Let’s start this week with a thank you…

A few weeks ago, we asked for donations to support our Cooking curriculum. To make sure that we can continue to offer this, asked for a voluntary donation of £3 to £6 to pay for the ingredients. So far, we’ve received £205 which will really help to pay for the ingredients we need. Thank you for your support.

For more about our Cooking curriculum, please check out our Cooking and Nutrition Curriculum Guide – they include the recipes and background information including the food preparation skills children will practise. (We’re in Year A this year.)

Being geographers

Our topic this half-term is a Geography one: Where in the world. This week, you might have spotted our children exploring the local area being geographers. We’ve measured carbon stores in trees and explored our locality.

Arbor

We have recently moved our Management Information System (MIS) to Arbor. Arbor will allow us to communicate with you more efficiently and will eventually bring all core school data into one system.

Yesterday, you should have received an email letting you know how to login to the parent portal/app for your child. If you’ve not received this, please let the office know.

You can familiarise yourself with Arbor using this link: Getting started – Log into the Parent Portal and the Parent App

Arbor also offers access to other training resources, which can be found here.

Before the half term break, we hope to have finalised the payments area in Arbor, so you’ll be able to pay for school meals on the portal or app. We’ll let you know when this is live.

If you’ve any questions, please contact the school office.

Marvellous mapping!

Our Weekly Message on 12 September was all about the current school topic – a Geography one called Where in the World. In it, we suggested a challenge:

Children could draw a plan/map of their bedroom with a key. Older children could try to do this for each room of their house. Children could also create a map of a mythical location with an accompanying key.

Bradley in Year 5 has stepped up to the challenge wonderfully.. He’s created a map based on an area of one of our National Parks, used as a location for a new natural history attraction featuring dinosaurs – a sort of Jurassic Park, if you like!

How I made the map:

1. I started by looking at different maps of our National Parks and trying to understand their geographical features. I picked an area with a variety of natural features that will help support the dinosaur exhibits.

2. Then with help from my dad we traced the area of the map I wanted to use onto A3 paper. We only included natural features and didn’t trace man made structures.

3. After tracing the map we added some basic contours and then I coloured in the map.

4. Next we scanned the map onto the computer. Then I made a digital drawing. Then came the fun part where I was able to add icons to the map to show where various dinosaurs may live inside the safari park. We added some physical features to improve the park for visitors.

5. Lastly, I made a key for all the symbols used on the map.

We all love it!

Have a happy and healthy weekend!