Newsletters

Abberley Parochial Primary Parent Newsletter 

Newsletter - 03.02.23

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It has been our assessment week at Abberley this week. Although it might sound ominous, this gives us a chance to reflect on the progress your children have made and helps us to identify what we need to plan in the coming weeks. Many of the children enjoy this opportunity to show all that they can do, but we understand that this is not the case for all. We hope to always use assessment in a supportive and constructive way.

As I visited classrooms, children have been excited to show me the positive work they have done and it has been a pleasure to talk with them about their progress and learning. Some incredible writing and stories were created.

Following a review, we have made some tweaks to our marking and feedback policy to make sure that the work we do as teachers has a positive impact on learning. This includes how we provide feedback and revisit learning and what we do when your children have misconceptions or find something more difficult. Over the coming weeks and months we will continue to monitor this to ensure it is helping. 

Yours sincerely,

Joel Turvey


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.

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02 Feb 2023
Shapes are all around us.
Reception go on a shape hunt.
Read more
02 Feb 2023
Performance Poetry
A brilliant collection of videos showcasing Kestrels performing Jabberwocky or their own nonsense poem.
Read more
02 Feb 2023
Crime busting Kestrels
Kestrels were putting all the fraction knowledge and understanding they have gained over the past few weeks to good use today. They were investigating the theft of some felt tipped pens and working to uncover the culprit! This involved some excellent discussions as well as them honing their problem...
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02 Feb 2023
I love rock 'n' roll!
The focus in dance for Y5&6 has moved on to rock 'n' roll. The children had great fun learning the hand jive. They then used this along with adding some kicks and flicks to put together some fab routines. 
Read more
01 Feb 2023
Alice in Wonderland (Retold)
A fantastic audiobook written and read by Merlins class.
Read more
27 Jan 2023
Celebration Assembly
Celebration Assembly 27th January
Read more

Year 6 English SATs booster
3:30pm – 4:10pm
06
February
Year 5 & 6 Lacrosse tournament (by invitation)
3:45pm – 5:30pm
06
February
Year 6 maths SATs booster
3:30pm – 4:10pm
09
February
Year 6 English SATs booster
3:30pm – 4:10pm
13
February
Year 1 & 2 mini Olympics at The Chantry (by invitation)
3:45pm – 5:30pm
13
February
Rags to Riches collection
All Day
14
February
Scholastic book fair
All Day
From 15 Feb until 17 Feb
15
February
Parent's evening
4:00pm – 7:00pm
15
February
Year 5 & 6 girls and boys football fixture vs Whittington Primary (by invitation)
9:45am – 11:45am
16
February
Bayton and Abberley year 5 - dreams and goals activity
2:00pm – 2:30pm
16
February
Parent's evening
4:00pm – 7:00pm
16
February
Half-term
All Day
From 18 Feb until 26 Feb
18
February
Year 6 English SATs booster
3:30pm – 4:10pm
20
February
Year 6 maths SATs booster
3:30pm – 4:10pm
23
February
Year 6 English SATs booster
3:30pm – 4:10pm
27
February

Wrens

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. 

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Skylarks

This week in English, the children have started our new book focus which is 'The Tear Thief' by Carol Ann Duffy. The story is about a magical, fairy-like creature who listens out for children crying and comes to 'steal' their tears so that they can stop crying and be happy again. The story has lots of wonderful vocabulary and amazing imagery which makes us think about what it is like to be really happy or really sad. 'The Tear Thief' explains that 'crocodile tears' are worth much less than those of real sadness. We played a drama game called 'Whoosh!' where the children acted out parts of the story together.  There have been lots of requests to play this again so we will soon delve deeper into displaying different feelings as different characters within the book. On Tuesday, the children ordered the story by memory and then had a go at listening to sentences that included key words.  They listened to them 3 times and then wrote them from memory remembering punctuation and spelling rules. We moved on to getting ready to write a detailed character description of the main character by creating 'role on the wall' full of super vocabulary and ideas to put into our writing.  Also this week, we have edited a piece of  writing for our writing journal books. We used the acronym CUPS (capitals, understand, punctuation, spelling) to edit our writing before writing it in best. Skylarks have produced some wonderful pieces of writing. 
 
"Money, money, money! Must be funny..." Our new topic in maths is MONEY! In a world full of contactless payments it is really important that the children become familiar with using 'cash' and how this works. We started looking at coin denominations and how much a set of the same coins is worth.  For example, 3 10ps are worth 30p. We have had a go at writing the '£' sign.  It's tricky but lots of children are now getting the hang of it.
 
In RE, more drama took place as the year 1s joined us for the afternoon.  The children acted out 'Jonah and the Whale', thinking about why Christians may use that story to remind them about true values and how important it is to follow God and his requests.
 
In art, our new focus is 'Flora and Fauna' or 'Plants and Animals'. Over the next 3 weeks, the children will be using different media to create art linked to this topic. We used ink pens to draw insects and there were some great pieces around the classroom. We were even lucky enough to have Miss Williams bring in some of her art work to share with us.
 
In PE, we all learnt a new pirate dance and then performed it to our peers. We demonstrated turning, gestures and pathways and used our faces to show great expression when we had to walk the plank!
 
In science, we did an investigation to find how we could change the shape of different materials. We used and tested the twist, squeeze, stretch and squash vocabulary.
 
In geography,  we are continuing to travel to a destination in the world that we would like to visit and thinking about what we would need to take with us. 
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Kingfishers

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.

Kestrels

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!  

Merlins

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.


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