Newsletters

Parents' evening

This is scheduled for 15th and 16th February. This should now be visible to you in parent portal. This can be accessed via the following link: https://www.abberley.worcs.sch.uk/parentportal/?redirect=parents-evening  using the same login details as in the autumn term or via the school app as below. 

If you have forgotten your login details, please e-mail the office and we can issue a password reset.

If further problems persist, please call us on Monday or early next week or speak with Mr Turvey on the gate and we will book an appointment for you. 

School uniform recycle and reuse schemes

Malvern Hills District Council is currently in the process of mapping out all school uniform banks and recycling projects in the district and would welcome your help. We know that a number of schools, parishes and communities run successful schemes already and we are keen to learn from them and share that learning with others. We would also like to address any gaps in provision and work with partners to develop support, where needed.

In order to do this, we have developed a short survey asking for information on schemes that already exist and also for details of those perhaps you or the local community would like to set up.

The survey can be found at https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/MHDUniformRecycling/ and we welcome your help in completing this and/or sharing with your local school, PTA and partners.

If you would like further information then please do get in touch.

Many thanks and best wishes,

Claire Vaughan-Wood

Community Development Officer, Community Services, Malvern Hills District Council

Pokemon cards

We have started to see more and more children bringing Pokemon cards into school and this is causing issues amongst them. If these cards are in school, they are not to be traded or taken as part of a game. If further issues arise, we will have to ban them from coming into school. We are sure the children can look after them and be responsible so that we do not need to take this step.

Big Schools’ Birdwatch 2023

The children in Years 1 and 2 have been getting our garden area ready for the Big Schools’ Birdwatch. Camouflage netting has been put up in the greenhouse to make a temporary bird hide and our bird feeders have also been put up ready to encourage the birds into our garden. The children have been practising how to use binoculars ready for Tuesday when they are going to count how many birds they see and record their sightings. We will then send our results to the RSPB and our birdwatch will count as one activity towards a Bronze Wild Challenge Award. The Wild Challenge Awards are run by the RSPB to help children to connect with and learn about nature.

If anyone has any bird feeders they do not want or use any more we would be very grateful to have them.

This week the Wrens have been visiting New York in America with Emma Jane and her aeroplane. Our role play turned into a hot dog stand and our tuff tray became Central Park Zoo. We learnt how New York has lots of skyscrapers, the Statue of Liberty and yellow taxis. It is also sometimes called The Big Apple!

Year 1 imagined what it would be like to visit New York City and used their senses to produce some fantastic creative writing. The children are becoming much more consistent at using capital letters and full stops in their writing and challenged themselves to use interesting vocabulary to describe what they could see, taste, smell and hear.

Meanwhile, Reception enjoyed exploring the artwork of Marz jr. with Mrs Postlethwaite and showed great determination and resilience to produce some brilliant pen and ink drawings of the New York skyline.  This linked very well with this week's maths work on 4 sided shapes. As part of this topic, the children went on a shape hunt round school and found shapes everywhere! We also completed a challenge to create different shapes using matchsticks which made us think very carefully about the length of each side.

Year 1 have been continuing to study place value in maths and have become confident in writing, ordering and comparing numbers to 20.

In phonics, Reception have now been introduced to all the Phase 3 digraphs and trigraphs.  For the next few weeks they will be consolidating this knowledge and moving onto blending and segmenting longer words containing more than one digraph.  Please continue to support your child by working through the weekly phonics homework; we are very proud of the progress they are making. 

This week in English, Kingfishers have continued to focus on the features of diary entries and how to write a diary entry successfully. They are writing as Hogarth's father and so have had to empathise with his character in order to put themselves in his shoes to imagine what he was thinking and feeling. They have done a great job with this and will complete their diary entries at the beginning of next week. Also this week, the children reflected on their action sequence written a couple of weeks ago. Using feedback and marking they then had to redraft this piece to make it even better.

In maths, the children have been learning a couple of different methods to multiply accurately. At the beginning of the week they learnt how to multiply 2-digit numbers by 1-digit using the grid method. We have also focused on multiplying 2-digit and 3-digit numbers by 1-digit using column multiplication. They seemed to really enjoy this method as the layout and process is similar to that of column addition. Towards the end of this week, we began to look at dividing 2-digit numbers by 1-digit using the bus stop method. 

In geography this week, we took a trip to Asia. The children learnt lots about the continent of Asia, such as the climate and many of the countries that are a part of this huge continent. Ask your child to tell you a fact that they have learnt about Asia. Using an atlas the children needed to identify a minimum of 10 countries found in Asia, many of which before looking they thought were in Europe. 

In science, we continued with last week's sound experiment. The children had to work with their partner to continue to write up their investigation accurately, before testing their hypothesis and determining if they had been correct in their thinking.

In English this week, we have moved our focus on to the story of Alice in Wonderland. The children have created their own character based on Alice whose personality may contrast Alice significantly. They will use this character to write their own alternative story. We have watched Alice chase the white rabbit and fall down the rabbit hole and, next week, the children will be writing about how their character reacts to the same events happening to them. 

In maths, the children have been learning about finding fractions of amounts and quantities. We have looked at the different ways they can do this and the children have decided which method they find most useful. This led to some interesting discussions about the ways different children learn and the importance of being able to explain their thought processes and reasoning. 

In science, Y5&6 have been writing up their investigation into kitchen roll from last week. We discussed what the key information is that they need to include and how they could use scientific reasoning and language to explain both their results and the conclusions they draw from these. 

The children had great fun in dance this week as we moved on to our rock ‘n’ roll theme. They learned the hand jive and how to do kicks and flicks in time to the music. The children worked collaboratively to create routines which they performed with confidence to the rest of the children. 

In music, we continued with our focus on old school hip hop. As well as practising performing ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel Air’, the children were also introduced to ‘Rapper’s Delight’ by The Sugarhill Gang. It came as quite a surprise to them when they realised it was a remix of this song that they danced to at Young Voices!  

I'm pleased to say that you can now listen to the audio book written and read by Merlins class.  It is now available to listen to on the school website in the 'News' section.

In Merlins class this week, we have analysed the poem 'Jabberwocky' by Lewis Carroll. We have looked at the rhyming patterns, the syllables and the alternating pattern of hard and soft syllables (iambic tetrameter). It was important that the children analysed this poem carefully as, this week, they have started planning and writing their own imitation poems based on this poem. The children have designed their own creature and setting and are using these ideas to inspire their creativity.

In maths, our focus has been ratio. We started by looking at the additive and multiplicative relationships between numbers. We then looked at using ratio language and the ratio symbol before ending the week by solving tricky ratio problems. 

In PE, our dance focus has been 'rock and roll'. This week the children learnt the 'heel toe', the 'jump kick' and the hand jive. They worked initially in pairs, and then fours to produce a routine which consisted of all three.

In geography, we have learnt to read the scale on a map to calculate read world distances.