Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

December 2018

REDWOOD PARK ACADEMY

Dear Parents and Carers,

We’ve come to the end of another very busy and successful Autumn Term here at Redwood with much to celebrate! As ever, this term right across the school pupils have had a multitude of opportunities for learning and developing their inde-pendence in all areas of the curric-ulum. There have been many highlights! We’ve had a ‘Garden to Fork’ project, various sporting events, Redwood’s got Talent, Team Days for Sponsored Walk and the Christmas Market, trips to Fort Purbrook, canoeing at the lake and many more! Key Stage 4 rehearsals for Rock Challenge are going well, as are the develop-ments with Forest Schools and the skills that pupils are gaining for managing the change in seasons in maintaining and developing the school garden!

We’ve even had some learning opportunities for parents and car-ers this term with our internet safe-ty workshop run by our Family Support Worker.

Thank you to all those parents /carers who have supported our events this year, including those who helped at the Christmas Mar-ket and to those who provided do-nations for the raffle. We really appreciate it.

The build up to the festive season has been enormous fun this year! All pupils had the opportunity to make their own baubles which they then hung on our very own Norway Spruce that has been the centrepiece to all our celebrations. We also had the Christmas Market which was a huge success, the Redwood Christmas Lunch, the staff panto ( oh yes we did!) and of course the fabulous Christmas Celebration concert which, as those of you were there will agree, was just amazing. It was also great that so many of you were able to come and see the achieve-ments of all the performers for yourselves. We look forward to hearing more from the Redwood Choir!

Whilst we are all very much ready for a rest, we are also very much looking forward to seeing every-one back at school on Monday 7th January. Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,

Jo and Alison

It has been a fun filled half term for Fratton Park class. We kicked the term off by taking a VIP trip to our namesake, the Fratton Park stadi-

um, where we got to visit the changing rooms and sat in the manager’s chair.

We have also been out enjoy-ing weekly trips to Fort Purbrook, where we have been trying out a

variety of exciting activities such as assault courses, archery and prob-lem solving challenges.

In school we have been looking at the celebration of Diwali and we have had the opportunity to try out food, clothing and customs from India.

In maths and English we have been building our core number skills and creating information leaf-lets which look amazing! After a long and action packed term we are looking forward to a break and coming back in January to continue

the exciting learning journey ahead of us.

See you next time!

What a great first term for Spinna-ker class! Our topic has been learn-ing all about India and Mexico. The Day of the Dead in Mexico was

fascinating and very different to British festivals and we made some cakes, lan-terns and masks. When focusing on India we have cre-ated our very own Rangoli patterns,

using chalk and pasta.

Cooking has also been a particular highlight - we have made truffles and fruit tarts amongst many other

delicious things.

In Design and Technology, we have made a cake stand. Spinna-ker have made themselves very proud by using a range of tools such as a saw, disk sander and bench hook - to hold our work down.

In English we have looked at descriptive lan-guage and have also made our own leaflet all about the Festival of Light that happens in India.

In Maths we have played all sorts of games; such as knocking over skittles with numbers on - which we then used for calculations. This has deepened our knowledge of num-bers.

Spinnaker have enjoyed going to the forest where we have worked as a team, completed team games

and searching for items in the for-est!

Mountbatten class have made a fantastic start to their time at Red-wood Park Academy. It’s been great to see them settle into their new roles in Year 7 and adapting to the routines and expectations. Our topic this term has been Party Planet and for this we have ex-plored how Mexican people cele-brate the Day of the Dead; how Hindus celebrate Diwali; and we have reached the climax of our term with the celebration of Christ-mas. Whilst studying Mexico we learnt about human and physical features of the country and worked in small groups to build our own

erupting volcanoes just like Popo-catepetl.

Staying closer to home, we spent our Wednesday afternoons explor-ing the woodlands at the Forest of

Bere. Here we in-vestigated the habi-tats and microhabi-tats that make up the local ecosys-tems, observed the seasons change from autumn to win-ter and made a wide variety of

woodland art using organic materi-als found in the forest. We look for-

ward to continuing our explorations of the forest next term as Winter breaks into Spring.

Our most popular lesson this term have unanimously been PE & Swimming. In PE pupils learnt a dance routine to celebrate Diwali, We love using the school swim-ming pool on Thursday afternoons and have all made great progress in our water skills.

Mountbatten

Spinnaker

Fratton Park

Wedgewood

During this half term we have learnt about time and money. We have begun to read time in intervals of 5 minutes and have learnt different ways to make 50p, £1 and to find change up to £10.

Wedgewood have been learning about polar regions throughout the topic lessons and created a display by using paint, glitter and a range of other tools to depict the Northern Lights of the Arctic. We have also found learning about penguins and polar bears. We then used the op-portunity to apply what we know about 3D shapes to make our own

polar bears and write our own bear stories! This term we have also taken part in many out-door activ-ities and especially enjoyed gardening, making our recycled Christmas tree and MFL day!

Kings King’s class have had an exciting first term. We started by looking at the King’s Theatre, exploring its history and enjoying a visit behind the scenes to find out more about it. In Geogra-phy, we ex-plored maps, starting with the school and the area surrounding it, before moving onto world maps, looking at continents and the different animals that live there. We created our own mini habitats, using materials we found around the school.

Our two focus countries have been Mexico and India. We enjoyed working together to build a ‘Day of the Dead’ shrine on MFL day and holding a feast of Mexican snacks around it. While studying India, we learnt about Diwali, which was also the focus of our class assembly. We found out about the festival and dyed a LOT of pasta, so that Key Stage 3 could make rangoli pat-terns, using what we know about symmetry. We finished this section by sharing Indian snacks and learn-ing some Bhangra dance moves, which was great fun!

Most of us applied for positions on the school council and Alfie, Nikita,

Jake B, Adam C, Declan and Lilly were very brave presenting their speeches in front of Key Stage 3 assembly. We can’t wait to get started on our new roles in the Spring term!

Cacades

What a term! We have enjoyed set-tling into our new class this year. We have explored writing in as many different ways as possible –

our favourite was using yoga to retell our favourite sto-ries and using salt dough to practice our letter shapes! In maths we have

been practicing our number skills. We’re getting really

good at using money! Recently, we have enjoyed showing off our crea-

tive skills as we worked together to make different products to sell at our Christmas Fayre. We took turns to make our products and help with the selling! This week we have been thoroughly im-mersing our-selves in the Christmas spir-

it. We have been using the skills we have learned over the year to come to-gether and make decorations, bis-

cuits and even practice our signing and singing in a festive video! We are really looking forward to our Christmas holiday and the term ahead… after a well deserved rest! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from everyone in Cascades class!

Jingle bells jingle bells! Museum have jingled all the way this term with lots of smiles and so much to celebrate. The team helped the local South Downs ranger to plant

Dutch Elm resistant tree sap-lings to help re-store a lo-

cal habitat called

Widely Dell. We hope to invite friends and family members in the summer term to the area to cele-

brate in the hard work the pupils will be carrying out during the aca-demic year. The pupils have worked really hard in mathematics learning how to handle money in real life situations which included a trip to Cosham to buy items for the Christmas fair. The pupils have made great strides in swimming, who knows we may see them in the local Olympics! In English the pu-

pils are learning to become journal-ists writing about their adventures during the term. We are all very proud of the hard work each pupil has contributed to rebuilding the

Redwood Park pond. So far the foundations have been prepared, the next step will be lining the pond in the hope of attracting local wild-life for the whole school to enjoy. We look forward to the Christmas celebrations and wish you all a happy new year!

Museum

Castle Here we are at the end of our first

term of the school year - it has raced

by!

We have already learnt so much this

year about ourselves and how we are

all different and learn in many differ-

ent ways.

Part of our

learning

has been

how to get

the best

out of

each oth-

er through

different challenges that we have in

class daily. Some of these are think-

ing challenges and some are more

physical but what they all have in

common is – Teamwork! We are all

realising that sometimes you need to

work together to achieve a goal and

that it is alright to ask for help.

In English we have worked lots on

how reports are written and also

have looked at how to identify parts

of a story so that it all makes sense

and follows a plan.

In Maths, we have completed lots of

work on numbers and also been

working on our understanding of frac-

tions.

The highlight of our term has been in

finishing our ‘Party Planet’ topic. We

planned our own party which includ-

ed a music playlist, guest list, invita-

tions and also created our own

games as well as the instructions on

how to play them. We invited D –Day

class to share our party which was

great fun!

D-Day Dday have had so much fun al-ready, and we’re only 1/3 of the way in! We have done a lot of work on our body reading skills and en-joyed some fantastic acting from others in the class for us to guess what’s happening. We have also been out shopping for life manage-ment, checking prices and buying items, and most importantly check-ing our change!

We have been focusing on our top-ic this Autumn term and everything has been ‘Overground Under-ground!’ We have discovered all about insects and their habitats in Science and even got to hunt for them in the forest! We have been

learning about hedgehogs in topic, determining what a healthy diet is for them and how it is different from a healthy diet for us. We all de-cided we definitely preferred our healthy diet!

In Humani-ties we have been looking at historic buildings, past and present, as well as famous tunnels like the Vietnam

Cu Chi tunnels. We have been able to go on lots of trips and adven-tures to help us learn more about all these exciting things and we are looking forward to the new term with more adventures to come!

Clarence Clarence class have had a busy term with their Underground Overground project. We have looked at habitats in Science and created a Wormery, where we watched the worms making tunnels through the soil in addition to the first half term where we looked at electricity and how this is produced. Our Eng-lish project has been joined with Life Skills and we have been using different forms of public transport to visit destinations around Portsmouth.

We visited the War Memorial in the Guildhall by taking a train. This also coincided with our English project on Remembrance Poetry. Our final desti-nation was Make in Cromwell Road Fratton where we were allowed to use our money skills to purchase items form their charity shop and great drinks and cakes from the café. To end our les-sons on report writing we had a visit from the Naughty Elf Ernie! Ernie had eaten the chocolates from our advent calendar, leaving a chocolatey mess in the classroom. This gave us an oppor-tunity to create great news reports.

We are looking forward to our last week of term especially the Christmas Dinner

and Staff Panto and wish you all a Mer-ry Christmas.

Gunwharf Gunwharf have had a lovely 1

st

Term in KS4, they have been out and about in the community a lot looking at their topic of Under-ground and Overground, they have settled in well to their options and have enjoyed different challenges in Life Management. Gunwharf have been look-ing at recycling and Mechanics this half term in Life Manage-ment, which has been great fun and they have been able to

ensure the staff’s cars are all safe! In Sport and Leisure pupils have been exploring different venues to take part in sport and leisure in-cluding fitness at the seafront, ulti-mate Frisbee in the Park and a little recreation at Drayton Park. In Maths we have been looking at the area of different shapes and build-ing bridges. We have also been thinking forward to our futures after Redwood and have so far been to Portsmouth and Highbury Colleges to see what they have to offer for us. This is a very exciting time!!!

We are very much looking forward to next term and ex-ploring different ways to inter-pret our theme

of ‘Grow you own’ In project we have an idea to grow our own retro gaming club as we loved playing on these consoles at a recent trip to the museum in Portsmouth.

We would like to wish Everyone a very Happy Christmas from Gun-wharf.

Dockyard Merry Christmas from Dockyard.

You find us tired but happy from all the things we have been busy do-ing at school. We have been doing

some forensic science and investigating fingerprints during our sci-ence lessons have been out shopping in our life man-agement les-sons. We walked around

the shops in Cosham and bought some items we thought were es-sential. We enjoyed looking round

and choosing products (especially the ones we got to eat!!).

We also all worked hard at the Christmas Fayre. We all enjoyed creating our products during the Team day and then helped to sell them all at the Christmas fayre. Our

teams worked well and all had a very successful day.

Our recycled Christmas tree is coming on well, hopefully we will win the competition but I think our Angel is definitely the most unique!!

Guildhall are very much looking forward to taking the train from Cosham to Havant for their swim-ming lesson at Havant Leisure Centre next week. The planning for it was done ahead of time during the maths lesson so they are inde-pendently able to use a train time-table and purchase tickets.

For Children in Need Day, Guildhall came up with a clever idea to incor-porate Pudsey Bear into a range of fun activities for everyone to share and enjoy; successfully raising money for the charity.

A group from Guildhall participated in a work experience at: ‘Lilly and

Lime’ developing life skills in prepa-ration for college. Alongside that, they spent time exploring local col-leges where they were given information re-garding future career pro-spects.

Individuals have successfully completed their recycling pro-jects and motor mechanics course as well as the: ‘Jamie Oliver’s BTEC Home Cooking’.

The class has a raffle reward sys-tem where students collect tickets, during the term, for excellent work and outstanding behaviour. Those tickets will then be drawn during a fun packed Xmas week, at the end of term, and a selection of prizes given. Well done everyone! Merry Christmas!

Guildhall

Music to our ears!

With Christmas creeping up on us and our Christmas show getting ever closer. The music department and students at Redwood Park Academy have been working hard to prepare performances of some of our favourite Christmas

tunes.

With a mixture of live performances, techno wizardry and some classic carolling from our teachers and students, we are sure that it is going to be a lot of fun and we cannot wait to see the result of all the efforts that have been exert-

ed.

Included in our preparations for the Christmas concert we have had the pleasure of recording the majority of our stu-dents singing the song “Do they know it’s Christmas?“ by Band Aid. From the many great performances we cap-

tured, we have chosen a number to be included in the final recording which will be shown along with a video in the concert.

We cannot wait for you to hear all that has been going on in preparation for our Christmas show. I know the students are excited to show all they have been working on.

The Station

This term has been action packed in the Station with pupils enjoying a range of activities, trips and new opportunities. We have raised money for charity, visited the local

community and spent time getting to know new peers. Pupils have grown in confidence and resili-

ence and are enjoying spending more and more time in different groups across the school. Our

highlights of this term have includ-ed:

Bailey: “feeding an alpaca from the top of my head at the farm”

George: “doing my Dr Who project”

Preston: “cooking and my smoothie business”

Our attention now moves to the Spring Term which promises new and exciting adventures for The Station as we move to-wards develop-

ing projects, activities and social opportunities for pupils across the school. January will see the arrival of ‘Judo John’, Sensory Circuits and Platform 16 – our project base – home to ‘The Station Café’ and ‘Off the Rails – Hair & Beauty’ amongst other exciting interven-tions.

Merry Christmas & a Happy New

Year from everyone in The Station. We look forward to updating you next Term!

PE and Sport

Getting creative!

Many stunning works of Art have been created by Redwood students over the past term.

Year 7 have been learning about warm and cool colours and painted watercolour fishes decorated with collage.

Year 8 studied the proportions of the human body and used this knowledge to create sculptures of acrobats in various gymnastic positions. They also looked at the abstract art of

Wassily Kandinsky and recreated one of his famous artworks.

Year 9 looked at the proportions of the human face and created portraits with crazy patterned hair. Some also studied the Mexi-can Day of the Dead festival and painted patterned Sugar Skulls with sparkly collage.

The Creative Arts group produced Native American

Art based on spirit animals and also tried their hand at creating mosaics. They also made plaster masks based on the theme of a carnival.

Many students are currently working on 3D projects using air drying clay and more beautiful results are expected!

Horticulture round-up It’s been getting colder in the garden and as we clear the beds for winter it begins to look bare. However, there are signs of spring even now as the onions, garlic and shallots start to show themselves above the earth. The spring

bulbs are growing and in the poly-tunnel salads, cabbages, peas and beans are all doing well.

We have been busy preparing for Christmas; making pickles, chutneys and sauces. The pickled onions have been very popular, the picked eggs less so!

There are lots of wreaths and stars made and sold at the fair and the gardener’s Christmas tree is decorated. The hens are feeling very festive, even if they have stopped laying until spring!

The PE department has had a fantastic start to this academic year, we have taken part in lots of different activities across the county. In KS3 lessons we have been exploring the festival of Diwali through dance and gymnastics which has been great fun and the pupils have loved dressing up and using lights! In KS4 we have been busy in the commu-

nity working on out Orienteering skills and using public swimming pools. We had very successful Key stage 3 & 4 Football tournaments with 15 pupils representing Redwood with Pride and Resilience. We also took 12 pupils to

Chichester University to take part in the Para Play Day where trainee teachers practiced their teaching skills with us and we all thought they were great! We look forward to the new term where we will be taking part in a Dodgeball

competition, Sportshall Athletics and a Multi-Sport Ball Skills session.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We’re looking forward to seeing everyone back at school on Monday 7th

January 2019.