Hymers Hessle Mount Happenings Issue 11 May 2024

Despite the first half of the Summer Term being largely cold and rainy, the children have still been spending lots of time outside.

I recently read a piece of research from Natural England about children’s exposure to nature and the impact on health. Some of the many benefits from spending time in the natural world include an improved ability to self-regulate emotions, a reduction in stress and anxiety, and better academic performance. For these reasons and plenty more, the outdoors will continue to feature in many of our lessons and activities. I am also very grateful to the HCA who have recently funded outdoor toys, storage and fencing to develop our outdoor areas in order to provide the children with more enriching experiences.

During this half term I have been fortunate enough to join all year groups on their school trips across Yorkshire. In each section of the newsletter you will find more details of the children’s experiences alongside photos of their adventures. The children were excellent ambassadors for our school with the CARE Code firmly placed in their rucksacks! It was heart-warming to hear many members of the public complimenting the children’s behaviour, manners and engagement whilst on the trips.

message from Mr Copeland

We have had a couple of key sporting events this half term for the Year 2 pupils. The first of these was an U7 Girls football fixture against a local club team, Chanterlands Girls’ Football Club. The players were fantastic and worked well as a team to score a number of goals and defended well against their opponents. This was part of a wider

evening of football with over 100 girls from age 6 to 11 representing their school or club. On Monday 13 May all of the Year 2 pupils travelled over to the Hymers campus for the annual Year 2 and Year 3 Swimming Gala. All children took part in at least two races and supported each other superbly from the side of the pool. It was fantastic to see the progress the children have made in swimming and to see their confidence continue to flourish. Congratulations must go to Brandesburton, this year’s winning house.

Please look at the Key Dates section of the newsletter to see what is coming up before the end of the year. During the next half term the children will be taking part in transitional activities to support their move to the next academic year and we are all excited to see the Year 2 performance of Pirates vs Mermaids! Finally, I would like to finish by sending my congratulations to Miss Chapman and her husband James on the birth of their second child Beau, pictured left. It looks like Milo is settling into his big brother role beautifully!

We have enjoyed a wonderful start to the Summer Term in the Pre-School!

We have had lots of fun learning about butterflies, worms, spiders, ants, ladybirds and bees. The children made beautiful minibeast pictures using their collage and cutting skills,

then brought them to life by decorating them and adding googly eyes. We also looked at the life cycle of a ladybird and have been fascinated watching our class ladybirds as they grow and change from larvae to pupae into adult ladybirds. We are looking forward to releasing them into our school garden in the coming weeks.

We have taken part in some fun-filled lessons and enjoyed playing phonic games such as Word Bingo and What’s in the Box? The children have been using their listening ears to hear the sounds in words and blend them together to hear the word. We got to know some great stories about minibeasts such as ‘What the Ladybird Heard’ and ‘Bee my Friend’ and then we talked about friendships and why it is important to always be kind to other people. We learnt about 2D and 3D shapes with the children enjoying a shape hunt around the school. They did a brilliant job of spotting lots of cuboids, cubes, sphere and cone shapes in their everyday environment.

PRE-SCHOOL (cont.)

But of all the things we got up to our school trip to Pink Pig Farm was by far the most exciting! The children loved meeting and feeding the donkeys, sheep and goats. They were especially impressed by the speediness of the pigs running around! Obviously the pink tractor was a particular favourite, as was the opportunity to sit in a real tractor if you were brave enough (sadly this one was “only green”)! The indoor and outdoor playgrounds were very popular and it was really difficult to move on from the giant bouncy pillow. It was an amazing experience and a fantastic day for all of us and we couldn’t be more proud of them!

After the holidays we will be starting our new topic ‘Summer’. We have lots of exciting activities planned for the children and look forward to seeing you all back in school!

RECEPTION

We’ve had such a busy half term in Reception and cannot believe how quickly it has flown by!

Our work has been based around the topic Marvellous Minibeasts and started on a high with us observing our class caterpillars grow and change each day. When they made their chrysalis, we waited impatiently and finally watched in awe as beautiful Painted Lady butterflies emerged from them. It was quite sad saying goodbye but at the same time watching them fly away to embark on exciting new adventures was amazing to see. Keep an eye out for them in your garden!

We also learnt about spiders, caterpillars, ladybirds, snails and bees, and have thoroughly enjoyed going into our Woodland Area each week to search and uncover them. Luckily we found several of the little creatures and some of us even dared to try holding them in our hands! We’ve taken advantage of the lovely weather and spent many afternoons outside exploring the outdoor play equipment and resources. Recently we’ve particularly enjoyed making sounds with musical instruments, improving our gross motor skills with the twirly ribbons, as well as blowing bubbles!

Our trip to Hall Farm Park in South Kelsey was amazing and we had a fabulous time seeing the different animals, we went on a tractor ride to feed potatoes to the cows, loved the goat walking and exploring the indoor and outdoor play areas. The children followed the CARE Code at all times and enjoyed every minute of the day. All this fun lead to plenty of naps on the bus journey back!

RECEPTION (cont.)

YEAR 1

This half term saw the Year 1 children dive into two stories. First the children studied a mystery story about a little girl who creates a garden on a disused car park rooftop. They learnt about the characters and story plot but the title, ‘The Secret Sky Garden’ wasn’t revealed until the last week. The second story, ‘Look Up’ coincided well with the northern lights being visible over the UK in May. The children studied the character Rocket and why she liked space so much. They even designed their own meteor poster!

One, two miss a few, 99, 100! Yes, Year 1 have been counting in one, twos, fives and tens, in our Maths lessons to 100 and beyond. Halfway through the term, the children spent time describing position, direction and movement, using positional language, including whole, half and threequarter turns. There was lots of fun on the Twister mats when we turned them into a human robot game!

In Science, the children planted bean seeds and because they also diligently watered them, our classrooms were soon

starting to look like Jack’s garden, from ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’! Whilst the beans grew, we kept a diary and noted changes to the plants. The children were able to identify and name the main parts of plants and the important role each part of the plant has. Our botanist skills were put to the test as we named and compared wild plants with purposefully grown garden plants, deciduous and evergreen trees. Our Geography lessons had us comparing weather around the world. We all thought the rhyme, ‘Rain, Rain, Go Away!’ was suitable to our recent weather in England! Our weather chart has definitely measured more rain than we prefer to see! Luckily we had lovely weather for our day trip to the Yorkshire Wildlife Park where we revisited our ‘Animals, including Humans’ Science topic and gained a greater depth of knowledge about invertebrates. As artists, we applied our shading skills to animal pictures and had fun with our jelly baby Cubist collage.

Well done Year 1, for a super half term! We look forward to seeing as many parents as possible at Sports Day!

As we approach the last half term in Reception, we are so proud of everyone’s achievements this year. We are seeing the children master key mathematical concepts which will help them so much as they move through the school years. Reading and writing are of a very high standard and it is a delight to see how much progress has been made.

We anticipate that our last five weeks in Reception will be fun-packed as there is so much to look forward to; Sports Day, French Day, Transition Day and so much more!

What

an incredibly busy half term we have had in Year 2!

The children continue to work hard and have produced some wonderfully creative pieces of work. We have been learning how to use apostrophes to show possession in English, and how to use inverted commas to punctuate direct speech. These are both tricky pieces of grammar and the children have listened carefully and are really getting the hang of them! In Maths we have been working hard on fractions; we now know that a half is the same as two quarters, and how to find fractions of shapes and numbers.

The children have very much enjoyed our topic of the Great Fire of London We have learned so much about the events of the fire from a variety of historical sources including Samuel Pepys’ diary; the children were very interested to learn that he buried his

parmesan cheese in the garden to save it from the fire! We have made our own houses to recreate Pudding Lane where the fire started and are very excited about setting fire to them after the half term break so we can see for ourselves how and why the fire spread so quickly.  In Science we have been trying to work out what plants need to grow well; we have set up an experiment with bean seeds in different conditions and will look at the results in June. We have dissected seeds and discovered the food stores and baby plants inside them, and conducted an experiment to see what was the best way to stop apples from going brown in our pack

June

they make and giving very good reasons for them. We even had one of our Year 2 students bravely give an assembly to the rest of Hymers Hessle Mount about allergies, the science behind allergic reactions, anaphylaxis and how to use an epipen!

A definite highlight of this half term was our trip to Eureka! in Halifax. We had so much fun exploring all of the different zones of the museum and learning in a brilliantly hands-on way. The Gross Lab workshop in the afternoon was really interesting (and really gross)! Year 2 were impeccably behaved throughout the trip and it was wonderful to see their enthusiasm for everything they were shown.

This same enthusiasm has been very evident during rehearsals for our production of Pirates vs Mermaids We have been so impressed by how quickly the children learned their lines. They have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into making the characters of the pirates and mermaids come alive and cannot wait to show everybody their scary pirate faces and sassy mermaid dancing! We are looking forward to seeing the Year 2 parents and families at the performances of the production. It will be a lovely start to the children’s last half term at Hymers Hessle Mount!

Mon 3 - Second half of the Summer Term begins

Mon 10 - Year 2 Production Dress Rehearsal 2pm

Tue 11

- Year 2 Production 2pm

Wed 12 - Year 2 Production 2pm

Mon 17 - Induction Day and New Parents’ Evening 6pm

Fri 21

- HHM Sports Day @ Hymers College 1:30pm

Sat 22 - HCA Garden Party @ Hymers College

Mon 24 - Northern Lights drama presentation to parents 4:10pm

Tue 25 - Paris Olympics Day

Fri 28

- Pre-School Performance, Graduation and Picnic (pm)

Mon 1 - Summer Reports sent home

Tue 2 - No Pens Day

Thur 4 - Year 2 Leavers’ Party

Fri 5 - School ends for summer: EYFS 11:30am & KS1 11:45am

Week Commencing:

Mon 8 - Summer School Week 1

Mon 15 - Summer School Week 2