St Andrews Dusit Newsletter February 2022

2/25/2022

2/25/2022

Upcoming Events

Message from the Head of School

March 28th–4th Book Week 4th Book Week Dress up day

April 1st Songkran Assembly 1st End of Term 2 18th Term 3 start

*Please note that we will review the government guidance regarding social distancing, COVID-19 and watch to see if there are any spikes in local case transmissions over the Christmas break. If there are any changes regarding our Health and Safety regulations, we will reach out and inform parents.

Dear Dusit Community, Before the half term break, we had our annual Safeguarding Audit. We know that safeguarding our children is paramount; if children feel safe and happy, they are more likely to learn better.

When we are happy our brains are much more interconnected and able to make more connections and links with other areas of the brain, making for not only happier brains but brains that are much better at problem solving and accepting and solving the everyday challenges that life invariably places in our way.

Feedback from our Safeguarding Audit: 

The Head of School and DSL, provide strong leadership for safeguarding. They model an uncompromising culture of care for children.

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Safeguarding is a strength, the DSL has developed a sound understanding of best practice and continually seeks ways to improve.

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Staff are complimentary about the school’s approach to safeguarding, they have confidence in leadership, appreciate support available and say communication is good.

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The children met say they feel safe and supported; staff are approachable if they need to talk to them. They thought any behaviour issues were dealt with promptly.

I wanted to thank our staff and Miss Sonal, our Designated Safeguarding Lead, for helping to embed a positive culture at St Andrews Dusit.

Please remember that next week is Book Week and on Friday, we will all be dressing up as book characters!

Have an enjoyable weekend ahead.

Caroline Ratcliffe

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Nursery The children have all settled so well this half-term; confidently saying goodbye to their familiar adults and walking to the nursery each morning. They are all becoming increasingly more aware of our routines, taking their shoes and socks off when they arrive and washing their hands. All of the children are forming lovely relationships with their teachers and are making great friends with the other children as they play, sing and explore the setting together.

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Nursery We have been looking at animals this half-term. We’ve explored the different animals we would expect to see on the farm, and we’ve explored jungle animals. The children had lots of fun looking at adult animals and their babies, and this led us to look at photos of our families and our baby pictures. The children have been exploring handprints and footprints, and using lots of language associated with size and we have worked together to draw outlines around our friends’ and teachers’ bodies, identifying which is the tallest and which is the shortest and remembering who those outlines belonged to.

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Nursery We are all so excited to start the new half term with lots of fun and engaging new activities, learning and continuous provision to explore. We will begin by celebrating book week. The entire school will be exploring the much loved classic; The Three Little Pigs. We will be dressing up as the characters and acting out scenes, working together to draw our own story maps, creating props and role playing different scenarios in our specially adapted Three Little Pigs role play area.

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Kindergarten What a busy half term we have had! We have really enjoyed celebrating Chinese New Year together. This included some Chinese writing, making a lion head, practising our fine motor skills by using the chopsticks to pick up noodles, making drums and Chinese ribbon dancing. We paraded our lion dances around the classroom and the playground. As it is the year of the Tiger this year, after

celebrating Chinese New Year we decided to focus on tigers. We have been reading the story of ‘The Tiger Who Came to Tea’ by Judith Kerr.

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Kindergarten KG have enjoyed an adventure with the tiger, role playing eating all of the food and drink and then had a lovely tiger tea party. Everyone came dressed in their party clothes and prepared snacks such as jam sandwiches, biscuits and even made their own mint tea. We have learnt about different animal patterns and printed them using paint and bubble wrap. KG have also explored repeating patterns using natural materials and different coloured materials in the classroom.

This term we have also welcomed Ms.Linnea and a new KG class; our Starfish Class! They are busy settling into the classroom routines and getting to know their new friends and teachers.

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Reception Reception have returned with a splash to learning!

The Sharks, Dolphins and Whales were so happy to be reunited with new friends and old, as we welcomed some new students to Reception. Welcome to Nym, Chertam, Jeongwon and Korn! They have been settling in so well and some new friendships have been forming.

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Reception Reception have had a magical time learning all about dragons, castles and knights! There are lots of different types of dragons. We crafted our own puppet dragons to celebrate Chinese New Year and beautiful dragon eggs. We built fairytale castles using boxes, junk, tape, glitter and paint. We looked at the different parts of a castle and shared lots of exciting stories, featuring princesses who save the day! We role-played at knights in our own castle in the role-play area with swords and shields.

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Reception Next, we will be building on our fairytale theme to explore more traditional tales and folk stories. It has been lovely to watch the children explore and use their motor skills to explore the climbing equipment in the playground recently too.

They are developing fantastic muscle strength, balance and coordination. Keep on climbing, knights of Reception!

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Year 1 The Pirate Adventure Continues In design and technology we have created our pirate ships and evaluated our final piece following our plans and designs closely. We then evaluated our creations as this is the last part of all D&T processes.

As a start to our new English information writing we were artistic and imaginative in our lessons as we made the most beautiful and colourful krakens as inspiration in all our work. We used this to write our own information text.

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Year 1 We followed the appropriate subheadings: title, description, habitat, diet and, did you know?

We are expanding our number knowledge and place value of numbers within 50.

We are using dienes to represent numbers and placing them onto part-whole models. All these lessons and games have been fun and educational too!

In science we have continued to learn about different materials and have started to look at their properties. We had a brief but fun and wet investigative science lesson, where we looked at materials that we learnt about and then guessed if they would sink or float.

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Year 1

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Year 2 Year 2 Learning Maestros The Year 2 Bears have gone from strength to strength this term. Whether they are traipsing across Antarctica to find the south pole or investigating the water proofing properties of materials, they approach all aspects of their learning with enthusiasm and dedication.

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Year 2 We have been particularly impressed by the Penguin reports they have produced. A significant learning curve for children in Year 2 is to understand that writing is a multistep process. In Year 2, we have been spending a great deal of time and effort on perfecting our ability to edit. We work in teams of 2, with one person being Arthur the author and the other being Edith the editor.

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Year 2 Edith helps Arthur by checking for missing punctuation, key topic spelling words and ensuring sentences make sense and are punctuated correctly. They then swap roles to focus on the other person's writing. The next phase of editing involves the class teacher giving specific feedback to the class around common errors that they noticed. For instance; the incorrect use of there, their or they’re.

Edith and Arthur then return to their editing to focus on the specific feedback they have received. This type of editing and feedback allows the students to take ownership of their writing and develop a sense of pride in the work they have put in to improve and correct their writing.

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Year 3 Get Mummified!

This month, Year 3 has become fully immersed in our book ‘Varjak Paw’. We have loved following the character’s journey and exploring the dilemmas that he has faced. Last week, we started planning our own Varjak adventures using a story mountain to focus on the main areas. We developed our settings and the children showcased their wonderful knowledge of descriptive language. The

children showed true determination when writing their stories and persevered to ensure they included all the skills they have learnt so far. We have now published our stories and are enjoying reading them in the book corner.

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Year 3 In topic, we are thoroughly enjoying our topic ‘Mummified’. We travelled back in time to find out where Ancient Egypt appears on the timeline, we have learnt about the importance of the River Nile and its uses. We used an interactive map to make predictions about where we thought the tomb of King Tut was and explained our reasonings. We also imagined we entered his tomb, and found all the treasures inside. In teams, we entered his tomb one at a time and created observational drawings of what we saw. It was lots of fun!

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Year 3 In maths, we have completed our multiplication and division unit and children are able to problem solve using a variety of manipulatives and written calculations. Next term we'll be moving on to money and statistics.

In art, we have been using the skill of printmaking to create block sting prints of hieroglyphs. We had fun making our own papyrus paper to print on and got very sticky hands in the process. After the break we will be creating our very own Egyptian death masks.

This term has been only the start of our ‘Mummified’ unit and we can’t wait to continue it next term.

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Year 4 Over the last 5 weeks, Year 4 have become lost in Ted Hughes’ incredible story, The Iron Man. This story is packed full of action, mystery, humour and so many characters who are not quite as they seem.

The class have used the story as a springboard for two incredible pieces of writing. The first was a detailed newspaper report about the day The Iron Man was captured. Year 4 began by interviewing witnesses to the Iron Man’s arrival and learnt how to use apostrophes and commas to punctuate direct speech, like a real journalist. They then worked on using fronted adverbials to explain when, where or how an action happened and used them to link ideas across their writing. The second piece of writing was an action packed first person narrative, full of descriptive language and emotions. We even learnt how to use the present

perfect tense to describe events that began in the past and continued to the present time. To conclude the story, we made some exciting comic strips to showcase all that we have learnt!

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Year 4 In art, we looked at the powerful images created by the illustrator Chris Mould for one of the most recent editions of The Iron Man. We were inspired by his use of shading techniques, and used these to explore a range of hatching techniques. We ended the term by creating contrasting images based on Chris Mould’s use of warm and cold colours to create mood. I think you will agree, the children have really created some masterpieces!

We’ve learnt so much throughout this journey of The Iron Man; a fearsome figure who turns out to be a real superhero! I wonder what the Year 4 superpowers would be?

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Year 5 This month we have shown understanding and perseverance in Year 5. We have completed some incredible artwork, written up our letters to NASA and have started our work on fractions. We have worked as a team and helped one another and are incredibly proud of the resilience shown and the care taken of each other.

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Year 5 We’ve been working hard using manipulatives to learn about equivalent fractions. We are beginning to show this using the written methods, as well as the concrete, ensuring we understand the concept behind it. This is very tricky but we persevered.

We also had a lot of fun creating space art, focusing on how to make our spheres look more realistic, focusing on light and dark. This term we have learnt so much about space - in science, art and even English lessons.

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Year 6 This month in Year 6 Eagles we have been continuing to immerse ourselves in the history and culture of Ancient Greece. In Writing, we have finished the first drafts of our mythical quest stories and practised how to self-assess our writing. This has connected to our Topic lessons where we have learned about life in Ancient Greece, including the differences between Athens and Sparta, and mythbusting

the Trojan War by examining primary and secondary sources. In art, we have made collagraph prints in the style of Ancient Greek pottery.

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Year 6 In Maths, we have learned about percentages, including how to order them and compare them to decimals and fractions. We also learned how to find percentages of amounts. We have now moved on to a new unit on algebra, using function machines and algebraic expressions.

In Science, we have been investigating the properties of light to solve a crime, eliminating a different suspect each week as we demonstrate concepts like light moving in straight lines, white light being made of different colours, and what affects shadow size. We are very close to collecting enough evidence to find the prime suspect!

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Dusit’s Got Talent It’s time to set the stage and turn on the lights! Our annual Dusit’s Got Talent: 2022 was yet another raving success. This year, the number of submissions increased making the judges’ jobs even harder, deciding who was going to move on to the finals. Every act was just as good as the one before and I do not envy those of

you who voted because the choice was tough. Needless to say, the Dusit community showed up to support their own and voted in record numbers. The results are in and the winners are below. I want to thank every student who sent in an audition video and the parents who have taken the time to not only record but encourage. Keep up the wonderful work and starting planning what you will do for next year’s DGT. KS1 Winner(s): Tee and Fa KS2 Winner(s): Pun Pun, Chanya, Google, and Alicia Teacher Winner: Ms. Ashley DGT: 2022 SUPERSTAR: Tania

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Superstars of the Month