Blog for november
Thursday 26th November
Year 2 had a fantastic trip to At Bristol for a Maths Mission themed day! We were set a mission to find an Alien’s way home using directions, time, patterns and shapes. We saw different patterns of stars in the sky when we visited the planetarium, we built our own rockets using 2D and 3D shapes and we even got to blast off our rockets at the end of the day. As well as all of this we got to have a go on all of the exhibitions, our favourites were making bubbles and making animations. Thank you to the parents who came along we really appreciate your help!
Thursday 26th November
Congratulations to a group of Year 5 and 6 pupils who represented the school in a Catholic Cluster Hockey Tournament at St Paul’s Catholic Primary School in Yate. They represented the school brilliantly and finished the competition with a silver medal! Well done to Sophie, Julia, Ben, Lucas, Ted and Mathilde!
Thursday 26th November - Slimbridge trip
Year 1 went on a school trip to Slimbridge Wetlands Centre on Thursday 26th November to learn more about how animals are adpated to suit their habitat. We enjoyed learning all about beavers and otters. We learnt about how a beaver builds its home and what foods they like to eat. We also learnt all about otters and enjoyed watching them swim in the water. We also saw lots of interesting birds and we enjoyed feeding them too!
Wednesday 25th November - Netball match
Congratulations to the St Mary’s Netball team who played their first competitive game against St Paul’s Catholic Primary School, they did so well and won 5-4! Well done to Sophie, Julia, Benjamin, Charmaine, Maja, Jack B and Xiao!
Friday 27th November - Forest Friday
St George's Class have been on a Bug Hunt today. We found worms, snails, slugs, woodlice and a centipede. We also did some number and shape challenges - Ala, Jia, Carolyn and Luca found lots of dinosaur bones and managed to put them together!
24th November 2015 - Hey Ewe!
Year 2 Drama club started today after school, thank you to all that attended. We are all getting very excited as we prepare for our Christmas Play – ‘Hey Ewe’. We hope that you can all come along and watch the whole of KS1 perform on Thursday 10th December! Miss Simpson
23rd November 2015 - New to the Library!
These fantastic books from Barrington Stoke were purchased with money donated by the Friends of St Mary’s.
Barrington Stoke books are ideal for readers who are looking for a ‘Quick, fun read’ as they are dyslexia-friendly. Barrington Stoke books are published using cream paper to reduce glare and prevent words from ‘jumping around’. In addition, the fonts and word spacing are carefully designed to make everything as clear as possible, and thick paper is used so that words and illustrations don’t show through from other pages and confuse the eye. Most importantly, the edit process is very special and has been developed by dyslexia and speech and language experts in response to research and feedback from thousands of readers on hundreds of Barrington Stoke manuscripts over the years, so that the grammatical structure of sentences and the vocabulary is stimulating, but not so complex that it confuses the reader. All these special features make Barrington Stoke books a brilliant choice for any child who does not typically enjoy reading, or who is struggling to find something that interests them at their reading level. These are just a small selection of the new titles available, but you can see we have a large range of books to suit anyone’s tastes, from sports to fantasy adventure, from humorous books to books set in the past, mysteries and real-life stories. Barrington Stoke books have a royal blue sticker on their spine, and are stored on their own shelf. They will be moved soon to a more prominent position when the new shelving arrives. Many thanks to FOSM for their generous donations!
We hope to add more books to the collection with the money we raise from the Scholastic Book Fair this week.
20th November 15 - Maths Week
St Georges' Class (Reception)
As part of Maths Week, the children were set a challenge: to build a chair for one of the three bears. This generated discussion about how many legs they would have, how many cubes they would use for each leg, what shape the seat would be…
Afterwards, the children were invited to make another object for the bears. We had a table, a robot and a telephone.
St Nicholas' Class (Year 1)...
As part of Maths week, we have been working on our problem solving skills. Children were given the task of building chairs and tables for The Three Bears! They had to think about length and height and work together as a team to build these out of cubes.
November - New to the Library this week.....
Armistice Day 2015
St Francis Class led a beautiful and moving whole-school assembly to commemorate Armistice Day.
In the assembly, they read and performed some poems from World War One which they had studied as part of their English lessons during week 1 and 2 of this term. The poems were ‘In Flanders Fields’ by John McCrae, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen and ‘For the Fallen’ by Robert Lawrence Binyon. The assembly concluded with some prayers before the 11 o’clock silence.
Everyone agreed that St Francis Class represented the school superbly with their respectful and empathetic manners. This is the first year we have commemorated Armistice Day as a whole school, with an assembly; we hope to do so again next year, with parents welcome also.
Thursday 12th November - Chaplaincy Club visit to meet the Bishop
Thursday 19th November......
Monday 16th November .....
Monday 9th November - Scooter training
This week the children in Year 2 were lucky enough to have Rozalia Ernsting from South Glos for a morning, to give us some very useful training and information for scooter riding.
First she talked to us in the classroom about safety issues when riding a scooter: road safety, obstacles to be aware of and weather conditions. After that we split into three groups and went outside with our scooters. The first thing we did was to check our scooter wheels and the handle bar height; Roz taught us what to look and listen for, for example: squeaky or wobbly wheels and to check if the quick-release catch was done up tightly.
Everything checked, we progress to testing our brakes by scooting and stopping at a certain point and then showed Roz how well we scooted by circling the playground. We then split into two teams and practised our steering skills by making a figure of eight around cones.
We all really enjoyed the morning especially as were joined by a cat who was very interested in everything we did!
Friday 6th November - Bike-It Breakfast
We held our first Bike-It Breakfast which, despite the rain, was very well attended. Thank you to all parents who made special arrangements so their children could take part.
Friday 6th November... Dance Club
Last week Dance Club started again for this academic year. We had a great time learning some basic Samba moves in preparation for our Rio inspired dance that we will be performing in February’s Dance festival at Abbeywood! Well done to everyone who came! Miss Simpson
Thursday 5th November - Anglo-Saxon Day
Year 4 had Thor Ewing visit the school for an Anglo-Saxon Workshop. They dressed up and learnt to write with a quill, play the harp and grind wheat seeds into flour.
