Spring 1 Newsletter 2023

‘Ex Corde Vita’

HEADTEACHER INTRODUCTION

Dear Parents,

I have great pleasure in presenting our first newsletter of 2023 for Spring Term 1 replete with a stunning range of information covering all what has been happening at school. In just a short few weeks there have been exciting educational visits in Year 5 to Kew Gardens linked to their science topics and the Army Museum for Year 6 pertaining to their work on World War II. It was wonderful to receive a reply from a member of the public travelling on the same tube train as Year 6 which stated that they were one of the best behaved schools they had seen and so polite

well done Year 6 for representing our school so well! Year 3 have been attending Forest School and had a great time experimenting with all things outdoors! They also visited the Science Museum.

Children’s lunchtimes continue to be a hub of activity with wonderful zones of games and sports as well as a plethora of lunchtime clubs such as Performance Club, fencing, chess and much more! A new inter house football league has been launched which is very exciting. The School Council have been discussing what would make lunchtimes even better and we have decided to add a wellbeing area to play board games and to support relaxation on the playground- what a great idea!

You will also see a range of stunning work and activities the children have been involved in from Reception to Year 6! The quality of work is simply breathtaking! Children have been busily working hard in lessons and showing excellent behaviour to earn tokens for their respective houses! Pankhurst house is currently in the lead and we wonder if this will continue after half term as we lead up to Easter to see who will win the Spring Term house award prize!

A heartfelt thank you to all those who contributed to our mufti day today in support for families affected by the recent earthquakes in Turkey. We raised £470.00 which will be donated to the British Red Cross Earthquake in Turkey Appeal.

I wish you all a happy and pleasant half term!

Warm wishes

Dr Darren Jones

CONTEXTUALISED CURRICULUM

One of the tenets of the Southfield Curriculum is contextualisation of the children's learning. We do this in a number of ways through Maths Through Story, Real Life Maths, workshops, visitors and school trips. This half term we have continued to provide these valuable curriculumexperiences. These are a selection of the visits the children had this term:

Year 3 attended Forest School and visited the Science Museum

Year 5 visited Kew Gardens

Year 6 visited the National Army Museum

Year 3 Science Museum

Year 3 Forest School

Year 5 Kew Gardens

Year 6 National Army Museum

PE

Wow! What a fantastic spring term so far. Throughout the school, all the children have been learning and developing their Gymnastics and yoga techniques helping them to become gymnasts.

We have been practising and performing different patterns and shapes with balance and control, demonstrating different jumps and rolls exploring different ways to travel.

In EYFS, the children have been learning how to control their body movements while holding a balance using the ‘pitch and point’ technique. As well as, learning body shapes.

KS1 have been learning different body shapes and jumps from a straight jumps to a cat leap keeping control when transitioning from one technique to another while keeping a rhythmic pattern.

KS2 have continued to work hard on their gymnastic routines putting together rhythmic performance including all the gymnastic elements of shapes, rolls, jumps and travelling

Lunchtimes have continued to be a great addition to the children’s physical activities this term with great activities for all the children to take part in and enjoy.

This term I am pleased to introduce ‘The House Football League’ for Key stages 1-2. Giving all the children opportunity to represent their ’House’ . The league games take place at lunchtimes with KS1 every Tuesday and Thursday and KS2 Monday and Wednesday. The final games of the league will be played during Healthy lifestyles weeks in the summer term.

Parents and carers can keep an eye on the league by following the link below:

https://score7.io/tournaments/southfieldyr6

Spring 2 is going to be just as jammed packed; EYFS and KS1 will be learning Dance-‘Rhythm and Movement’ and KS2 Invasion games- ‘Basketball’

LUNCH TIME CLUBS

As part of our extensive enrichment offers at lunchtime, we are continuing offering children the opportunity to participate in lunchtime clubs at significantly subsidised costs or free. Below are some images of the clubs this term.

Fencing club

Performance club

Construction club

PARTNER READING

As part of our reading pillars, our younger classes are buddied up with one of the older classes and they meet each week for 30 minutes to read books to one another and to spend time together as a school community, The children look forward to these sessions every week and it is beautiful to watch the children bond whilst also developing their confidence as readers and communicators.

PARENT WORKSHOPS

This half term, we have hosted a multitude of parent workshops centered around the curriculum. Each workshop informed parents about how subjects are taught, assessment practices and how they could further support their child at home. Below are the parent workshops that have taken place so far:

 Arithmetic and Basic Skills

 Multiplication Timestables Check

 Story and Teaching Children to Read

 E – Safety

Southfield Primary School - Parent Workshops (southfieldschool.org.uk)

WHAT HAVE WE BEEN DOING?

EYFS RECEPTION

In EYFS we have had a very exciting and fun filled half term with lots of opportunities for role play, creative artwork, learning through play as well as studying Phonics, Maths and our overarching topic ‘Space.’

We have been very impressed with the children’s ability to immersive themselves in the topic and apply knowledge in context, as well as improve and consolidate early Maths, Reading and Writing.

During our Space topic we learnt that the earth orbits the sun, what gravity is, how stars are formed and die, what satellites are and how we used them, as well as what equipment astronauts use to complete missions safely and successfully.

To supplement our learning about Space, we have been creating Space themed artwork, we have role played in our “Space station.” added and subtracted space debris as well as complete writing tasks about the solar system and the cosmos. We also immersed ourselves in the topic in a variety of other forms including: Junk modelling, Collage, Painting, Singing simple songs from memory and Imaginative role play.

KEY STAGE 1

YEAR 1

We have had a very busy term in Year One –it has flown by! We have created some amazing writing based around the works of John Burningham alongside consolidating our knowledge of numbers to 20. In Science we got to explore seasons and the weather. We even learnt how to present data in a graph! In Geography, we explored the United Kingdom and learnt lots of interesting facts. Did you know that Edinburgh is built on an extinct volcano? In PSHE Day, we explored healthy choices and made fruit and cheese kebabs. They were delicious and it was lots of fun. Our lunchtime clubs have been loads of fun too with pompom making with Mrs Tauchert and performance with Ms Cooper. We can’t wait for next half term.

YEAR 2

Year 2 have had an excellent start to the Spring term. They have had really applied their skills and knowledge in all areas of the curriculum and had much fun doing so. This term, they wrote a range of fiction texts and drew inspiration from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to create newspaper reports, diary entries and character descriptions. They have worked on their addition and subtraction skills and can now add and subtract two 2-digit numbers even crossing 10.

Their Geography topic has continued to take the children around the British Isles and even to Cape Town where we were able to compare our local area (London) to the wonderful city that is Cape Town. This term, they learned about the four countries that make up the British Isles and make the distinction between Great Britain and the United Kingdom.

Science has given the children the opportunity to learn about electricity and explore and investigate using circuits. They have used their knowledge of conductors and insulators to choose suitable resources to complete circuits. They had so much fun creating their circuits and grouping materials according to their properties in relation to the flow of electrical energy.

In Art, the children have had a fantastic time creating self-portraits; the children produced beautiful pieces by adding to them each week by applying their new skills. The children also studied famous portrait artists.

KEY STAGE 2

YEAR 3

It has been an action-packed start to 2023! Year 3 have honed their survival skills at Forest School where they have constructed dens, built fires and made culinary outdoor creations such as cinnamon and honey glazed apples. We have also ventured to the Science Museum to experience the wonders of the Wonderlab and contextualise our science curriculum subject on light. In history, we have travelled back in time to the dark ages of the Anglo-Saxon era. We have learnt about Anglo-Saxon hierarchical life, various tribes and the arrival of the Vikings through analysing historical artefacts. Our geographic focus has centred on rivers throughout the continents and how human interactions have evolved over time.

Our English writing has been based on Ivan’s harrowing, epic quest to save his younger brother from the cruel and cunning King of Winter, Starjik, in the fictional novel ‘Ice Palace’. We have written a range of dramatic narratives that have built suspense through a mixture of sentence structures, emotive language and technical features, such as subordinate clauses. Our mathematical master classes have deepened our knowledge of multiplication and division. We can now multiply and divide 2-digit numbers by a 1-digit number with remainders.

In Real Life Maths, we have budgeted for our own end of year party and we used our observation and estimation skills to solve cryptic clues down at a natural waterhole. Our Creative Writing stories include the twisted tale of ‘Into the Woods’ and the mysterious case of ‘The Sea Monster’.

YEAR 4

To start the New Year and Spring term off, in English, we have read the children’s novel ‘Kensuke’s Kingdom’ which follows the journey of a young boy called Michael and his trip on ‘The Peggy Sue’ around the world, until an unfortunate event occurred which caused Michael to become stranded on an island with a man called Kensuke. The novel has provided a great foundation for the children to create some fantastic diary entries, letters, newspaper reports, persuasive texts, and short narratives about the novel; allowing them to be creative and think about what life must have been like for Michael.

In Maths, we have continued to look and delve deeper into multiplication and division, learning and understanding the rules of multiplying certain numbers together. We then looked closer at factors of numbers and how to systematically work out the factor of a given number. We have continually been practicing our times tables to become more confident and fluent with all of our times tables up to and including 12.

In Geography, we have covered Eastern Europe, where we learned to identify the Baltic and Balkan countries, how the climate of these countries differ to the UK and Mediterranean, compared how the human and physical geographical features of Eastern Europe differed from those of the United Kingdom, and finally took a closer look at the global effects of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

In Science, we explored ecology. We started off by looking at how living things depended on their habitats to be able to live, looking in more detail about how some animals adapt to be able to live in their habitats. We then moved on to look at how food chains were affected by natural life cycle, looking in detail about producers, consumers, and decomposers and their roles. We finally looked at ecosystems and how they are affected by human behaviour before conducting research about how humans have changed the local area, looking specifically at Southfield Primary School and the ecosystems within the garden area.

For History, we started our new topic of Life in Ancient Rome, discovering how powerful the Ancient Roman Empire was, the structure of the Roman society during the Roman Republic and discussed the effect that this would have had on people who lived there. We then studied the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in Pompeii, focussing on the damage and destruction that this caused. We wrote some incredible letters from a child’s perspective trying to escape the natural disaster. Finally, we explored the leisure activities such as ‘bathing’ , shopping in the ‘Forum’, and spectating events, such as gladiator fights, at the amphitheatres.

YEAR 5

At the start of the New Year and Spring Term, we began our new Science topic of ‘Living Things and Their Habitats’ with a recent visit to Kew Gardens – where we honed our scientific skills by examining a variety of plant specimens and how they pollinate both under the microscope and throughout the gardens and glasshouses. We have built on this in the classroom by conducting our own experiment of growing broad beans in different conditions and making observations at regular time intervals whilst also comparing the life cycles of different species. In geography, we have learnt about three different regions of the UK – East Anglia, the Midlands and Yorkshire. We have used geographic information – such as relief maps – to compare the topography of these different regions and a range of historical sources to understand how the physical and human features have changed over time. For history, we used historical records of the French Revolution to understand how France was transformed from a monarchy to a republic, looking specifically at the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. Our fictional English text of Tom’s Midnight Garden has provided a descriptive and moving context for poetry, a characterisation narrative, a dairy entry and setting description. In maths, we have been looking at fractions and learning how to convert between mixed numbers and improper fractions before understanding how to order, add and subtract them. We channelled our writing flair through an illustrated novel on the emotive topics of environmentalism and belonging in ‘The House Held up By Trees’ and we applied our Real Life Maths skills in calculating how much it would cost to travel using a non-electric car to way up whether it’s worth the purchase of an electric car in the long run.

YEAR 6

Year 6 have had fantastic start to Spring Term! This term, Year 6 have been using their class novel Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian as their stimulus for writing. The novel explores the story of a young, abused boy, who is relocated to the countryside to the care of an elderly recluse, Mr. Tom, in the wake of World War 2. This linked wonderfully with their prior learning in History of World War 1 and The Rise of Hitler. The children have produced excellent work across a whole host of fiction genre styles, including a narrative with speech, a diary entry, poetry and an informal letter. In Maths, the children have deepened their understanding of the four operations and solved problems using BIDMAS and long division. They have begun exploring the relationship between fractions and division, equivalent fractions and adding and subtracting them. They have also had to explain their reasoning and provide evidence to support their understanding. Our Geography topic North America has seen the children applying their prior learning from previous years by analysing maps and diagrams to learn about the continent in its entirety, focussing on biomes and countries in North America, as well as the rivers and cities. They drew on their knowledge from the last half term to compare the UK and the region of North America.

This half term’s Science topic of Electricity has seen the children participating in experiments by constructing circuits and learning about the different components that make them work. They also planned an investigation with circuits, making predictions and using symbols to draw diagrams of their experiments. Finally they used all of their knowledge to design and make a simple toy. In History, we have been exploring “The Rise and Fall of Hitler” leading on from our previous topic from Autumn 1 - The Great War. This topic focused on Hitler’s rise to power, inevitably leading to WWII and Hitler’s demise. The content followed the events of the Armistice and Treaty of Versailles, the rise of the Nazi Party, life in Nazi Germany, Kristallnacht and the outbreak of the Second World War. We contextualised our learning in History this term with a trip to The National Army Museum, where they toured the galleries and participated in a workshop!