Southfield Primary School Newsletter Dec 21

‘Ex Corde Vita’

HEADTEACHER INTRODUCTION As we end the autumn term and prepare for Christmas festivities we can look back on a highly successful term replete with some wonderful events and memories. I hope you enjoy flicking through the special events held this term. These include the spectacular Year 5 class assemblies, the breathtaking nativities and Christmas shows to the stunning orchestra and choir performances. Our very exciting contextualsied and knowledge based curriculum has produced some beautiful work from the children that many of you would have seen at the Open Morning. This has been punctuated by our popular history days where children dressed up in the period, participated in drama workshops and cooking from times past. Developing young geographers through our geography week was also a particular highlight.

Children have been enjoying the new enrichment agenda with French and Spanish classes, specialist drama, PE and Music and the wonderful art which culminated in our glorious art exhibition. One of our special traditions at Southfield is the yearly Christmas Bazaar and this year was no exception!

Children enjoyed purchasing Christmas presents and meeting Santa and our Year 6 elves were incredible.

We look forward to a great Spring Term ahead and you should have received a calendar of events.

I hope you enjoy a happy and peaceful Christmas and a happy new year ahead.

Dr. Jones

BACK TO SCHOOL

REMEMBRANCE ASSEMBLY On Thursday November 11th, we held a school assembly to commemorate Remembrance Day. Some of our Year 6 pupils recited Flanders Fields and explained the history behind Armistice Day. They also sang a beautiful song and a trumpeter played The Last Post to draw the assembly to a close. It was an incredibly moving and sombre commemoration. Well done to the children and a huge thank you to Ms Foster for your hard work in bringing this beautiful piece together.

CLASS ASSEMBLIES We were delighted to welcome the return of our classes assemblies again. Year 5 Puccini and 5 Schubert started the year off with a fabulous re-telling of their class novel Why The Whales Came by Michael Murpurgo , featuring an enormous whale! Huge well done to the children and to Mr Coleman and Mr Tauchert, our two Year 5 teachers, for their tireless work in bringing these productions to life.

GEOGRAPHY WEEK

This half term we held our Geography Week across the school. There were so many fantastic activities happening from orienteering around the school grounds to completing Phileas Fogg’s journey around the world in 80 days. It was great to see a buzz around the school with classrooms scattered with maps, compasses, atlases and globes.

Year 3 also had a wonderful workshop on rivers and the water cycle and there was some beautiful writing done based on our environmental creative writing picture books. We had a visit from some of our school governors who also got to sample the brilliant work being done in classes.

HISTORY DAYS This half term, we had history themed days across the school from Year 2 to Year 6. Each day included dressing up as people of the time, an art/DT activitiy, some cooking or baking and a drama workshop led by The Drama Hut. These days contextualised the children’s learning this term.

The days were as follows: Year 2: The Romans Year 3: The Egyptians Year 4: The Greeks Year 5: The British Empire Year 6: The Suffragettes

CHRISTMAS BAZAAR We were delighted to welcome back our annial Christmas Bazaar and Elf Competition organised by our wonderful PTA. Once again it was a roaring success. Thank you to all our Southfield community for your donations for the bazaar and for your time to make it such a great day for the children. Year 6 dressed as elves and shepherded the younger children on their shopping sprees. It was great to have that buzz and feeling back around the school. We are already looking forward to next year!

ART EXHIBITIONS Over the course of this term, children from Nursery to Reception have been completing art work which went on display in our two art exhibitions on the 1st and 2nd of December. Thank you to our specialist art teacher Ms Saunders who oversaw the production of the pieces for parents to purchase as a keepsake. It was a beautiful event and one we hope to do annually.

CHRISTMAS PERFORMANCES

It was great to welcome back parents to watch our nativities and Christmas performances this year. Each year group put on a wonderful show and we had beautiful performances from our choir, recorder club and our musicians. Thank you very much to everyone invloved for all their efforts. It gave us a wonderfully festive feel.

We also had a visit from Quantum Theatre and Hobgoblin who did two fantastic shows of The Snow Queen and King Arthur. They will be back again in the Spring for our annual Reading Festival.

SCHOOL COUNCIL In school council, we get to participate in some of the decision making for our school. We help make a difference by voting in a democratic way and we try and bring about positive changes by sharing our ideas and opinions.

This term, we have gathered feedback about the new lunchtime activities and thought of more that could be included. We spoke with our classes regarding Science to find out what they have been enjoying about the subject so far and we have changed the house names.

We asked Dr. Jones if we could change the names of our houses and he agreed. We asked our classes to think of role models that had made contributions to education and/or the wider world that we could name the houses after.

The four most popular people were: Pankhurst, Mandela, Ghandi and Shakespeare and from Januray, these will be our new house names.

HEAD BOY AND HEAD GIRL Dan and Skye are our Head Boy and Girl this year and they have had a whirlwind of a first term.

Her’s what they had to say:

“It has been a phenomenal experience being Head Boy and Girl at Southfield so far. We have conducted parent tours (which were amazing); we have given speeches (which were quite nervewracking at first) and we have spoken in assemblies. The more we have done these things the more confident we have become, not just in ourselves but in all aspects of our learnig at Southfield. This has been such a postivie and rewarding experience and we very much look forward to what next term has in store for us”

PARENT WORKSHOPS Reading: Ms Mc Greal delivered a reading workshop which followed on from Ms Ouko’s Phonics assembly earlier in the term. She discussed the five pillars of reading in our curriculum and how it punctuates every aspect of learning. She also discussed ways to support with reading and comprehension at home. A link to the workshop can be found here: https://www.southfieldschool.org.uk/docs/Reading_at_Southfield.pdf

Story-Centred Knowledge Curriculum: Dr Jones delivered a workshop to parents on the four fundamental driving principles of our curriculum at Southfield which are:    

Story-centred curriculum Contextualised curriculum Knowledge rich Personal growth

HOUSE PRIZE This terms house prize was won by Gunnersbury with a total of 624 points.

The children were treated to extra play, a treat and a medal for all their efforts in working together to win.

Best of luck to all houses next term!

WHAT HAVE WE BEEN DOING?

EYFS NURSERY This term in Nursery our topic has been ‘My Favourite things’.We talked about various ‘favourite’ things that the children could have. Each child sent in a photo of them with their favourite toy and each child got up and spoke to the class about why it was their favourite. The toy shop in the role play area has been very busy! Especially in the run up to Christmas! We have learnt all our numbers to 10 and the children enjoyed using ‘maps’ to find their way around using positional language. We had read a range of stories and the children love listening to them and re-enacting parts of the story in their play. Our performance of Whoops a Daisy Angel was amazing! We also attended a workshop which the children thoroughly enjoyed and have been playing the games from it in the playground since!

RECEPTION Reception has had a blast this term learning lots of new facts about space.

Our role-play areas were transformed into space stations and we whizzed through the solar system in our imaginary rockets! We used junk materials to create moon buggies and spent time finding out about each of the planets. We read many wonderful stories, including, ‘Aliens Love Underpants’, ‘The Marvellous Moon Map’ and ‘Whatever Next’. A story we particularly enjoyed was ‘Man on the Moon’-a story about Bob, whose job is to look after the moon. We loved the illustrations and used these as inspiration for our own play aliens in our Maths Through Story lesson, where we shaped play dough into different 3D shapes. At the end of term, we enjoyed taking part in a workshop run by ‘Perform’, where we played lots of games and even had a visit from an alien! We loved coming to school in our space-related costumes!

KEY STAGE 1 YEAR 1 In Year 1 this half term in English our writing has been non-fiction based. The children wrote in a range of genres, including book reviews, reports and information leaflets. Our History and Science lessons provided inspiration for this written work, thereby linking our writing to the knowledge which the children had already gained. Alongside their usual English lessons, we will also continued to teach our bi-weekly Creative Writing sessions, where the storybooks ‘Dinosaur’s Day out’, ‘Room on a Broom’ and ‘Zog’ were used to spark the children’s own creativity. In Maths we have been identifying and representing numbers using different pictorial representations, placing numbers from 0-100 on number lines, and learning addition and subtraction number bonds facts. In History we have been learning about the past, our own family tree, Mary Seacole, and archaeologists. We have learnt about animals and their needs in Science and we now have a clearer understanding of animals needs and how to describe and group animals according to their features and diet. We also found out about how to look after pets. In the penultimate week before the end of term we had an RE day where we learnt about different creation stories. We acted out some of these stories and found out which religious traditions they belong to. We then wrote about the importance of the world and why it is important to care for it. We also had a PSHE day where we set a goal for ourselves, we learnt what ‘voting’ is and carried out a class vote, we looked at the importance of keeping clean and the use of medicines, and also explored what ‘bullying’ is. For our computing day we have been working on our computing unit ‘We are TV chefs’ to create simple clear steps to follow (an algorithm) for a recipe. We used different features of a video camera to record a short video about making a pizza(1H)/burger(1R).. During this unit we have been developing our collaboration skills and discussing our work to think about how it could be improved.

YEAR 2 Year 2 Mozart 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, Geography and History knowledge about living things and their environment, spatial skills and the Roman Empire. In Maths, they have continued to explain their reasoning and began to provide evidence of this through using manipulatives and representations. They have also begun to count forwards and backwards in 2s, 3s, 5s and 10s and started to link this with repeated addition and multiplication.

The children thoroughly enjoyed History day, when Boudicca visited to tell them all about her great battle with the Romans. She showed them how the Romans organised themselves into formations with shields for protection. It was great – they even got to make and eat Roman bread! Forest School has been a wonderful experience for Year 2 as they have been able to delve further into our topic of ‘Living things and their Environments’. They have been able to explore the mini-habitats, discuss the conditions and see the mini-beasts that call these environments home. It has been a fantastic half term!

KEY STAGE 2 YEAR 3 .This half of term has been a busy one for

Year 3! Full of exciting learning and experiences. In English we have been learning how to write in a variety of nonfiction styles including most recently instructional writing where we have written a recipe for the Ancient Egyptian Caraway Buns we made during our fabulous History Day. We were visited by the goddess Isis and learnt all about how prepare a Pharaoh for the Afterlife! In Maths we have been continuing to grow our confidence in our number skills through working on addition and subtraction. We have developed our reasoning skills through learning about how to check our working out but doing the reverse operation to ensure our answers are correct. Science this term we have been learning all about cycles and their repeating nature. We have found patterns in all aspects of life from the way our planet cycles through the seasons, plants and nature cycles. It has been fascinating to learn how life is a repeating pattern.

Geography Week was a great success with the children developing their confidence in map skills, locating different countries and cities around the world as well as exploring the world through the wonder of Google Maps and street view. We also had a go at orienteering around the playground! It was cold but great fun! Our History topic has been exploring the Ancient Egyptians and learning how they lived and died. Our PSHE and RE days focused on ensuring our social skills are based on kindness and Christmas.

Of course we also topped off this half term with our musical spectacular The Mouse in Santa’s House!

YEAR 4 Year 4 have continued to their great start to the year this half term! In English, we have been learning how to write different genres of non-fiction texts based on the learning from our topic lessons. We’ve written recipes on how to bake Greek biscuits, biographies on Thomas Barnardo and information texts on how to maintain a healthy lifestyle. In Geography we’ve been travelling through the Mediterranean, leaning all about the countries there, their culture, their climate and the agricultural side of life in the sunny Med. In Real Life Maths, we’ve been putting our newly learnt mathematical skills to great use planning journeys through a myriad of time-zones around the world. We also used our knowledge of subtraction and addition to calculate the money raised for ‘Children in Need’.

Whilst in Creative Writing, the children have been developing their narrative voice, writing their own versions of a series of books based around the school’s TRUE values. During our PSHE day on Health and Wellbeing, the classes discussed the different types of bullying and the effects it has on people, before talking about what we could do to stop bullying in our community. We listened to some stories of people that had been bullied, before some of the children shared their own experiences.

Everyone listened so well and we were very proud of them all. Finally, the children have been busy practicing for the class nativity where a pair of brothers find themselves mistakenly transported back to Bethlehem. We can’t wait to perform it to you all!

YEAR 5 During the second Autumn half term in Year 5, we honed our orienteering skills and scaled up our mountains of knowledge throughout geography week. This included navigating around the school using maps and compasses to solve cryptic clues, learning about climate zones around the world and building our own contour models. In Real Life Maths, we learnt about Philias Fogg’s fictional trip around the world and we calculated our own modern-day journey taking into account departure and arrival times across different time zones around the world. Our nonfiction texts in English included redrafting our own version of Sir Edmund Hillary’s biography and constructing our very own instruction text on how to make Victoria Sponge cupcakes, which we made on our Early British Empire history-themed day.

For our historical re-enactment day, we all dressed up in dated outfits and took part in an interactive drama workshop, which uncovered the age of exploration of notable historical figures, such as Sir Walter Raleigh. Our dramatic talents were also on show through our re-telling of our Autumn one fictional English novel of Why the Wales Came by Michael Morpurgo in our class assembly.

Our commitment to developing our thespian flair was given a festive twist by re-enacting the classic tale of Ebenezer Scrooge in Bah Humbug.

Merry Christmas to one and all.

YEAR 6

This half term we have been writing all about our foundation subject studies in English. We have written biographies abour Emmeline Pankhurst, information texts about animals in The Great War and a balanced discussion on the fight for women’s suffrage. This coincided with our Suffragettes History Day which was a fantastic way to contextualize and give meaning to our learning. In Science, we have looked at classification and taxonomy and learned about Carolus Linneaus, the father of the two-part naming system which is still used today. Some of our cohort were involved in the Remembrance Day assembly which was a beautifully poignant commemoration. In Geography we have been studying the British Isles, including air pollution and climate change in our local regions. In RE we have been learning the significance of the Torrah in Judaism and in PSHE we have had talks from the MET police about keeping safe. We got to dress up as elves for the Christmas Bazaar and take the younger years shopping which was enormous fun and finally, we also performed our winter World War II production of Julia Donaldson’s Bombs and Blackberries for our parents and carers. We also managed to get two workshops in the Houses of Parliament in December which was incredibly lucky - what a jam packed half term!

ATTENDANCE We are delighted and thrilled with our half term attendance figure which stands at 95.3%.

A huge thank you to all for your sterling efforts and for your commitment and support with the current systems in place to keep us all safe.

We now aim for 96% attendance next term!

FURTHER INFORMATION Aktiva are providing breakfast and after school club. Please email them directly if you are interested in your child attending.

Please kindly ensure your account for ISS Catering for your child’s school dinner is always in credit.

‘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