Dear Parents and Carers,

Thank you so much for all your support with our Red Nose Day fundraiser and for contributing so generously. We are delighted to announce that a grand total of £440 was raised on the day! The winner (loser?) chosen by the children to gunged was me, but thank you to Mr Rob and Miss Rogers, who were game, and got gunged for a good cause too. The children also enjoyed dressing up in red for the day and performing in our school talent show in the afternoon.

Thank you for all your positive feedback on our new online booking system for Parents Evening and for the reviewed security systems for the evening. We hope that those of you who came this week found the information useful and know how well your children are doing and what the next steps are in their learning.

We are delighted to hear that you are also finding that the children are so enthused about reading now; many of you commented on how the drive in school has been really successful and that previously reluctant readers are now avidly pouring through books—this is absolutely wonderful! We are continuing our drive to improve standards in reading through inviting authors into school and this week the children really enjoyed their sessions with David Mason, from ‘Inspire to Write.’ I have since been inundated with children excited and eager to share their vastly improved writing skills as a result and am delighted at the children’s obvious enthusiasm and enjoyment and at the visible progress which they have made. We also launched our March reading challenge, ‘Ride Away With Reading’, and hope that our children are keen to complete the course in order to win their prizes, generously supplied by Regency Bookshop in Surbiton.

We celebrated World Book Week last week in school with lots of fun reading activities and challenges and with staff sharing their favourite books with pupils too. On Friday 6th March we dressed as our favourite book characters which, again, raised the profile of reading and celebrated all those wonderful characters and their stories. Thank you again for some truly inventive and imaginative costumes!

You received a letter from me this week about the use of St. Paul’s School as a polling station on May 7th. We do apologise for any inconvenience which this causes you and will have more notice of this happening in the future, meaning that we will use the day as one of our 5 annual staff training days so that the children do not miss their time in school. Thank you for your understanding.

Headteacher Newsletter March 13th 2015

Mrs Kathryn Hemming

World Book Day March 2015

Year 3/4 Egyptian Day

We invited The Freshwater Theatre

Company in to work with our children

for a day and were really impressed

both with the effort and thought which

went into their outfits, and to the

amount they learned during they day. Through

drama and discussion they now talk with great

knowledge about the characters and myths of

Ancient Egypt.

Class news

Red: We’ve been doing lots of shopping and learning all about money in our biscuit shop and have made

Gruffalo crumble when learning about capacity and weights. In literacy we’ve enjoyed looking at a

selection of books and wrote letters, recipes and party invitations for our favourite characters. Our art

work is amazing and we have enjoyed Elmer collages, finger painting flowers and daffodil painting.

Yellow: We’ve been extremely busy this half term learning how to count in 2s, 5s and 10s. We even used

cubes to make arrays to help us find the answers. We have completed lots of science experiments; our

favourite was helping Ringo the Alien to mend his umbrella by testing materials to see if they were

waterproof. We had great fun learning about Chinese New Year, creating a giant dragon and dancing

in the hall!

Blue: On World Book Day we designed blurbs, book covers, bookmarks and books reviews and collected

data of our favourite books. In maths we have been adding 2 digit numbers using partitioning and then

writing our own word problems and carrying out lots of measuring investigations. We are loving our

Pirates theme and have created our own pirate dictionaries.

Year 3: We thoroughly enjoyed working with David Mason and wrote some fantastic poems about the clouds

and the sun. In science we have been investigating different soil types and learning from the flooding

last year, while, in maths, we have been practising measuring angles and reminding ourselves about

fractions of numbers.

Year 4: We have been learning about time and practising it daily—please help by testing us lots at home too!

We loved listening to David Mason perform poetry. We were completely inspired by the drama

workshop and our writing afterwards was amazing!

Year 5: As budding scientists we have been dissecting flowers to look at the parts for reproductions and have

been experimenting to see if tall people have bigger lungs and then linking this with maths by plotting

on graphs. We have also been learning Roman numerals in maths and in English we have written

fabulous stories based on the Aztecs and Robin Hood!

Year 6: We have been learning about angles—thinking of fun ways to remember different types. We have

also been working hard at diagonal reflection and the rotation of 2D shapes. In History we have

enjoyed learning about The Parthenon, creating comic strips to show what happened to this temple

over time. We are now writing balanced arguments about whether the Elgin Marbles should stay in

The British Museum or be returned to Greece.

Health and Safety.

Thank you for all your positive comments about the improved security of the school site. We will also be installing a security touch keypad on the

carpark gate to ensure that everyone enters via the pedestrian entrance.

We have had some reported instances of children being upset by online

gaming and from texting outside school and so ask all parents to remain informed about their child’s online presence. We will be organising some

more internet safety training for parents and for pupils in the Summer Term and would encourage all to attend.

By popular

demand:

The Red Nose

Day gunging!