the children helped Mrs Chapman to invent a new mythical monster inspired by her Superpowers series! The children came up with some fantastic ideas for strengths and weaknesses and they were buzzing with ideas for story writing.

Over the week each class has partnered up with a class for another year group for buddy reading. It was so lovely to watch the older children reading to the younger children, sharing stories together.

Entries for our ‘Extreme Reading’ competition have been coming in thick and fast all week…many with a ‘snowy’ theme! Wow Clifton children really do have such a passion for reading that they will do it everywhere and anywhere!

Please do visit the library to see all the amazing photographs or follow this link for the video https://www.dropbox.com/s/b1s0mj0dyyuanb8/week%207%20book%20week%20064.mov?dl=0

Today we finished our Book week celebration by having a book character dress up day! The children all looked fantastic in their costumes and they were all so excited to share which characters they had come

dresses as! A huge thank you to all the parents who have helped put together these amazing costumes and bringing your children’s favourite book characters to life!

To round off our day we hope you and your children enjoy watching an ‘episode’ of Clifton’s Bedtime Stories! https://www.dropbox.com/s/6i06smqt102z1x7/IMG_5855.MOV?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4gikjxjufiokfe9/IMG_5876.MOV?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ivkk0x7ku0qri5g/IMG_7559%20rotated.avi?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6df4du7zsb03a0s/AC%20reading%20The%20Way%20back%20Home.avi?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/actzip6i6di33a1/JH%20reading.avi?dl=0

Dear parent,

It is now less than a month until the York Literature Festival begins. A limited number of free tickets for each event we are hosting are available to parents and pupils of St Peter’s 3-18. Please follow the below links to access free tickets. Please note that free tickets are limited to two per person. Once all the free tickets have gone, further tickets can be purchased via the York Theatre Royal Box Office.

Dr Janina Ramirez: The World of Medieval Mysticism Friday 16 March 7pm Dr Ramirez will explore the power of the mystical tradition, referencing her book and BBC documentary on Julian of Norwich, the first known woman to write a book in English. Tickets.

Sir Simon Jenkins: Britain's 100 Best Railway Stations Saturday 17 March 7pm Bestselling historian and columnist Simon Jenkins has travelled the country, visiting the best railway stations and learning of their history, significance, triumphs and follies. Tickets.

Guy Bass: Stitch Head Sunday 18 March 11am-12.30pm Guy Bass' bestselling book series follows the adventures of a mad scientist's forgotten creation, the tiny hero known as Stitch Head. Join Guy for ridiculous ramblings, rib-tickling readings and raucous regalement as he explores his childhood inspirations and aspirations. Celebrating 200 years of Frankenstein. Tickets.

Baroness Sayeeda Warsi: The Enemy Within - A Tale of Muslim Britain Sunday 18 March 3pm Sayeeda Warsi draws on her own unique position as the UK's first Muslim Cabinet minister to consider the past decade for Muslims in Britain, and the lessons and challenges they must face in the next. Tickets.

Johnny Ball: Wonders Beyond Numbers Thursday 22 March 7pm TV legend Johnny Ball will tell us the story of mathematics. Introducing us to the major characters and leading us through many twists and turns, Johnny will take us from ancient times to the technological wonderland we live in today. Tickets.

Professor Phil Manning: Last Days of the Dinosaurs Saturday 24 March 3pm The end of the dinosaurs’ reign on Earth was 65 million years ago. What happened? New discoveries in Mexico provide the first ever timing of events on the last day of the Cretaceous. Tickets.

Dr Lindsey Fitzharris: The Butchering Art Saturday 24 March 7pm Medical historian Dr Fitzharris illuminates the turning point in the history of medicine, when pioneering British surgeon Joseph Lister transformed his brutal, harrowing practice into the safe, vaunted profession we know today. Tickets. If you have any access requirements, are hard of hearing or have any other special requests, please book your tickets, then email events@stpetersyork.org.uk or call 01904 527 315, stating which event(s) you are attending and how many tickets you have booked.

Please note that many of our events sell out, and you must bring your ticket with you to guarantee entry. Please either print off your ticket or display it to us on your smartphone or tablet on the evening.

With all best wishes,

Ben Fuller

Head of Public Lectures

St Peter’s School, York, YO30 6AB