St Peter's 2-8 Newsletter I 4

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DIARY FOR WEEK COMMENCING 4th OCTOBER 2021 Y1 Story Club Y2 Multisports Y2 Engineers & Construction

Y2 Cricket* Y3 Football* Y3 IT Y1 Multisports Y1 Sports* Y2 STEM Y2 Sports* Y3 Language Y3 Swimming Y3 Tennis*

WEDS

Y1 Get Creative Y1 Cricket* Y2&3 Choir

THURSDAY

Last night I received this lovely invitation to attend a Roman Banquet in Year 2. Obviously, I accepted and attended this amazing occasion. The children and staff dressed in Roman costumes, sang a number of Roman songs and tasted the most exquisite Roman food. On the menu were olives, cheese, grapes, pita breads, honey and olive oil and to wash it down was a delicious red wine

(aka blackcurrant juice). The room was beautifully dressed and I had the opportunity to tase one of the honey biscuits that the children made yesterday. Huge thank you to all of the children for their warm welcome and to the staff, Mrs Hall, Miss Platts and Miss Jeffrey for preparing such a wonderful learning experience for the children. They all were engrossed in their learning and clearly learned a tremendous amount of how the Romans lived in the city of York (Eborcarum).

Reception children this week had a visit from four firefighters who arrived on their fire engine but had to cut their visit short as they had a real life incident to deal with! They ran out of our school into the fire engine and left with sirens sounding. Thank you for visiting us to talk about what you do. RC visited Museum Gardens to look at and explore ‘birds of prey’. Unfortunately when they arrived the birds of prey were nowhere to be seen. Mrs Coyle and Mrs Walker decided to have a ‘pop up classroom’ and have an ice cream in the park instead and the children concluded that ice cream is better than owls anyway!

Finally, one of our groundsmen, Gordon Gatenby, retired today after 34 years of service. I first heard about Gordon from a parent who on their first day of term arrived at school in the pouring rain. She was holding a child by the hand, carrying a second child in her arms and had a third child in a car seat. Gordon found an umbrella and held it for her as she walked into school to drop a child off, he then waited for the parent and walked her to her car holding the umbrella for her. This is the type of person he is and he will be missed by the whole school community.

The kindness he displayed at all times will never ever be forgotten. On behalf of us all I would like to wish him the very best for his retirement.

Just a reminder Reception swimming is not on tomorrow as it is a whole school exeat. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend.

Best wishes,

TUESDAY

Monday morning! I then spoke about Rita Resilience, one of our Learning Superheroes and her superpowers, explaining the importance of not giving up. The assembly finished with a story form Aesop's Funky Fables, ‘The Hare and the Tortoise’. Last week we had our first Celebration assembly, however, today was my first having been away last week. It was so lovely handing out Learning Superhero and Value Champion certificates for each class and also presenting the weekly House Points trophy.

Newsletter No: 4 Friday, October 1st 2021

MONDAY

Today is World Smile Day and as I am writing this newsletter and don’t we all need smiles on this damp, dark and Autumnal morning. As is well known by now throughout the world Harvey Ball, a commercial artist from Worcester, Massachusetts created the smiley face in 1963.

That image went on to become the most recognizable symbol of good will and good cheer on the planet.

As the years passed Harvey Ball became concerned about the over-commercialisation of his symbol, and how its original meaning and intent had become lost in the constant repetition of the marketplace. Out of that concern came his idea for World Smile Day®. He thought that we, all of us, should devote one day each year to smiles and kind acts throughout the world. The smiley face knows no politics, no geography and no religion. Harvey’s idea was that for at least one day each year, neither should we. He declared that the first Friday in October each year would henceforth be World Smile Day®.

Ever since first being held in 1999, it has continued every year in Smiley's hometown of Worcester, USA and around the world.

After Harvey died in 2001, the Harvey Ball World Smile Foundation was created to honour his name and memory. The Foundation continues as the official sponsor of World Smile Day® each year.

At St Peter’s 2-8, there are always so many smiles on display throughout the school and the children are so happy in and out of their classrooms. Today we celebrated World Smile Day® by having our photograph taken by Mrs Bateson in the Atrium of school. As you can see it was a lot of fun and the children and parents had a wonderful time. However, we should never forget the main focus of today is that we should always try to follow the motto of the day, ‘Do an act of kindness. Help one person smile’.

It has been a joy to have assemblies in person this week. On Monday Mrs Hayden led us singing ‘The Power in Me’ (with actions); what a way to start a

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Y1 Sign Language Y1 Tennis* Y2 Art Y2 Multisports Y3 Sewing and Craft Y3 Hockey

FRIDAY

Y1 Film Club Y1 Street Dance Cancelled Y2 Coding Y2 Football* Y2 Tennis* Y3 STEM Y3 Cricket*

SAT

Reception swimming

Notice Board

house points trophy

MICKLEGATE

value champions • Heidi (RC)

• Alfie (2H)

• Benjamin (RJ)

• Manny (2J) • Ros (2P)

• Xander (RM) • Sophia (3C) • Luca (1A) • Immie (3M) • Rupert (1C)

• Joseph (3S)

• Nate (1E)

• Ben (3S)

learning superheroes • Ivy (RC)

• Oliver H (RM)

• Sam (2J)

• Thomas C (RJ)

• Adam (1A)

• Harriet (2P)

• Oliver D (RJ)

• Arjun (1C)

• Annaliese (3C)

• Robert (RJ)

• Bertie (1E)

• Annlee (3C)

• Oscar (RJ)

• Novem (2H)

• Thomas (3M) • Lottie (3S)

Music award • Luca (1A) • Arthur (1A)

PE award • Adriana (3S)

•Archie (RC)

STREET DANCE FRIDAY 8TH OCTOBER Please note that Miss West is away from school next Friday October 8th and therefore unable to take her Street Dance class that afternoon. No charge will be made and After School Care is available if needed.

Notice Board RECEPTION SWIMMING TOMORROW Please remember there is no Reception Swimming tomorrow (Saturday 2nd October) because of the St Peter’s Exeat weekend.

YEAR 3 ART PROJECT Year Three are going to be carrying out an exciting art project next week which requires a plastic bottle and newspaper. Please could all children bring in a clean bottle(s) and any old newspaper by next Wednesday (6th) at the latest so that we can get started!

LOST PROPERTY •

Many thanks.

MUSICAL NOTES We had a fabulous start to this week, we finally were able to join together as a school and enjoy singing in assembly again! I was so impressed with all the children, but particularly our Year 1s who managed to learn all the words to Power in Me along with some funky dance moves. The song is now a firm favourite with the children! The letters have gone out to our Year 2 and 3 parents advertising our trip to Young Voices on Thursday 3rd February. We have everything crossed we will make it this year! It’s a fabulous opportunity for our children to sing with a live band in front of an audience and this year’s songs are absolutely fantastic. It promises to be a fun evening for both our children and their parents.

Please can you return the Google form by next Friday so we can secure the best seats for our audience.

On Thursday 21st October at 2pm we will hold our first face to face concert of the year in the Rayson Room. The choir will be singing along with some of our children who have been learning their instrument for at least a year. If your child would like to play, please email a.hayden@stpetersyork.org.uk so I can pop them on the list. We will be live streaming the concert but hope to have a live audience with us too, it’s been a long time!

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Sophia (2H) has lost her school navy coat. It has a Little Miss Chatterbox name label on the wash care label in the coat pocket and written on the reflective label on the back of the coat.

Norman (3M) has lost his named tracksuit bottoms.

Alexander (3C) has lost his swimming trunks.

Andrey (3M) has lost his named PE tracksuit top.

Hugh (1A) has lost his swimming hat.

Charlie (3C) has lost his school shoes, names with a red cricket bat sticker.

Iker has lost his new PE top.

PLEASE NAME ALL ITEMS OF UNIFORM CLEARLY IN A PLACE WHERE THE CHILDREN CAN EASILY FIND AND READ IT. STAFF AND YOU AS PARETNS SPEND A HUGE AMOUNT OF TIME SEARCHING FOR LOST PROPERTY, WHICH CAN BE MUCH ALLEVIATED IF CHILDREN CAN FIND THEIR OWN KIT AND KEEP IT ON THEIR PEGS.

Reception have been working super hard within their games lessons, working on their throwing and catching skills, for the last couple of weeks. They have explored various different sizes and shaped balls, to investigate which ones were easier to catch. It is great to see the children now applying their impressive throwing and

catching skills with their partner.

below the most During our Core PE lessons, recent the children have blown me relay away with their impressive game fundamental movements of we played where the children running, hopping, jumping, had to balance their beanbag skipping, galloping and on a body part whist balancing recently. We have crawling, hopping or even incorporated these jumping. skills into tag games. See

PE

PE

ACORNS

If you go down to the woods today, you’re in for a BIG surprise, the Acorns have had their Teddy Bears’ Picnic! We enjoyed reading about Spot’s First Picnic and then

planned a picnic of our own. We learnt how to spread butter on our bread, chose our own fillings and made teddy bear rice crispy cakes. We have stomped through

CONKERS

In true early years style we have rolled with the children’s interests and partied our way through the week!

With lots of September birthdays to celebrate, the children have been inspired to give the home corner a makeover; decorating it with banners,

streamers, party food, and making their own invitations and party hats.

Adding some disco lights and a CD player (DJ’d by the children themselves of course!) it has made this week one big party in Nursery.

RECEPTION

This week got off to a very exciting start as we had our visit from the fire service! Four lovely fire fighters arrived in their sparkling red fire engine and came in to talk to us. They told us all about what they do in their job - fighting fires, helping with crashes on the roads and even sailing on boats to help with flooding. Most exciting of all however was when the boss got a call on his walkie talkie summoning the fire fighters to an emergency! Off they ran across the playground, jumped in their fire engine and with their siren blaring, drove back out of school to their emergency. All the children followed and waved them off and hopefully they will be back sometime to see us soon.

The children have loved dressing up as fire fighters and playing with the engines and creating dramatic scenarios in our construction area, as well as painting a huge fire engine outside!

At Forest School this week we had lots of fun on the way down collecting hundreds of conkers and playing games with our wellies! We have been looking at grouping and sorting in maths this week so enjoyed grouping our wellies and sorting the conkers to create patterns.

In provision the children have really enjoyed our new magical role play area. We have been creating our own potions to make us invisible, to turn us into frogs and many more! RC also had their first pop up classroom this week at the Museum Gardens where they found out all about the ruins, played circle games, hide and seek and rounded off the trip with a yummy ice cream from the ice

cream van! We have been creating some fabulous bird pictures and collages in our provision art areas this week and we have also been watching cameras around the world showing us lots of birds' homes. The children have also been busy making lemon cakes and medicines in the mud kitchen, building aeroplanes out of big construction and using our conkers to practice weighing, counting, to build runs and to paint with! The children have been enjoying our first week of learning sounds 's, a, t, p'! We have been playing lots of fun games and developing those fine motor skills too! We are very excited next week for our Harvest festival celebrations and showing our parents next Friday our scarecrows. As it is Black History month beginning next week too, we are also going to be looking at and discussing lots of texts about diversity and celebrations across the world in October.

RECEPTION

Wow, what a wonderful week we have had in Year 1! We have had such fun making our own fossils in the classroom, using lots of excellent skills such as measuring, printing and reading instructions. We hope you love them as much as we do! Forest Schools is always the place we enjoy exploring and this Wednesday was no exception! We explored high up in the trees when climbing, we explored down below the changing Autumn leaves; looking for treasures such as conkers... wow didn't we find a lot of conkers?!

This week we have been learning about

adjectives and the importance of them when we read and write in Year 1. We have been using our knowledge of adjectives to describe characters from our core text, Fortunately The Milk, and we have really enjoyed thinking of lots of different ways to bring them to life! Did you know that there is a 'wumpire' with long, dark hair and spooky eyes? I wonder if you can use adjectives at home to describe some more characters or maybe even members of your own family?

YEAR 1

YEAR 1

As we continue on our Roman journey in Year 2, we have been pulling out all the stops for our Roman banquet on Friday! The children have been busy exploring foods which the Romans used to eat and despite there being some similarities with the foods we eat today, there were also many which took us by surprise! Did you know that the Romans used to eat pigs' brains and roast peacock? Or that a popular snack was dormice dipped in honey? See what other Roman delicacies the children can tell you about!

We have loved taking part in baking activities in preparation for our feast (we couldn't catch enough dormice, so we decided to play it safe with honey biscuits instead!) and we were very impressed with the children's measuring and collaboration skills.

The children have also been writing invitations to the staff around school and creating their own Roman menus!

YEAR 2

In maths, we have been expanding our understanding of number through reading and writing two and three-digit numbers, ordering them and comparing them using the greater than/ less

than symbols. We have been using language such as greater than, less than, more and equal to as well as using resources and our reasoning skills to explain how we know which is greater.

As we move on to the next stage of our learning journey next week, exploring the Vikings, we kindly ask you to save a small cardboard box (shoe box size) or cardboard lid which your child can use to create a small world inside. Please send this into school, clearly named.

YEAR 2

into place value and using various methods of working to solve problems. We have been focussing on adding and subtracting 10s, 100s, 1000s and even 10,000s to numbers, as well as continuing our quest to conquer times tables!

Wishing everyone a wonderful weekend.

YEAR 3

It has been an exciting week of learning in Year Three. In our thematic text, Lucy enthusiastically tells her siblings all about Narnia and what it is like there. However, much to her disgust, nobody believes her! We imagined we were Lucy and wrote a diary entry full of the various emotions we would have felt if we were her. We then used illustrations from the book to write speech bubbles, before moving onto writing direct speech using inverted commas. The children enjoyed using their imaginations to come up with speech for the characters, basing their ideas on their interpretation of the story so far. The creativity didn’t stop with our writing this week! We baked and iced reindeer biscuits to rival those pulling the White Witch’s sled, made clay Mr Tumnus faces using natural materials from the forest, carried out another ice themed science experiment and even made our Christmas cards!

Phew! In Maths we have enjoyed delving deeper

The Great St Peter’s Bake Off - Monday 18th October Bake Off is back! And not just on Channel 4!

FoSP are so pleased to be able to run our very wonderful Bake Off event again this year. The children are invited to bake cakes, muffins, biscuits, traybakes etc based on a theme. They then bring them in on the morning of Monday 18th October to our Bake Off Tent where all bakes will be tasted, judged and prizes awarded (in year groups). 2019 was, obviously, the last time we were able to run this event, and it was truly amazing with so many of our children taking part across all of the year groups, from Acorns to Year 3. Lets make this year even bigger! As we did last time, we have decided that Bake Off themes will predominantly follow the year groups’ learning themes, as follows:Acorns - Halloween Conkers - Halloween Reception: Halloween Year 1: Fortunately the Milk Year 2: York Year 3: Narnia Each year group will be judged separately. Rules to follow in forthcoming Newsletters but all bakes MUST BE NUT FREE. Bake Off Cake Sale - Monday 18th October As has become customary after our Bake Off Competition we will be selling all of the wonderful creations that our children have made after school on 18th October. So please pop the date in your diary to come along for a cup of tea and a slice of Mr Tumnus's Teacake, or a Homemade Halloween Hobnob! (NB - if you would like to keep some or all of your creation, that is absolutely fine and we will let you know how to do this nearer the time).

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These donations really mount up and will ALL go to the chosen school charity for the year - this year being Childrens Heart Surgery Fund in Leeds. All donations make a BIG difference so we’d really appreciate it if you could take a moment to sign up and support us. It’s completely FREE and only takes a moment.

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