Newsletters

28 January 2022

Dear Parents and Carers,

This month I have had the pleasure of spending a lot of time in Key Stage One classes, and it has been wonderful to see how all the children have been learning and developing.  Despite the challenges of staff absences and high rates of COVID, the children have continued to work hard, and I’ve been so impressed with their resilience and hard work during these very strange times. 

Mrs Lagares is currently off with COVID and is hoping to be well enough to return to school next week.  Due to the high number of infections in the school at the moment, we will be keeping all the current measures that we have in place until half term when we will review these.  We are very grateful for your support in regularly testing your children, particularly when numbers in classes or year groups are increasing.  We know that it isn’t easy or pleasant and are very grateful for your support.

Best wishes,

Mrs Critchlow

Dear Parents and Carers,

Happy New Year to you all and welcome back to our Spring Term.

I am now entering my second term as SENDCO at Wooden Hill and am really enjoying my role. 

I have been fortunate enough to meet a number of SEND parents and have been able to get to know and work with both your children and support their Teachers in strategies and delivery of differentiated lessons.

If you do have a concern about your child, please first approach the Class Teacher and share your concerns. The Class Teacher will be able to support you, or if needed, they will seek advice from me, and then set interventions and support in place, this is known as wave 1 provision.

If your child is not receptive to the provision offered by the Teacher, another meeting with the Class Teacher will follow, where the Phase Leader may be present: For Early Years it is myself, for KS 1 Mrs Critchlow and KS2 Miss Leigh-Hunt.

It will be at this point an Individual Needs Plan (INP) will be created. This is a plan with specific targets to support your child to enable them to make progress with a more individualised approach.

The INP is reviewed termly, and a copy of the old INP will be shared with you, as well as the new one. If your child is not making progress, referrals to external agencies may be made, so that a specialist can assess your child. I do need to make you aware that currently referrals for Autism, ADHD and Occupational Therapy have a waiting list of 30 months.

I just thought it would be helpful to share the processes, so that you understand the SEND procedures offered at Wooden Hill.

Kind regards and thank you for your support,

Mrs Rutter.

Nursery Roundup

The children returned from their Christmas break full of enthusiasm and excited to see their friends and teachers. The older children have been thinking about how they can welcome the younger children and have come up with some great ideas including: showing them where things are, sharing toys, smiling, waving and showing them how to use their listening ears and looking eyes.

Their topic for this half-term is ‘Frozen’ and the children will be focussing on the season of winter. So far they have enjoyed looking at winter themed sensory bottles in the exploration area, looking at some wintery stories and making collages using wintery coloured materials, foil, cotton wool and glitter. 

The children have enjoyed going into the main school playground and observing signs of winter. They spotted bare trees, holly and the grey and cloudy sky. They also spoke about needing to wear warm clothing when the weather is cold. They have had the opportunity to make ‘snowy footprint’ pictures and play with ‘snow’ made from flour which they enjoyed sprinkling with sieves. 

The children have had lots of fun investigating ice and one morning they discovered some frozen ‘Dinosaur eggs’ in the garden. This prompted lots of discussion about where they had come from and how they could break them! The children came up with lots of ideas such as throwing them on the floor, using the tools from our tool box, and putting them in warm water. They said the frozen eggs felt slippery, cold and freezing. 

The children's role-play area has been transformed into ‘Elsa’s Palace’ and the children have enjoyed playing with the Frozen characters, dressing up and acting. They have been colouring ‘Frozen’ picture too. One child said excitedly, “It is like Frozen Day today!”

This week the children have been very lucky to have a brand new mud kitchen to play with in Nursery garden, this was kindly made by Mrs Bhatti who has also sourced new utensils and pots and pans for the children to use.

The children have been making snow globes, and really enjoyed shaking them and watching the ‘snow’ whirl around in the bottles. They have also explored painting with colourful ice, and observed what happened as the ice started to melt on their paper. They noticed that they could make lots of new colours by mixing the paint. 

The stories that have been read in group times this week are ‘Stick Man’, ‘The Snail and the Whale’ and ‘There was and Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly’. The Children in green group have read ‘Where’s Spot’ and ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’.

Click here to keep up with all the Nursery news.

Year 1 Roundup

The staff were so pleased to see the children return with huge smiles after Christmas! They all settled back in to daily routine beautifully. 

They started the term being introduced to a new genre of writing - persuasive writing and explored a model text all about Australia and how they are now going to be creating their own persuasive leaflet called 'Ice Planet'. One day the children got to explore the icy outdoors... on a freezing cold day! The children collected some wonderful words to describe the icy setting! 

The children had a fascinating time looking at the timelines and the history of transport and got to make a timeline of their own lives.  Apparently the children of Beaver class were led to believe that Mrs Critchlow was born such a long time ago that they nearly put her out of the door!  

Even though recently there have been a lot of children and staff unwell the children in school have been great.  They have worked so hard in English and, on Friday, wrote a leaflet to persuade their audience to visit a theme park they had designed. We have also been hugely impressed by the quality of home learning shared by the children who have been working from home. 

There has also been lots of chilly fun in PE when practising their throwing and catching skills.

Click here to keep up with all the Year 1 news.

Year 2 Roundup

Following the Christmas break the children started a new topic in English studying the story ‘Stardust’. The children have been writing exciting sentences, interesting sentences using alliteration, a range of punctuation including exclamation and apostrophes and expanded noun phrases.

In PE lessons the children have started playing invasion games (where the children learn how to attack and defend working within their team) and gymnastics!

In Computing, Year have started a new unit on ‘Digital Photography’ and have been learning how to take clear photographs using digital devices including iPads. We have learnt to take photographs in portrait and landscape formats and we have had a lot of fun practising; taking a range of photographs including close ups, distance shots, action shots and even selfies!

In Maths the children have started learning about multiplication. They have been using objects such as counters to make equal groups and finding the total by adding the groups together. For example they know that three equal groups of six is eighteen so we can say “3 lots of 6 is 18”. We have also been creating arrays to show multiplication, where the rows and columns represent the equal groups. Finally we have been exploring word problems and number stories to show multiplication, for example “There are 4 bags of sweets, with 10 sweets in each bag. How many sweets are there altogether?

Despite the recent challenges of Covid, the children in school have coped amazingly without their usual teachers and routines and the children at home have been completing some fantastic home learning tasks. In particular, we have had some great research undertaken on ‘big cats’. Abi worked really hard to create a presentation of the facts that she found on tigers. We have also had some brilliant Maths work on multiplication.

Well done to everyone for all your hard work and fingers crossed we are a bit more back to normal soon!

Click here to keep up with all the Year 2 news.

Year 3 Roundup

It was an exciting return to school for Year 3 as they got to start to learn all about Ancient Egypt. They have learnt about Egyptian writing, mummification, Egyptian fashion, pyramids and the importance of the Nile. The children have learnt about the Egyptian gods and pyramids and got to have a go at creating their own Egyptian god, thinking carefully about what their role would be and how their appearance represented this. They got into role as slaves building the pyramids and did some great role-play demonstrating an understanding of what they did and how they might have felt. The children have also learnt about canonic jars and compared some aspects of their life to ours.

The children have really enjoyed getting stuck into 'The true story of the three little pigs.' They have enjoyed taking on the role of the wolf and defending themselves in questioning with a very tough group of police officers who would not believe it was all an accident! They have written all about the wolf's unfortunate sneeze in the straw house and also got to build stick and straw houses to blow down to help them collect verbs, adjectives and similes to use in their writing to describe the houses and what happened to them. The writing produced was fantastic!

The children have been doing some amazing sentences to build a class story about the three little pigs. They have got into character as the wolf to think carefully about what he will say, feel and do at different points in the story.

 

On Thursday this week, the children had an exciting trip to the 'museum' to find out about the archaeologist Howard Carter and the child pharaoh Tutankhamun. They looked at photographs taken of the tomb and artefacts at the time of discovery, read entries in Howard Carter's diary, examined drawings and diagrams made of the tomb and contents and explored some examples of artefacts.

Click here to keep up with all the Year 3 news.

Year 4 Roundup

The Year 4 children all came back after the Christmas holidays with a great mindset to their learning. The main topics for this half-term are:

• History - The Roman Empire
• Science - Rocks
• RE - Hinduism
• Indoor PE - Teamwork
• Outdoor PE - Hockey

To find out more about some of these, visit the 'Our Topic and Knowledge Organisers' tab under the Year 4 area. 

Year Four the term writing their own adversity poems, learning about Hadrian's wall in our history topic on the Roman invasion of Britain, discovering more about how rocks are formed including fossils, and working on their communication skills through team games in PE, blindfolded!

In science the children have been thinking about rocks and how fossils are made. Some children made salt dough and used this to begin making their own fossils. The children showed great teamwork when making their dough and transferred this awesome teamwork into their PE where they enjoyed a game of bench ball. 

Click here to keep up with all the Year 4 news.

Year 5 Roundup

In English this term, Year 5 have already completed a unit on Idia, a Benin Princess, based on dreams and growing up. This linked well with their History topic, the Kingdom of Benin, which has been fascinating, learning about the past and all the cultural differences. The children have also been looking at African art, bold and bright designs which include lots of shapes.

In maths, the children have already powered through a unit on multiplication and division. Times Table Rockstars practise is really key to developing these fundamental skills. Now, the children have moved on to fractions including equivalent fractions and mixed numbers/improper fractions, both of which use their times tables knowledge again.

Year 5 have done some very practical geography lessons, as you can see, creating the earth out of play dough to revise its layers and forming mountains using biscuits and shaving foam. They have then linked this with computing as they have been independently researching and presenting information, it would be great if the children could continue this at home too! This learning has been linked with the children reading lessons, to find out more about mountains and the people who climb them.

Click here to keep up with all the Year 5 news.

Year 6 Roundup 

Over the last 3 weeks in English, Year 6 have been developing their diary writing skills. They studied the narrative story 'Rose Blanche' and delved into their understanding of the character. From this, they then wrote some amazing diary entries from the perspective of the main character. 

Since returning from our Christmas break, the children have jumped straight into a fully immersive learning experience around WWII. They have created a range of artwork using a variety of techniques. They've created collages to understand the importance of camouflage, London landmark silhouettes during the blitz and much more. 

Year 6 had an amazing experience day on Wednesday 26th to understand the life of an evacuee. They came into school all dressed up and ready to learn! they baked scones using rations, wrote several diary entries throughout the day, and researched the impact of WWII on Berkshire.

There are even more pictures on Google classroom and on the website so make sure to check it out over there!

Click here to keep up with all the Year 6 news.

~ Dates for the Diary ~