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Abberley Acorns and Music Lesson Invoices

The invoices for Abberley Acorns (February 1st to March 17th) and the Spring Term music lessons have gone out in the post this week.

Worcestershire County Council have informed us that there are a number of outstanding invoices, now overdue, for Abberley Acorns from December 2022 and January 2023. Could you make sure these are paid as soon as possible. Below is an extract from the Abberley Acorns terms and conditions regarding failure to pay.

'Parents are to call the school office if there are any queries relating to payment. If following an invoice, payment is not received within thirty days and money owed to the school exceeds £100, pupils will no longer be able to make use of any paid for service, such as Abberley Acorns, music tuition, residential visits etc, without full payment being made in advance.'

Reception and Key Stage 1 Easter Celebration

On Thursday 30 March 2023  Reception and Key Stage 1 would like to invite you to their Easter celebration which they are holding in conjunction with Abberley Preschool.

The event will take place in the Village Hall at 9.15am and should last approximately 1 hour.

The children will be performing some Easter songs and poems.

There will also be an Easter bonnet parade and competition.   Please bring all Easter bonnets into school on Thursday morning.  Prizes will be awarded for the best bonnets in each year group.

Following the children's performances, the Friends will be serving refreshments.

Lost Property

All unnamed lost property will be in the playground next week for you to check if it belongs to you. Any unclaimed items will either be washed and put into our recycled uniform sale or given to Acorns Children’s Hospice Charity shop. Could we PLEASE ask you to name all uniform as out of 29 items in the lost property bin only 5 were named.

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It has been lovely to see some spring sunshine this week in between the showers and the Wrens have been celebrating by learning all about the season of spring.  We talked about the changes we can spot outside that tell is spring is here and what an exciting time of year it is with the signs of new life.  On Tuesday, we learnt how to do some observational drawing in art with Miss Williams and produced some lovely pictures of a pot of daffodils. 

In RE, both Reception and Key Stage 1 have been learning about the events of Holy week and the significance of the Easter story to Christians.  We have also been busy practising for our Easter celebration next Thursday and are looking forward to sharing our performances with you.

In maths, Reception have been learning to combine 2 numbers and record their workings as an addition number sentence. They did really well at this activity and next week we will be focussing on forming our numbers correctly as we discovered it is very easy to write them the wrong way round!   Meanwhile, Year 1 have been continuing to work on numbers up to 50 with a focus on ordering numbers on a number line and identifying one more and one less than a given number.  We realised that is very important to be "spot on" when writing our tens and ones to ensure we write the correct number.  

In PE, Reception are nearing the end of their unit of work on gymnastics.  They have learnt lots of new skills this term including jumping, travelling, rolling and balancing.  This week we practised linking movements to form a sequence.  We were very impressed by the children's creative ideas.

In English, we have started a new book based on The Great Fire of London, it follows a flea and a rat (Vlad and Boxton) on their journey through tackling the fire. On Monday, the children wrote questions to Vlad the flea all about his experiences with Boxton. The children used important question words such as 'who?', 'why?', 'when?', 'how?' etc to create questions and Miss Hughes magically changed into Vlad to answer the questions from his point of view. Boxton the rat doesn't talk, so we decided to think of questions and then how he would possibly answer if he could. It turns out he does not like being bitten by the naughty flea! 

In maths, the children have been ordering lengths and heights, looking at converting 'm and cm' into just 'cm' to make comparisons to how long or tall something is. The children have also been problem solving with different questions to decipher what object is the longest or shortest from a list of clues. This took a lot more thinking! Today, the children learnt to solve division calculations by either 'sharing' or 'how many?' eg 8 divided by 2 = 8 shared equally between 2 groups or asking 'how many 2s make 8?'

In history this week, the year 1s and 2s have explored what Stuart London would have looked like, specifically at how the buildings looked and were built. They created some fantastic art work to go on display alongside some key words and phrases of things they have learnt on their Great Fire of London journey. 

In PSHE, the children learnt how medicine can help us feel better, when we are feeling ill but also how important it is to use them safely. The children enjoyed role playing being ill and what they could do to make themselves feel better. 

Don't forget to get creative and make an Easter bonnet/hat ready for the Easter parade next Thursday.

In English this week, we have continued to read our class book, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, and have found out that Percy is the son of Poseidon. Percy is being sent on a quest to the Underworld to confront the Lord of the Dead and find the most powerful weapon in the universe! We have also been reading non chronological reports and explanation texts and identifying the key features of these.

In maths, we have continued with our work on area and perimeter and the children have moved on to finding the area of compound shapes, which needs them to be able to understand the difference between horizontal and vertical in order to find the values of missing sides.

As Y3 are on residential, Y4&5 have come together for the remainder of this week. The children have been working on a house project. This has involved them finding the area and perimeter of a variety of houses, choosing where in the world they would like to live and researching the climate and how this affects the types of houses that are built there and designing their own house for their chosen country, along with producing a floorplan to show their house in more detail. The children were then set a budget to furnish their houses and it surprised some children just how much things cost! Their final task was to design an eco garden, which depended on where they had decided to build their houses as to what wildlife they would be trying to encourage and what those animals would need to help them thrive. The children thoroughly enjoyed this challenge and have produced some imaginative and well-thought through designs.

This week in Merlins class has been enjoyable and the children have worked hard.

In English, we completed our instructional texts which were written to help a newcomer arriving at Camp Half Blood learn a new and useful skill.

In maths, we have been calculating the volume of cuboids. Later in the week, we moved onto reading and interpreting line graphs. Some of us managed to use our knowledge to draw line graphs using only numerical data.

In RE, we worked collaboratively to research a well-known Christian who has made a sacrifice to help others. The children then presented this information to their peers.

In DT, the children have been working to build a prototype for their bird houses. They worked so well on these, and results are fantastic. We hope to give them an opportunity to build the final product next week.