St Peter's 2-8 Newsletter I 14

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One of the most important aspects of teaching creativity is that it fosters emotional development. Creativity involves a lot of trial and error.

‘Productive struggle’ or not having a fear of failure builds resilience, one of our leaning superhero powers, and teaches children to push through difficulty to reach success. It is so important that we allow children to experience the journey of learning Creativity is important in education rather than placing huge importance on more than ever and the staff at St the end destination. Through these Peter’s are providing a wealth of experiences the children have limitless opportunities to allow the children to boundaries and no glass ceilings in their be creative despite the latest lockdown learning, this in turn helps with their measures. Creativity is often aligned self-esteem and emotional with other soft skills- great to have, development. Creativity also provides though not as important as reading or children the freedom to explore, long division. Research is showing that collaborate and learn new things from creativity isn’t just great to have, it’s an each other, another one of our essential human skill. At St Peter’s 2-8 superhero qualities. we have made teaching creativity a priority within our thematic approach to learning. It is easy to observe at school that creativity motivates children to learn. There is a tremendous amount of supporting research that links creativity with the intrinsic motivation to learn. When children are focused on a creative goal, they become more absorbed in their learning and more driven to acquire the skills they need to accomplish it.

Children are most motivated to learn when certain factors are present:

Newsletter No: 14 Friday, 15th January 2021

Well, we all successfully made it through to the end of the week. I have been astonished by the extraordinary capacity of our children to adapt to a different approach to their learning.

Additionally, I am in awe of the amazing staff who are producing the most wonderful creative learning experiences for our children through this difficult period.

I must commend all of the parents who are facilitating the remote learning at home whilst balancing their own work commitments and home life. We do understand this is a difficult situation and are here to support you wherever we possibly can. The most important aspect to focus on for our children at the moment is their wellbeing. The live registrations and live lessons provide the children with a connection and relationship to their class friends and teachers. Any gaps in their learning will be filled when we return to face to face teaching. Fundamentally, you are there as a parent, supporting your child and we are here to support you on this unforeseen and uncertain journey.

Here is a link to some resources you may find useful. Antonia and I are always here to support you and can be contacted at any time. We have been •When they are able to link and create overwhelmed by your messages of connections with their learning to their kindness and understanding. In times personal interests.

Creativity, originality and initiative have like these the single most important •When they have a sense of autonomy been highlighted as essential skills for action is kindness and the whole school the future by the World Economic and control over their learning task, community of children, teachers, Forum 2025. As automation continues and they feel competent in the work support staff and parents have to swallow up routine jobs, those who they’re doing. displayed this in abundance this week. rely on soft skills like creativity are Creative approaches within our Thank you! predicted to see the most growth. thematic curriculum develop higher Best wishes and have a wonderful Having a creative mindset is what we order cognitive skills such as problem weekend, are trying to foster at St Peter’s 2-8 solving, critical thinking and making through our thematic curriculum and connections between subjects. This our focus on learning through play. approach helps children connect new information to their prior knowledge. One of my personal favourite TED Talks is the inspirational talk by the late This is constantly observed when our children learn through play and through Sir Ken Robinson, ‘Do Schools Kill Creativity?’ our thematic curriculum.

Notice Board MUSICAL NOTES Well done to all our pupils (and their grownups!) who have navigated the technology and managed to sign into their 1:1 online lessons for the first time this week! As always, if you have any problems, please do email me and I will try to help! The children have all been working hard this week on a selection of new songs, I hope they have been enjoying a good sing as much as I have?!

Mrs Hayden

THANK YOU A BIG thank you to our lovely kitchen staff, Stuart, Aga, Michelle, Danielle and Janet (and Moira of course!) for all they are doing to keep us going.

PE

The children have continued to impress us with their resilience and resourcefulness during our virtual PE lessons this week! In their core PE lessons, the children have brought lots of energy to our new fitness workout. The children demonstrated brilliant aptitude and enthusiasm for the karate kicks and punches, which really tested their coordination and flexibility. They showed great endurance throughout the whole 30 minute workout, which was amazing to see.

In their games lessons, Reception have been continuing to develop their ball skills, practicing stopping a ball which was rolled towards them with the bottom of their feet, before challenging themselves to stop the ball using their instep. Thank you very much to the family members who assisted the children with this task.

Years 1-3 have been working on their Netball skills during their games sessions this week, learning how to pivot, a key skill in the game of Netball. The children have been learning how to jump and land with one foot then the other. They then progressed this skill to learning to pivot around whilst keeping one foot stuck to the floor. The children then introduced a ball into this skill, learning to “jump” up to catch the ball, land “1, 2” then pivot around (“3, 4, 5”) in order to make a pass to an available player. All the children worked extremely hard and became very familiar with the phrase “Jump 1, 2, 3, 4, 5”. Well done everyone!

NURSERY

What a wonderful time we have had in a Winter Wonderland...

In maths this week the children became amazing shopkeepers after learning all about different types of coins and their value! They made toy shops and even an 'egg drop shop' where they bought supplies to protect an egg which they then dropped from a height - what a 'cracking' time we had!

On Wednesday we were thrilled with the beautiful

collaged art work that the children created inspired by the artist Marcus Oakley, using their knowledge of 2D and 3D shapes to create and describe their wonderful artwork!

On Thursday we used our knowledge of coins and addition to do a very important pilot mission sending money 'over the border'.

On Friday Reception became budding scientists when they made incredible lava lamps in our 'Explore, create, investigate' lesson.

Wow, what a busy week! We want to say a huge well done to all the children and also to all the grown-ups who are doing such an incredible job supporting the children's learning at home and making it so much fun!

RECEPTION

All the children in Reception have knocked our socks off this week! We have been helping Inky mouse with his phonics; he surprises us every day with what he is doing when our lesson starts from being in pain and in a bandage on our 'ai' day, playing with his boat on our 'oa' day and even being fast asleep snuggled in his blanket thinking it was night on our 'igh' day!

YEAR 1

The Year Ones this week have shown just what resourceful and resilient learners they are yet again! They have been so creative with their ideas and also with coming up with innovative resources at home- well done (and well done and thank you to mummies and daddies too!)! In our Maths lessons we have been investigating 3d shapes and learning about their properties. The children created their own skeleton 3d shapes, many of which were edible and we had lots of munching during our Zoom videos as well as building!

Our theme lessons this week have focused on

designing and making our own robots and thinking about what our robot’s function could be. The children created mood boards from their research and then went on to plan and think about the materials they needed for their design.

We had lots of brilliant suggestions from swimming robots to cleaning robots, robots who could sneak food down from cupboards to dinosaur teacher robots that would work at a Dinosaur Museum- (that’s an animal of the prehistoric variety not just a very old teacher!).

The results were amazing!

Well done Year One we are very proud of you and miss you enormously!

YEAR 1 cont.

Year 2 seemed to have found their feet with online learning this week and have gone full steam ahead! We have covered some difficult subject areas including telling the time in maths and poetry in English. We began looking at o'clock and half past using analogue clocks and discussing the jobs of the three different hands. We then moved on to quarter past and quarter to, and even telling the time using digital clocks! It has been fantastic to see the children challenging themselves and stepping out of their comfort zones; telling the time is a difficult concept to grasp but we have been so impressed with the children's endurance and determination.

lilacs and pinks.

The children enjoyed an exciting science experiment this week where they created their own clouds in a jar! First we made a contrast of temperatures by adding hot water to the base of our jars and placing ice cubes on the lid, then we sprayed a little aerosol and put the lid back on. After waiting a few minutes, we removed our lids to find a smoke like cloud escaping from the jar! A cloud is formed when water vapour condenses into water droplets that attach to particles in the air; for our clouds in a jar, water vapour was formed by the hot water and the cold environment at the top of the jar (caused by the ice cubes) causing the water vapour to condense. The aerosol acted as the dust particles, therefore allowing the water vapour something to condense on to. Why don't you try this simple experiment at home or seek some help from a scientist in Year 2?

In art, we looked at a timeless famous painting by Claude Monet called 'The Magpie'; the children used a range of media to recreate the wintery scene, focusing on the use of 'cold' colours such as blues,

YEAR 2

Alongside our key text 'The Little Grey Men' we have continued to look at winter, as this is the time of year that the story is set in. The children have been recapping nouns, adjectives and verbs relating to winter which they then compiled to create their own Kennings poems. Again this was another difficult Overall, a busy but terrific week Year 2! Another huge well task, but the children created some wonderful poems by setting done! Where will our learning take us next week? themselves high expectations and reflecting on their knowledge so far. We have also been looking at wildlife in winter and what they do to survive throughout the cold season. The children have been making their own bird feeders to hang in their gardens, as it is often a difficult time for birds to find food.

Year Three have immersed themselves in their jungle themed learning this week. We started the week by looking at the food chain and discussing the fact that without the sun, we would be able to survive! We created our own jungle food chains with our chosen producer, herbivore, omnivore and finally, the carnivore! We then went on to animal classification and learnt about vertebrates and invertebrates. We enjoyed sorting our animals into categories, although some of them were quite challenging! This led us to look at the layers of the jungle and we discovered the special name for each section. The children made their own flap books to portray each section, lifting the flap to discover its inhabitants!

YEAR 3

In our text, we read that Mowgli was taken to Council Rock for the wolves to decide whether or not they

should allow him to stay in the jungle. This sparked a big debate and the children came up with a bevy of ideas for and against keeping him. They then wrote a persuasive piece of writing about why Mowgli should or shouldn’t be allowed to remain. At the end of the week, we held class debates where the children maturely and persuasively expressed their personal opinions.

In Maths we had been focussing on 2D shape. As well as learning about the properties of the polygons, we discovered more about the 4 different types of triangle, what quadrilaterals are and spent time practicing drawing shapes accurately with a ruler. We combined our skills to have a go at drawing a jungle shape picture using ONLY the shapes given - trickier than you think!

Phew! A busy week with lots to be proud of Year 3, keep up the hard work!

Friends of St Peter’s 2-8 (formerly Clifton School Friends) Little Paintbox Christmas Card Project We were thrilled this week to receive a cheque for our commission from the Christmas Card project. We raised a whopping £556.45, all of which will go to this year’s school charity (still TBC). So a HUGE thank you to everybody who purchased cards or gifts through the scheme. We look forward to doing it all over again next Christmas!

The FoSP2-8 Team

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