St Peter's 2-8 | Newsletter 3

CoMPasS

Registered Charity No: 1141329

The last few weeks have been extraordinary and it has been fitting as a school that we have marked the passing of Her Late Majesty The Queen with real dignity ensuring the children remember forever the historic days we have been living through.

The bank holiday provided an opportunity to show our respect by watching Queen Elizabeth’ funeral. Personally, I thought it was such a fitting occasion for a monarch who has been a constant throughout our lives. Over the past few weeks the children have settled brilliantly into school. It has been lovely to hear the buzz and excitement coming from all the classrooms and the sheer joy permeating down corridors.

The children have been incredibly enthusiastic and excited with their learning from the first day of term. When they arrived on Monday 5th September they thoroughly enjoyed discovering their themes for the term and seeing their new classrooms. All the classrooms looked absolutely stunning and they provide such a wonderful learning environment for the children. My thanks to the staff who spent time over the summer creating these enticing learning spaces.

This term the themes across the school from Year 1 to Year 3 are as follows; Year 1, Amazing Amazon Adventures, based around the theme text Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson. Year 2, Greece Lighting based on the text Here Comes Hercules by Stella Tarakson and in Year 3 the children will be focusing their energy on the theme Race Through Space, from the text George’s Secret Key To The Universe by Lucy and Stephen Hawking.

category. We were extremely honoured to have been shortlisted which resulted from a visit that took place during the summer term. To be shortlisted in categories such as these are a wonderful accolade for the teaching staff, teaching assistants, support staff,

use of WhatsApp groups. While I fully support using these chat forums to communicate messages amongst classes and year groups regarding social events, missing items of uniform etc I would also kindly remind parents that any school related issues should be communicated directly with the school either verbally or by email. You can always catch Mrs Clarke or myself at the gate or email Mrs Fattorini, c.fattorini@stpetersyork.org.uk should you have anything you would like to raise or feed back on. This helps to avoid any confusion regarding school related issues. Thank you for your support with this.

Friday 23rd September 2022

DIARY FOR WEEK COMMENCING 26th September 2022

MONDAY Council

At the end of August, we became aware that St Peter’s 2 8 had been shortlisted for two Talk Education Awards for Innovation in Education 2022. Shortlisted against four other schools, Cranford (Dorset), DLD College London, Downe House & Radley College (Berks & Oxon) and Godolphin & Latymer School (London), the school had been shortlisted under the category ‘Thinking beyond the curriculum’, how do school inspire pupils to think beyond the core and challenge themselves to take their interest in a subject further?

Congratulations to Godolphin & Latymer School who won this

governors and children who make the school the successful and thriving learning environment it is. Their work certainly does not go unnoticed. Well done to all. Prior to the start of term, Mrs Clarke and I hosted a new parent drinks reception organised by Ms Fattorini. It was a lovely evening and I know our new families appreciated the opportunity to meet with other parents prior to the start of the new term. My thanks to Mrs Woolf, Mrs Dryden and Mrs Wilson, members of the Friends of St Peter’s 2 8 committee who kindly joined us to provide some much valued knowledge and experience of life at St Peter’s 2 8 from a parent’s prospective.

The St Peter’s 2 8 Friends hosted two coffee mornings during the first week in the dining hall for parents from Nursery to Year 3. They provided a lovely social occasion for all parents across the school, and it was great to see so many of you there. We also hosted Parent Information Evenings, from Nursery to Year 3 to enable parents and guardians to join us to hear about our plans for the year group/s for the academic year ahead. I do hope those who were able to join us found these to be informative and enjoyed the opportunity of visiting classrooms and meeting with class teachers.

This week we have been joined by nine students from the University of Linz. They will remain with us on a two week placement as part of their teaching training programme in Austria. We are delighted to share our school with them, and I know they have really enjoyed getting to know the children and staff in school this week.

Next Monday 26th September there will be a public consultation for the new all weather pitches at 3pm in the St Peter’s 13 18 library. Residents in the area have been invited to join us to discuss the plans and share any concerns. I look forward to seeing those of you who are able to join us at the meeting.

Just a reminder regarding the

Over the summer holidays the school organised three weeks of Summer Camp. These were well attended by over 100 children each day and it was clear the children were all having so much fun. My huge thanks to all the staff who worked at the camp and in particular Sara Birch, Robyn Flockhart and Rebecca Bursnall for all their work and organisation in ensuring that this was another successful camp for all. The next holiday camp will run from Monday 31st October Friday 4th November.

TUESDAY

Over the next few weeks, we will be writing to nursery parents to canvass their views on potential developments in this area of school. I would be extremely grateful if you could spend a few minutes of your time responding to the survey when it arrives. Finally, as you may be aware we will be holding a 2 11 Open Morning on Saturday 15th October. While these events are for anyone to attend and you are very welcome, they have been specifically tailored for those who are not yet part of the school community. There will be opportunities to attend internal events for Year 3 children transitioning to Year 4 at St Peter’s 8 13 throughout the year, further information about these events will be communicated closer to the time.

Have a lovely weekend.

Best wishes,

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

Noticepoints trophy

• Sam H (3S) Amalie F (RJ) award

• Georgie & Luna (RC)

• Toby (RJ)

• Barnaby (RP)

• Evelyn (1A)

• Toby (1C)

• Yusuf (1E)

• Joseph (2H)

• Mason (2J)

• Matilda G (2P)

• George P (3C)

• Hugo & Manny (3M)

• Albert, Oliver, Annabel & India (3S)

• Henry, Rory & Taran (RC)

• Lailah (RJ)

• Lucas (RP)

• Eva (1A)

• Oliver (1C) Thomas (1E)

• Isabella &Nate (2H)

MICKLEGATE Archie H Kalan N Music award

• River (2J)

• Jojo (2P)

• Rosie (3C)

• Hamish (3M)

• Eddie (3S)

learning superheroes value champions

Notice

Notice Board

HARVEST FOOD BANK

The well-being champions are working to organise a Harvest collection to be taken to the Foodbank in the last week before half term. The flyer towards the end of the newsletter shows the items that the Foodbank have asked for. There will be

boxes at the gates in the mornings for items to be dropped off as well as a table in the foyer for parents to drop things in the afternoons. Many thanks for your support.

AUTUMN CONCERT

The Academy of St Olave's would like to invite you to a classical concert held in aid of Sunflower Kids, a charity supporting displaced Ukrainian children in York. Join them on 24th September at 20.00 where the orchestra will perform a concert around Beethoven’s epic ”Eroica” Symphony.

A recent article in the York Press has more information and there is a flyer at the end of the newsletter.

The Academy of St Olave's has chosen Sunflowers Kids Club as their charity and will donate the proceeds from their ticket sales!

If you like classical music and would like to support Ukrainian children who had to leave Ukraine and now are in York, this is a perfect event for you!

The concert will feature our own Mrs Hayden, who will be performing in this concert too, and Isabel Dowell, our Year 3 woodwind teacher, will be playing a bassoon concerto!

Tickets are available from www.academyofstolaves.org.uk. Accompanied children go free.

We look forward to seeing you there!

HEADLICE

Please be aware that we have headlice in Reception. Please check your child (ren)’s head(s) and treat if necessary.

Please could we request that all long hair is tied back in school to prevent the spread.

Please visit the NHS website for advice on treatment.

SCHOOL COUNCIL

Here are our new School Councillors! Watch this space for news from our meetings and projects.

Aria | Emmy Arthur Zachariah India Owen Joyce | Pip | Jack | Sasha Thomas Connie Xander George Heidi Japji Eva Finbar

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MENTAL HEALTH AND WELLBEING AT ST PETER'S 2-8

There have been many reports and articles in recent years about the decline in children’s mental health and wellbeing including 'The Good Childhood Report 2021' produced by The Children’s Society GCR_2021_Full_Report.pdf (childrenssociety.org.uk). Much of the evidence shows a decline in happiness and wellbeing, but there are proactive steps we can take to nurture positive wellbeing for children and this is something we actively do at school through learning and providing a warm and supportive environment.

At St Peter's 2-8 we teach children about the five ways to wellbeing and the actions they can take for their own wellbeing and for that of others. We aim for the children to develop amongst other attributes their independence, resilience and self awareness.

The children learn about wellbeing in PSHE lessons, via assemblies and during class circle times, including learning about and understanding how their emotional brain works though The Brain House. How to Teach Kids About the Brain: Laying Strong Foundations for Emotional Intelligence (by Dr Hazel Harrison) Hey Sigmund

Twice every half term we hold Wellbeing Wednesdays at 8:40 when the whole school learns a new mindfulness activity. This week we tried the Big Pond activity which you can try at home Be the Pond | Cosmic Kids Zen Den Mindfulness for kids - YouTube

The Year 3 children can apply to be Wellbeing Champions and are

responsible for being role models, promoting wellbeing, demonstrating kindness and empathy and noticing when someone needs a friend. They help deliver activities on Wellbeing Wednesdays, support us to organise charity fundraising and come up with novel ideas for promoting wellbeing at school.

They have written some excellent applications this year with impressive and original ideas for wellbeing, and I'm really looking forward to working with them this year.

Children who need a little extra help can have one to one sessions in our Wellbeing Treehouse from a member of our mental health team which includes counsellors and a mental health nurse or from Lisa Bateson our teaching assistant who delivers drawing and sand therapies and ELSA (Emotional Literacy Support Assistant). We also have a range of books and resources that we can we lend to help you if you are facing any particular issue with your child such as a bereavement or family separation.

New Year, new shiny trainers and we have certainly put them to the test over the past few weeks! It has been great to have the children back at St Peter’s 2-8. I have loved hearing about their holiday adventures and I was delighted with the energy and enthusiasm they have shown.

We are delighted to welcome Mr Lomax. The children have loved him working alongside them to motivate and support their learning. Despite some very unpredictable weather, the children have remained positive and demonstrated some great understanding. With a strong focus on movement, the children have now progressed onto jumping, galloping and skipping. From tag rugby in Year 3 to balance and co-ordination skills in Reception, the children have settled straight back into school life!

Here are a few photos of some of the skills that have been on display over the past few week!

ACORNS

The Acorns have enjoyed a week full of colour. We have sorted different coloured toys into matching containers as well as putting the correct coloured pom-poms onto the caterpillar’s colourful body. We have made pink play dough together and played with coloured shapes and bricks. We had a wonderful walk in the sunshine and picked as many apples and pears as

we could find, using Mrs Ferguson’s incredible apple picker! We could reach really high. We used the apples and pears that we had picked and made juice using a fancy juicer. We did an experiment to see which fruits and vegetables made the most juice and guessed which fruits would taste sweet and which would taste sour. We labelled our bottles and took some school-made juice home with us. It has been a super week!

It has been such a jam packed week in Conkers… I don’t know where to start!

We’ve practised our cutting skills with spaghetti and mask making, searched for signs of Autumn, taken photos with the iPads, collected more apples, picked blackberries AND got to sample them straight away! Yum! We even made our very own apple juice this week, with an apple press kindly brought in by our friend Rowan. To top off the week we had a spontaneous visit over to the yard where all the tractors are kept. The lovely Facilities Assistants gave us a tour of the sheds and all the different vehicles, and best of all we got to press the VERY loud horn!

CONKERS

CONKERS

It has been yet another busy and fun week in Reception this week, from water runs and rocket building, to apple picking and puppet shows! The children have continued to settle in well to their new routines and have enjoyed starting the day with choices of yoga, mark making or dough disco - all before 8.45am!

We have continued learning about the different areas of provision in our setting such as the home corner, the playdough area and the sand area. All of the Reception children have been brilliant at listening to how we

RECEPTION

use the areas, understanding how to use the equipment and they have been extremely helpful when tidying up!

In our outdoor learning sessions, Reception visited Mr Walker's garden to do some apple picking in preparation for a tasty treat next week! Whilst outside, Reception had the opportunity to do some watercolour painting looking at the beautiful colours of the flowers and plants in the garden.

Well done Reception on another fantastic week, all of your teachers are so proud of you!

RECEPTION

This week in Year One the children have well and truly transformed themselves into the rainforest explorers! As we dive deeper into our key text, AJourneytotheRiverSea, the children have begun to learn and understand about the different types of houses seen in the Amazon Rainforest. Using a range of different information books, pictures and QR codes, the children have been busy building houses on stilts that protect them from the rising levels of the river. There have been some wonderful examples of engineering and lots of problem solving going on with this learning.

We also learnt about 'The Marriage of the Waters' where the Negro River and the Amazon River meet. The waters from each river are different colours and it creates a wonderful contrast, which we decided to paint.

It has been delightful to see how the children's confidence in their classroom and outdoors has already grown in just a few weeks. The rainforest explorers have been revisiting their jungle shelters and have spent time reflecting on their shelters from before and how they could make them better or even stronger this time around.

Inside, the children have begun to think about the recipe of the ingredients that we need to use to write a super sentence! To help us become writing superstars, each time we write, one of the children will become a writing ninja of the day for their amazing effort and work. This also means they get to wear a writing ninja headband! So, keep an eye out for this!

We have had super fun in phonics this week, from clapping the syllables in our names to chalking all over the carpet, we just haven't stopped learning!

A shorter week but lots has been achieved! After bundles of commitment and resilience from our Year 2 pupils over the last few weeks, our Greek vases are finally complete! This art project has required the use of different mediums as well as research around the Greeks’ inspiration for their artistic designs, which we learnt varied from repeating patterns, gods and goddesses, traditional daily tasks and so on. We are very proud of the children’s dedication to this task! Alongside Ancient Greek art, we have been learning about the location of Greece on a map of Europe, along with other key locations in this area such as Crete and places and seas significant to us for example, the United Kingdom.

As we move on to the next chapter of our key text ‘HereComesHercules’, the main character Tim compares Hercules to a genie and requests three wishes, as he appears from the broken Greek

vase. The children have been focusing on sentence structure to write their own three wishes, looking at the correct punctuation. It was lovely to hear how considerate of others the children were when it came to their chosen wishes.

In maths this week, we have been continuing to revise our recall of numbers to 100 and the place value of these numbers through different methods including making and recording. The children have been using resources such as Base 10, Numicon and Abacuses to consolidate their understanding.

Autumn is a fantastic time to enjoy at Forest School; the children have loved collecting conkers and other seeds from the Forest and exploring the beautiful colours. Some of the children completed some weaving and knot tying activities whilst others used their collections to set up shops and make dens.

It has been an exciting first few weeks in Year 3. The children came back to school to discover an unfamiliar figure on the doors to the classrooms. After many guesses and much speculation, they discovered it was a lady named Katherine Johnson, one of NASAs most influential workers. This led on to the discovery of our topic for the term, RaceThroughSpace. Using the book George’s SecretKeytotheUniverseby Stephen and Lucy Hawkins as a vehicle for learning, the children have begun their space adventure.

During our first week we were introduced to the main character, George, and his pet pig, Freddy. We soon found out that Freddy was an adventure-seeking pig who liked to escape from his pigsty at the bottom of George’s garden! Our quest to find the missing pig involved creating missing posters and sending the Year 3 search party to forest school to retrieve him! We discovered that George enjoyed adventures too and spent most days hanging over the garden fence into his neighbour’s mysterious, wild garden which had ‘rioted

out of control until it looked like the Amazon jungle’. We were inspired by the artwork of Yvonne Coomber to produce our own wildflower paintings and created our own biodegradable plant pots so we could plant wildflower seeds.

We explored the different planets in our solar system and had great fun creating chalk pastel pictures of our favourite planets and filled them with exciting facts to create a information page about the different planets in the solar system. We have started to create our own model solar system and have enjoyed working collaboratively to created the planets in papier-mâché.

We used the James Webb telescope images to inspire our creative descriptive writing and the children wowed us with their use of figurative language within their independent work.

We have lots of exciting things in the planning for 22/23 but wanted to first introduce ourselves, extend a warm welcome to those of you who are new to school and explain how you can get involved with the Friends if you’d like to we couldn’t do any of it without you and we are so grateful for all your help!

Who are the Friends of St Peter’s 2 8?

Often known as FoSP or the Friends, we are a group of volunteer parents who organise events and charity initiatives throughout the year. Our aims are to support the children attending the school, organise social events for the parent community and to raise money for charity.

What type of events do we organise?

Every term, we try to arrange a social event for parents and a special treat or themed activity for the children. In the past, these have included

For the children:

❖ The Great St Peter’s 2 8 Bake Off

❖ Valentine’s Disco

❖ Willow Weaving Workshop

❖ ‘Clif Fest’ – our summer fete for all the family!

For parents:

❖ Curry & Quiz Nights

❖ Christmas Wreath Making

❖ Christmas cards

❖ Pub Safari

❖ The Summer Ball

The largest two events, Clif Fest and The Summer Ball, are both held in the Summer Term providing a fantastic finale to the school year!

Throughout the year, the Friends also organise ‘pop up’ cafes, Bags 2 School collections and run Nearly New Uniform sales.

Fund raising – how are funds spent?

All of our events raise money for both the designated school charity for the year and for additional resources for the children Last year, with the tremendous support of our parent community, we raised £5,500 for The Children’s Heart Surgery Fund, Leeds the school’s charity for the year.

Additional resources for the children funded by the Friends in recent years have included:

❖ waterproof suits for every child in the school to wear when attending Forest School

❖ interactive play materials for use in the playground and After School Care

❖ T shirts for every child to wear on Sports Day 2022

❖ contributions to the annual Year 3 trip to London and Leavers Hoodies need your help! on to find out more…

WELCOME BACK to the new academic year 2022/23 from the Friends of St Peter’s 2-8!

YourschoolNeedsYou!

The Friends are always looking for new recruits! Interested in joining the Friends committee?

Fresh ideas and new perspectives are always welcome and we’d love your help.

The Friends meet 4 5 times a year in school after morning drop off. We all contribute ideas and play an active role in the planning and organisation of events, often working together in smaller sub teams.

It is a great way to get to know other parents, to get involved with the school and can be really fulfilling. Our next meeting of the year is at 8:45am on Wednesday 16th November in the Dining Room come along and find out more with no obligation! We’d love to see you and tell you a bit more Or could you join our ‘army of volunteers’?

We are looking to expand our volunteer army! We always need more hands behind the scenes to help with the smooth running of events; could you give some time in the set up, clear up or during an event?

As part of the volunteer army, there is NO commitment to attend regular Friends meetings or take a leading role in organising events as we recognise everyone has differing commitments and draws on their time.

However, our army of volunteers are absolutely key to making events happen and their success. We are HUGELY grateful to everyone who gives up their time to help and hope you will get something out of it too! We may ask for your preferences and the types of event you may wish to help at for example running a stall or the BBQ at Clif Fest, or serving tea and coffee at a pop up café, and then request your help as required. We hope that lots of you will be attending the events anyway and will lend a hand to help!

If you would like to be part of the Friends ‘army of volunteers’, or have any questions at all about the Friends, please email Victoria and Sarah on victoriawoolf@hotmail.co.uk and sarahdolanbent@hotmail.co.uk

With best wishes for a great term from the Friends of St Peter’s 2 8