‘Ex Corde Vita’
HEADTEACHER INTRODUCTION Dear Parents and Carers, It is with great pleasure I write to you on the eve of our Christmas break to present you our bumper issue of the school newsletter. Firstly, I would like to thank each and every one for your unwavering patience and commitment to our school over the term. We are indeed a wonderful community and you have all shown this by adapting to a new way of working. It was heartening to see the generosity of our parents from the biscuit and Christmas gifts given to the children. Also, to the generosity of you all through regular donations and the PTA. This makes a huge difference to the offer we can give children and we thank you sincerely. Secondly, I would like to thank my wonderful senior team, staff and governors for all their hard work for our school over the term. There has been a tremendous amount of high quality and creative learning going on throughout the school and you will see examples of this on the pages ahead. We are so proud of our children’s behavior and efforts! The classrooms are awash with creative and stimulating displays and the children’s work is of such a high standard; we can’t wait to show you these in person soon. It has been a pleasure to see children being sent to me to celebrate wonderful work and in gaining the weekly achievement certificates. Our Nursery and Reception classes have settled in so well to school life and we are incredibly proud of all they have achieved so far! Our library project supported by the PTA is taking great shape; we have commissioned a librarian to support us and have now purchased all new stock. We hope to launch and open it early next term. Our computing and the digital world curriculum is going very well and children have been using the new chrome books and been involved in exciting projects. Our science in the natural world has been an excellent curricular addition and Year 3 have been actively involved in forest school this term. All around the school the sound of skipping ropes can be heard as children have entered with great gusto into the skipathon! We will be sending out a calendar of events early next term with many exciting things ahead. I hope you all enjoy watching the festive class productions that have been sent via Google Classroom. You will be immensely proud of your children and their spectacular acting and singing. I wish you all a happy and pleasant Christmas break ahead! Mr. Jones Headteacher
OUR TERM IN PICTURES
CHRISTMAS EVENTS As I am sure you are aware, we have been busy beavering away at our Christmas performances for the past couple of weeks. It is a highlight in the school calendar and we wanted to make it especially fun this year after all that has been going on in the world. From Nursery to Year 6, from Victorian London to Outer Space, you are in for a real treat! All the school plays will be available to watch on your child’s Google Classroom – we hope you enjoy! Thank you so much to our dedicated staff for working tirelessly to ensure that the children did not miss out on this this opportunity this year. Last Friday, we also held our annual Christmas Jumper Day. This year, we are raising money for the school and a huge thank you to all of you who donated so generously. We also received two incredibly kind donations of a Christmas biscuit and a Christmas Gift for every child from two very kind parents. We are eternally grateful to our wonderful Southfield community for your continue support through this tumultuous time.
FOREST SCHOOL Year 3 have had the most wonderful time at forest school this half term. They have had weekly trips to Green Twigs and made fire and built huts to name just a few of the exciting things they were up to. Read all about in the Year 3 section!
Next term will see Year 1 have a chance to attend weekly sessions. Letters should have already gone to parents via ParentMail so please have a look if you have a child in 1 Ravel or 1 Haydn.
SKIPATHON This term in PE the children took part in National skipping week. During the week each year group was set a challenge for the number of skips they could achieve altogether as a class. Year 1 Target: 1000 skips for each class Achieved: 1 Ravel-1108 1 Hayden- 1110 Year 2 Target: 1200 skips for each class Achieved: 2 Verdi-1210 skips 2 Mozart-1220skips Year 3 Target: 1250 skips for each class Achieved: 3 Elgar- 1255 3 Strauss- 1260 Year 4 Target:1350 skips for each class Achieved: 4 Bach - 1380 4 Mahler - 1370 Year 5 Target: 1500 skips for each class Achieved: 5 Schubert -1550 5 Puccini - 1600 Year 6 Target: 2000 skips for each class Achieved: 6 Beethoven- 2100 6 Vivaldi - 2150 All the children had a wonderful time working together to achieve their skipping goal. As a result of the national skipping week, the children have raised an amazing grand total of ÂŁ625 and have now taken their new found love of skipping into the playground where they continue to skip together and make up their own skipping songs. Keep skipping Southfield!!
PARENT WORKSHOPS PARENT WORKSHOPS
There have been two more Zoom parent workshops which have taken place. English: The English parent workshop took place on Tuesday 24th November at 10am with Ms Mc Greal. We discussed the use of literature and picture books across the school for our writing outcomes; the structure of how writing is taught across the school; reading, both for pleasure and its explicit teaching; and finally, how grammar and spelling/phonics is delivered. Thank you very much to the parents who took part. SEN: On 1st December, Ms Tamber and Ms Edwards presented a workshop to parents via Zoom regarding SEND at Southfield. Ms Tamber discussed the process of how SEND pupils are identified at school, the involvement of outside agencies and the referral process with the Educational Psychologist. Ms Edwards then focused on a specific area of SEND: dyslexia. She explained what it is, how it is identified and how classrooms and learning are adapted to help children with this need.
Please click the link below to view the presentation: https://www.southfieldschool.org.uk/Parents-Workshop/
CHRISTMAS CRAFTS The PTA cane up with a wonderful idea of every class making their own Christmas Crafts as a way of fundraising for the school in what has been such a turbulent year. The children had such fun making wood slices, pictures frames and Santa jars to name but a few. Every item that was purchased allowed us to make some much need money for Southfield and all proceeds will be put back into continuing to provide a wonderful school experience at Southfield.
ELF DAY
Sadly, due to current restrictions, we could not hold our annual Christmas Bazaar. Nevertheless, Year 6 still had an opportunity to dress up as elves and they had a wonderful day of games and crafts. The annual elf competition was held in the playground. There were two rounds where the elves had to dance for Mr. Jones and Ms. Tamber and eventually we crowned our two winners: Gabby 6B and Sofia 6V. Well done to all our elves!
WHAT HAVE WE BEEN DOING?
EYFS NURSERY In Nursery this half term we have been building relationships and talking with each other. We know our routines and are enjoying learning new things. In Maths we have been counting to 10 and learning to recognise the numbers 5-8 and count out the right amount of objects to go with each number. We have also learnt the names of 2D shapes and where we can see them in the environment. We have enjoyed Maths through story and it has helped us. In Literacy we have been practising writing our names. We continue to speak to each other, share the toys and wait our turn. Creative story telling is helping us to understand different situations in school and the world around us. We have enjoyed playing in the toy shop based around our topic My Favourite Things. We made our own toy and brought in pictures of us with our favourite toy and shared it with the class.
RECEPTION This half term, Reception have been learning about Space. We have been exploring the Solar System by naming planets and learning about their position in relation to the Sun. We have talked about the jobs and responsibilities of an astronaut – we loved playing in our class space station! We also talked about what it would be like to travel and live in space. We made rockets as part of a home project. In class, we made and decorated flying saucers and aliens. Inspired by Whatever Next, we had to select few of most crucial items to pack with us before we set off to the Moon in our cardboard space shuttle. We have been building on our knowledge and understanding of number. We began adding and subtracting using a variety of objects. We read Abigail and helped the main character do some counting. We also read Titch where we compared sizes, heights and weights. We used scales, rulers and measure tapes to measure how heavy and how long things were! As a class, we also compared ourselves and lined up from the shortest person. We will do it again soon as we are still growing and the order may change! In PE, we have been challenging ourselves in lots of different activities where not only did we need to use our muscle strength but also body balancing. We also needed to use our eyes and continued to show space awareness when moving around the hall. As Christmas is approaching, we have filmed our play titled Woops-A-Daisy Angel. We cannot wait to show it to our parents!
KEY STAGE 1 YEAR 1 1 has had a busy half term. In History we continued to look at life in the 1950’s and especially enjoyed learning about how their toys differed to ours. We also learnt about the Queen’s coronation and were extremely surprised when she came to visit us and answered questions we had about her. We have also continued to look at nonfiction texts in English including some lovely balanced discussions about the seasons that were written using knowledge learnt in science. We have continued to encourage creative writing and have retold some great stories such as ‘Grandads Island’ and ‘The Robot and the Bluebird’. Creativity has been plentiful with our Nativity rehearsals, music lessons and our explorations of colour, tints and shades in art, which helped us to create some beautiful ‘splash’ art based on the work of David Hockney.
YEAR 2 Year 2 have had a brilliant second half of the term! They have worked extremely hard in all areas of the curriculum and been so focused on all of the tasks at hand. This term, they wrote a range of non-fiction texts using their previous Science knowledge about materials and their everyday uses, and the Ancient Egyptians from History as a stimulus. They have continued to explain their reasoning and began to provide evidence of this through using manipulatives and representations Mathematics. Their History topic has continued to take the children all the way back to Ancient Egypt. This term, they learned about the process of mummification and were able to use this to mummify their own tomato! They were even able to meet the famous Pharaoh Tutankhamun. He answered questions about his life and told them all about life while he was ruling. Science has given the children the opportunity to continue exploring and investigating materials and their uses. They have used their knowledge of the properties of the materials to choose suitable resources to create objects – they had so much fun choosing appropriate materials to make a kite that could fly! In Art, the children have had a fantastic time understanding the significance of and responding to the works of Henry Matisse. Through the medium of shape and complimentary colours, the children created beautiful pieces. They also drew inspiration from Kurt Schwitters and used non-art materials to construct pictures. We also had so much fun practising and recording our Christmas play, ‘Hey Ewe!’ and we can’t wait for our parents to see it!
KEY STAGE 2 YEAR 3 .
This half term, 3 Elgar has had a lot of fun learning! One of the highlights has been the weekly trip to Forest School. The children have had the amazing opportunity to lead their own learning in the outdoors through exploration and discovery, which has provided them with meaningful experiences. Through these experiences, they have developed their problem solving skills, learnt resilience and resourcefulness, and developed their emotional intelligence and ability to work effectively as part of a team. Science has focused on investigative learning to explore the topic of forces. The children have learnt about the effects of friction on different surfaces, whether a material is magnetic or non-magnetic, and explored magnetic poles by making their very own compasses! In History, they have continued to learn about the Romans. They have learnt about Roman gods and goddesses and the roads that they built, many of which we still use today. They also created Roman shields – which was so much fun – and used them to better understand successful Roman battle formations. They have contextualised their learning in English lessons, applying their knowledge and understanding to write across a range of genres. The focus of art this term has been painting. The children have developed their understanding of colour and explored ways of making and creating a range of colours from the primary and secondary range. They also had a lot of fun making wind chimes, which they will buy to raise money for charities that the school wishes to support. They have received lots of comments about how fabulous they all look!
YEAR 4 This has been an exciting term for 4 Bach! In English, we have now finished our class novel, Street Child. We learnt not only that Jim Jarvis was a real boy but also how Dr. Barnados founded a ‘Ragged School’ where all children could get a free basic education. As for our Real Life maths lesson, the fun never stops! We have been applying our knowledge of place value and everything we have learnt so far about the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) to solve Christmas mysteries. We continued with our History topic on ‘The Victorians’ where we compared schooling then and now. We were shocked to learn of the punishments children received for mistakes in their work or making the wrong choices. We also discovered that lessons back then were nowhere near as exciting as they are today! We are sad to be bringing this topic to a close but look forward to finding out what next term has in store for us. There are so many talented artists in 4 Bach and once again, we have added some wonderful work to our sketch books. Our watercolour flowers and landscapes, inspired by Georgia O’ Keefe, were particularly impressive! In Science, we were amazed to find out that we could hear each other through our paper cup telephones! We made these by connecting two plastic cups with a long piece of string. One person spoke into the cup while the other listened carefully. The sound vibrations travelled along the tightly pulled string, allowing us to hear the message. We soon realised that this didn’t work quite as well if the string was loose or knotted.
YEAR 5 Year 5 have had another busy this half term in the lead up to Christmas. In English, we have been exploring non-fiction style texts. This has given us many opportunities to delve deeper into topics we are studying in History and Science; for example we wrote a biography on Elizabeth I and wrote an instructional text on How to make your own plant. For our History topic we continued our study of the Tudor period; this time focussing more closely on the reign of the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I. We have explored some of the key events that took place during her reign, for instance the Spanish Armada, and the unique problems she faced as a female monarch, which have led to her immense significance in British history. This topic has been further contextualised through Real Life Maths, in which we took on the role of Queen Elizabeth’s military advisors, and had to use our skills of multiplying and dividing by 10, 100, and 1000 in order to efficiently distribute weapons and food to our scattered armies. In Science, we have been looking at the different life cycles of certain plants and animals, again using this topic to develop our English writing skills by creating an explanation text on the life cycle of a flowering plant. As well as this, we also conducted an ongoing investigation in to what helps a plant to grow. Using runner bean seeds, we limited the amount of sunlight and water these seeds would receive, came up with predictions on what we thought would happen to the rate of growth, and recorded our observations over the term. Thank you to everyone that could donate to the PTSA Crafts event. With your help, the children were able to create some fantastic looking dragon bookmarks and origami Christmas trees, and we had a great time doing it!
YEAR 6 In the second Autumn half term, Year 6 have been analysing and constructing their own non-fiction explanation and information texts in English. This has included writing our own academic article on the origins of World War II through to redrafting our version of Winston Churchill’s famous speech, ‘The Few’, which he delivered during the Battle of Britain. We also built model Anderson Shelters and wrote our own comprehensive, step-by-step instruction guide for others to follow. Other cross-curricular topics included using our knowledge of how light behaves from our science lessons to design our own electronic information booklet on periscopes. Furthermore, we have been able to contextualise our maths knowledge through applying our learning in Real Life Maths, where we had to break the German Enigma encryption using our BIDMAS skills to decipher coded messages about Luftwaffe targets on the South Coast of England. We also answered Churchill’s call and assisted the government in recalculating their wartime ration allocations using our knowledge of fractions and we provided critical calculations to aid the Dunkirk sea rescue of Operation Dynamo. To contextualise this fully, we had a WW2 dress-up day, where we dressed and acted as evacuees. Lastly, we have been rehearsing for our digital acting debuts for our class festive production, including green screen special effects! We can’t wait for you to see it! Bah humbug!!!
COVID-19 PROTOCOL What to do if someone has symptoms of COVID-19
YES
‘Ex Corde Vita’
ATTENDANCE We are delighted and thrilled to announce we have met our attendance target for this term which was set at 95%, an increase of 2% on last half term. Thank you again to all our parents and carers for your continued support. We are eternally grateful to you all for following our strict Covid guidelines which has meant that almost all of our cohort have been able to attend school every day this half term. Let’s keep it going in 2021!
FURTHER INFORMATION Activa: Activa are continuing to provide breakfast and after school club. Please email them directly if you are interested in your child attending. Harrisons: Please kindly ensure your account with Harrison Catering for your child’s school dinner is always in credit.
The school will re-open on Tuesday, 5th of January for the start of the Spring term. Have a restful and safe Christmas from all of us here at Southfield.
‘Ex Corde Vita’
Email: admin@southfield.ealing.sch.uk
Southfield Primary School Southfield Road Bedford Park London W4 1BD Tel 020 8994 6173 or 020 8742 3127