Author: St Mark's Teacher

We have had a great start back in Year 4.  The children are working incredibly hard and representing St Mark’s brilliantly at swimming.

To start our Roman topic, the children explored a range of interesting artefacts.  Can you work out how all these items link together?

Key Dates:

28th January – Portals to the Past visit at St Mark’s
– 12th February – Roman Day!

Happy New Year to all of our Year 6 parents! 

Frozen Kingdoms

The children have come back full of enthusiasm and ready for another fantastic term of learning. They clearly had a well-deserved rest over Christmas. 

This half term, our topic is Frozen Kingdoms, where we will learn about life and conditions in the Arctic and Antarctica. Knowledge organisers will be coming home with the children by the end of this week. We can’t wait to share lots of our learning with you. 

We start this topic properly this week as last week, we completed our RE unit for this half term: The Kingdom of God. It is amazing to hear the children’s thoughts in RE; they always show such curiosity, open-mindedness and deep-thinking.

Reading Rewards

This week, we are starting a new reward system to encourage the children to read more at home. For every day they read at home AND record it in their logs, they will earn one raffle ticket. If they read with/to a parent and the parent records a brief comment, they will earn double! We understand there is not always enough time to hear your child read every day; please therefore encourage them to read independently as much as possible and hear them read with you whenever possible. On a Friday, the children will put the raffle tickets they have earned into a jar and later that day, teachers will choose 3 winning raffle tickets. Those children who have won will earn a prize of some sort! The raffle tickets will stay in the jar for the entire half term, meaning the more the children read, the more chance they have of winning. We hope you will support our new reading system!  Please ask if you have any questions. 

New dates for your diaries!

Week beginning 2nd March – Bikeability. This is a training programme to help children know how to look after a bike, cycle carefully, and also be safe on the roads. It is a free training scheme which many schools provide. Whatever a child’s experience is, the training will support them to become more confident. Children are encouraged to bring their own bikes, but a bike can also be borrowed if needed. We’ll be in touch nearer the time with more details.

Friday 19th June – Winchester Cathedral. This is a special leavers’ service for Year 6 children from many church schools across the county. It will be an all-day school trip. We will require parent helpers if you are interested! More details will follow nearer the time. 

Thursday 25th June – Think Safe. This is an important half-day trip where the children take part in short sessions from a variety of professionals around safety and well-being,

Happy New Year!

We have had a lovely start to our new term looking at our RE learning about Special Things. The children enjoyed exploring the concept of Special Things and talked about the toys and objects from home which were special to them. We then linked this to special things within the Christian and Jewish faiths. Each class enjoyed creating their own cloth for the class special table, with every child making one piece of the cloth. They look amazing!

We are continuing to develop our Maths knowledge of numbers within 20 by looking at how they are made up of tens and ones and comparing the numbers using the language of greater than and less than. We have also started to look at the story, ‘Lost in the Toy Museum’ as part of our English learning where we will explore the use of adjectives within our writing about toys.

We have also started our new project, Imagination, where we will be looking at how toys have changed throughout history. A note went home on Friday asking for the children to please bring in a small toy (which will stay in school until half term) to use for our Toy Exhibition on Thursday 6th February. Please ensure they come to school in a named carrier bag or named in another way.

Thank you for all your continued support.

Year 1 Team

What an exciting day we had in Year 3! It was lovely to see all the children dressed in red, white and blue clothes today. The children were extremely excited this morning when arriving in their classrooms to find a locked suitcase. We started the morning by predicting why we were dressed in these colours and what might be in the suitcase. We decided it was too small to have all of our clothes in to go on holiday! We then tried to have a guess at the codes for the padlocks but had no luck.

The children then completed a scavenger hunt to find different clues. The clues were maths problems to solve but had the children intrigued, as they talked about euros and pounds. Once they found the answers they had to unscramble the word ‘flag’ which lead to some more calculations before eventually finding the code to open the padlock ‘2652’. 

They then completed many activities that were found in the suitcase to learn about the facts on our knowledge organiser and about our new topic. The children had a super day and created some of their own flags only using red, white and blue. 

We hope they are as excited about our new topic as we are. The children have brought home their knowledge organisers and topic information for this half term. Please share this with your child and place it in a prominent place at home so that they learn all our facts.

Find our knowledge organiser here and our topic web Red, White and Blue topic web here. 

Year 3 team  

Tomorrow (Wednesday 8th January 2020) is our Red, white and Blue Day. 

The children can wear any of these colours and do not need to wear their usual uniform. 

We look forward to introducing our new topic throughout the day. 

Year 3 Team