Furze Platt Infant School

Newsletter - 17th November 2023

FPIS proudly supports BBC Children in Need with Bearpees, Pudsey and LOTS of spots!

With the half term holidays now a distant memory it has been back to school and back to Busy Learning for our children here at FPIS. We have had some exciting visits, visitors and memorable moments that have continued to bring our Autumn Term projects to life - and provide some wonderful learning opportunities. Please read on for more information about what has been happening in each Year Group below...

FPIS is a very proud supporter of BBC Children in Need - and this year it has certainly been an action-packed week in the build up to the main fundraising day for the charity, thanks to Joe Wick's Bearpee Challenge! Every day this week each class has been collectively completing the Bearpee Challenge and aiming to do 1000 Bearpees in total overall. The children (and grown ups!) have certainly put a great deal of energy and enthusiasm into this challenge and it has been lots of fun too! We were also extremely excited to welcome Pudsey Bear himself to our school yesterday. You can find out more about his visit below... Of course, Children in Need day would not be complete without some spotty outfits (and bear ears!) Thank you to everyone who has been able to make a donation via our JustGiving page. At the time of writing, the total amount raised is a fantastic £448 - THANK YOU!

If you haven't had a chance to donate, there is still time. Please click here to go to our FPIS Children in Need 2023 JustGiving page. Thank you for your support!

Our Remembrance Day assembly last week, led by Miss Dexter, was a very special moment for us to think about the importance of this day and why we remember those who have, and continue to, serve our country. Our thanks also to Mr Thompson for providing some very useful insight into the music and instruments often used to mark this occasion and for playing the last post to begin our two minutes silence.

We would also like to thank everyone who came along to our Parents' Meetings last week. Our Class Teachers really do value the oppprtunity to discuss children's progress and share their achievements, successes and next steps. We hope you found these conversations useful and would also like to say thank you for the many positive comments and helpful feedback, particularly around how well the children have settled into school so far this year. As always, we are very appreciative of your support.

Have a lovely weekend.

Best wishes

Jane Indge

Head of School

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Diary dates - coming up soon!

Here is a look at what's going to be happening in school during the next few weeks...

Friday 24th November - Non-uniform day (FPSA tombola cups)

Monday 27th November - Pantomime 'Jack & The Beanstalk' at FPJS: 1:30 pm

Monday 27th November - Christmas Postboxes OPEN

Thursday 30th November - Early Years Busy Learning Afternoon: 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Saturday 2nd December - FPSA Christmas Fair: 11:30 am - 2:30 pm

Friday 8th December - Christmas Jumper Day - children can wear Festive jumpers instead of their school cardigan/jumper

Friday 8th December - Early Years Christmas Performance: 2:00 pm

Monday 11th December - KS1 Christmas Performance - babies and younger children welcome: 9:30 am - 10:30 am

Monday 11th December - KS1 Christmas Performance - adults ONLY: 2:00pm - 3:00 pm

Tuesday 12th December - KS1 Christmas Performance - adults ONLY: 9:30 am - 10:30 am

Tuesday 12th December - KS1 Christmas Performance - adults ONLY: 2:00pm - 3:00 pm

Wednesday 13th December - Christmas Lunch

Wednesday 13th December - Christmas Postboxes CLOSE

Friday 15th December - Non-uniform day - Children's Christmas Parties

Friday 15th December - Term ends

School Attendance

SAM - our School Attendance Mascot, is our FPIS teddy bear who helps our children think about why it is so important to attend school every day.

Our children are busy learning right from the start of the day, so being in class on time each morning matters just as much too. Registration begins at 8:50am and we expect all children to be in class by 9:00am.

Each week, during our Celebration Assembly, the attendance figures are shared. The class with the best attendance overall gets to look after SAM until the following week.

This week, SAM will be going to Holly Class who had a very impressive overall figure of 99.2%! Well done!

Our latest school attendance figures for each class are shown in the table. Our school attendance target is: 97%

You can read our full Attendance Policy here.

Holly 99.2%

Willow 97.9%

Caterpillar 95.4%

Hazel 95.0%

Dragonfly 93.5%

Oak 93.5%

Bumblebee 93.3%

Silver Birch 90.9%

Beech 90.4%

FPIS SEND Signpost

Pudsey Bear visits FPIS!

We were absolutely delighted (and more than a little excited!) to welcome Pudsey Bear to FPIS yesterday.

Taking time out of his busy BBC Children in Need schedule, Pudsey joined us for a special assembly where Mrs Indge and Miss Edmondson began by introducing a seated Bearpee! This was followed by some of our the children very enthusiastically demonstrating their very own extreme Bearpees - all of which certainly seemed to impress Pudsey! Following this, there was time for Pudsey to visit the classrooms where the children had a photo opportunity with the bear himself!

Our thanks to Richard Hockley for organising this very special visitor - it really did make everyone smile and prompted us to think about how we can help make a difference to children all over the UK by supporting BBC Children in Need.

Early Years

Our Bumblebees, Caterpillars and Dragonflies have been super busy having lots of fun learning linked to their project, 'Me and My Family.' They begun the term learning about celebrations and sharing their own experiences about Diwali and Bonfire Night. They created Rangoli patterns and colourful pictures to represent lights and fireworks. Our Early Year children were very interested in learning about people from the past when learning about why some people celebrate on the 5th of November. They practiced the poem, Remember, Remember The 5th of November and were fascinated that it was written hundreds of years ago! The children discussed how to stay safe over bonfire weekend and performed their own firework dance. We all shared the story 'Whatever Next' by Jill Murphy and had the opportunity to retell the story with props.

Last week the Early Years children celebrated Nursery Rhyme Week. Our Bumblebees, Caterpillars and Dragonflies and Early Years staff all dressed up for our Magnificent Middle as nursery rhyme characters. We were so impressed with all of the fantastic outfits and would like to thank you for your support. The children have learnt, shared and performed well-known and new rhymes and have taken part in lots of fun activities that have supported their learning across the curriculum.

This week the children explored the question, How do we keep our bodies healthy? The children learnt about the importance of sleep, rest, exercise, drinking plenty of water and eating healthy food. They helped to sort real food that we should eat regularly and food that we should have occasionally. Some of the Early Years also created their own healthy plates. They were excited to meet Dr Rosie who talked to the children about staying healthy and why we might visit the doctors. She let them have a go with her tools and equipment and told them all about germs! This was also a good opportunity to remind the children of their previous learning about staying safe and Pantasaurus. Our role play basket at the moment is a doctors surgery, encouraging the children to act out meaningful experiences and further their learning about who helps us to care for our bodies. The children have loved being doctors, nurses and patients and our class dolls are now covered in plasters and bandages!

Year 1

In Year 1 we have been busy being creative, marching like soldiers, Diwali dancers and castle builders!

Recently, we celebrated our Magnificent Middle after learning about the Hindu and Sikh festival of Diwali. We used clay to create diva lamps and lit them as we celebrated in the hall together. We also learnt some traditional dance moves and enjoyed dancing to music. It was lovely to be able to come together in the hall and light our diva lamps and dance!

We have also been excitedly preparing for our trip to Windsor Castle on Monday for our Excellent Ending!

This week, we set ourselves an enormous challenge… to build Windsor Castle from scratch! We chose which part of the castle we wanted to build and had fun working with friends across the Year 1 classes, using our designing, painting, cutting and sticking skills. This has really supported our understanding of the different features of a castle, as we studied how Windsor Castle has changed over time and the different features, we will find during our visit next week.

We have also been busy learning about the role of the guards at Windsor Castle. We have been learning about the different companies of guards that look after the sovereign and their royal residencies. So, we made our own bearskin hats and chose the colour plume we wanted to wear which represented: the Coldstream, Grenadier, Welsh, Scots or Irish guards. We studied the changing of the guard parade and practised marching like soldiers. We then assembled in the hall with our newly made bearskin hats and proudly marched around the castle!

We are very much looking forward to our visit to Windsor Castle next week and the chance to see the features of a real castle up close and the changing of the guard! Look out for how we got on, in our next newsletter.

Phew...we are going to be Windsor Castle experts by the time we have visited on Monday!

Year 2

The Year 2 children have been busy learning all about the role and importance of different real-life superheroes from the past and the present. Part of our Sticky Knowledge for this half term has been to learn about Sir Nicholas Winton and the important role he played in the Kindertransport mission. We have been thinking about how he is remembered as well as other real-life superheroes. This has inspired us to design our own memorials for Nicholas Winton and others. We also learnt about the real-life superheroes we remember for Remembrance Day, this included humans and animals including Sergeant Stubby who we all thought was a real-life superhero for looking after soldiers during the Second World War.

This has also given us inspiration to think about different representations of our world and our School Values. We have been exploring different techniques that we can use with clay to help us design and create our own representations of our School Values. Look out for the results in our next newsletter!

We have also been thinking about how we can be real-life superheroes getting inspiration from the 3R’s (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle). We created our own mind maps about how we can look after our local area including litter picking, promoting the idea of reusing old materials, walking, scooting, or cycling to school rather than using a car and recycling the correct materials.

In Maths we have been exploring addition and subtraction focusing on using our knowledge of number bonds to 10 to support us. This has helped us solve a range of addition problems to 10 and across 10. We have enjoyed using the concrete objects during our maths lessons to show our working out!

Year 2 trip to Oaken Grove Park!

Inspired by all our learning about real-life superheroes we decided to become heroes ourselves! After wrapping up nice and warm and wearing our wellies we took a walk along to Oaken Grove Park where we had three challenges to complete! The first challenge was to explore the nature we could spot in our local area. We loved looking at the autumnal changes which are occurring. We had a list of things to find and got very excited when we spotted some huge mushrooms, different coloured leaves but the highlight was spotting a squirrel! The second challenge was to visit the Sir Nicholas Winton memorial garden. It was a great opportunity for us to explore how Nicholas Winton is remembered and how the Kindertransport has been represented in different ways. Lots of us had seen this before but it was exciting to go and visit it with our newly learnt knowledge. The third and final challenge led us to the picnic area in the park, where we put on some gloves and went to investigate how much litter we could find. We couldn’t believe how much there was and so transformed into real-life superheroes and completed our own litter picking challenge! The picnic area looked amazing once we had given it a good clean!

Despite some VERY heavy rain towards the end of our trip the grown ups were SO impressed with our enthusiasm and commitment to completing all three challenges even with some very heavy downpours!

We are very lucky to have such fantastic real-life superheroes representing our school! 😊

Tennis Workshops: Year 1

Last week on Monday and Thursday morning, Year 1 had a wonderful opportunity when three coaches from Bisham Abbey National Sports Centre visited our school. The children began by warming up with a series of running, jumping and stretching challenges. Then they practised handling tennis bats and balancing balls on their rackets. Finally, they got the chance to hit balls to the coaches over the net. You can see the concentration on their faces and how much fun they had! Thankfully the rain held off!

KS1 Speed Stacking Competition

On Monday 13th November eleven children from Year 1 and Year 2 attended a Speed Stacking Festival at Desborough College . A carousel of fun stacking activities saw our children participate in individual and team challenges to promote hand and eye coordination and physical activity. Stacking cups in pre-determined sequences the children challenged themselves as well as score points for their team in fun relays and races.

The children were amazing, had lots of fun and definitely completed the recommended 60 minutes of physical activity.a day.

Well done Year 1 and Year 2!

Nurture Group

In nurture, we have added to our autumn room decorations by finger painting trees using autumn colours. The children especially love doing art-themed activities.

We had fun harvesting lavender seeds from some dried down flowers. Most of the children said that they liked the smell of the lavender having smelled their fingers and we explained how the smell can help people to feel calm.

Finally, we have made some spider biscuits using Oreo biscuits, strawberry laces and sweetie eyes.

School Council

Our School Councillors have been helping to sell poppies for Remembrance Day over the past couple of weeks raising money for the Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal. They were excellent at encouraging people to come and buy a poppy to help remember our soldiers in the war. Well done School Council for your time and effort!

Eco Team

We are taking part in Cut The Carbon Fortnight. Cut Your Carbon is a month-long carbon-cutting challenge. Taking place throughout November 2023, the campaign challenges young people and their families to complete nine simple actions that will reduce their carbon footprint. Cut Your Carbon is a great way to learn more about the carbon emissions connected to everyday actions and how we can reduce them by making small, manageable changes.

This week we made posters to put around our school to let everyone know about the challenge. We would love it if our school could make a difference. The link below takes you to a variety of different challenges that help us Cut Carbon.

https://www.eco-schools.org.uk/cut-your-carbon/

The Big Ambition – Have your say!

The Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, has launched The Big Ambition, a national survey of children and young people across England.

The Big Ambition aims to hear from children across England on what they think is important! In the lead up to the next General Election, the Children’s Commissioner wants to take children’s thoughts, opinions and ideas to decision-makers, to make sure that the Government hears young people’s voices on what they think needs to be done to make children’s lives better in England.

The Big Ambition survey will be open until Friday 15th December.

Children or parents can complete the survey here: www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/thebigambition.

Awesome achievements!

We love finding out about and celebrating our children's achievements outside of school!

If your child has an achievement that they are very proud of and would like to share with us all, they will get the opportunity to do so during our Celebration Assembly on a Friday.

Our congratulations to Maya for completing the Doodle Maths Summer 2023 challenge

Congratulations to Ben who received a football medal. "I helped my team to score a goal and I helped a team mate up!" Well done Ben, what a brilliant team player!

Well done to Iasonas who was awarded his Level 2 Swimming certificate. "I worked really hard!" Keep up the super effort Iasonas!

Congratulations to Seamus who completed the Summer Reading Challenge! Well done, we are very proud of you!

Isla has been an incredibly busy athlete. She has received two awards in kickboxing for her technique and breaking boards as well as a wristband for her participation in her new passion- rubgy!

Deekshana has been an author and worked really hard to write her very own story for the BBC 500 Words competition. Amazing work Deekshana, keep it up!

Huge congratulations to Kara who received not one but two badges at Beavers. "I got them for hiking and the other one is for completing a running race". Well done Kara, we are very proud of you!

Oona has been working hard at kickboxing and was awarded for breaking boards with her foot! Amazing athletics Oona!

Lily has been an excellent Rainbow and has already earned herself 3 badges! She has been a camper, book lover and helper. Excellent work Lily, keep it up!

Well done Benjamin, we are very proud of you for being awarded two medals for brilliant listening in football! Congratulations!

House Points

Head of School Awards

Every Friday, during our whole school Celebration Assembly, Head of School awards are given out to a child or children in each class. The certificates are presented by Mrs Indge to those children who have consistently demonstrated excellent behaviours for learning.

Head of School Awards 17th November 2023.pdf

SuperPoWeR Awards

Miss Dexter pops on her Superhero cape each week during Celebration Assembly to present our SuperPoWeR awards. The awards are given to children who have been demonstrating excellent behaviour through our school values of Passion, Well being and Respect.

Book Bingo

Every week, during our Head of School Assembly, a bingo ball is selected from our special red bag. The bingo balls are numbered 1 - 30. Each child in Year 1 and 2 with the corresponding register number to the ball chosen will have the opportunity to bring their Maths book and Project scrapbook to share with Mrs Indge and Miss Dexter later that week. During the Book Bingo session, the children spend time looking through the books together with the adults, whilst discussing and explaining what they have been busy learning about.

FPSA update

Happy School Bags

Thank you to everyone who dropped off filled Happy School Bags for our collection on Tuesday. This is a really good fundraiser for the FPSA so your support with this is much appreciated. We raised £417 this time round which is fantastic!

New shed for 2nd hand uniform!

The FPSA are delighted that we now have a brand new shed to store all of our 2nd hand uniform in. Whilst there is still quite a few bags to sort out (thanks for all of the donations folks!), we hope to have a regular day/time when parents can access this shed. Watch this space.

We did manage to have a second hand uniform sale on Wednesday which was very popular and raised over £150. Mr Wallace was there to officially open the new shed.

Dates for your diary:

Christmas Fair - Saturday 2nd December (11.30am - 2.30pm)

Thank you to everyone who signed up to have an Oakwood Estates board advertising our fair outside their house. We had a tremendous response with over 75 households signed up. Look out for the boards going up this weekend!

This week, children came home with a very important letter that has key information on how you can help with the Christmas Fair. In addition, there were 2 books of raffle tickets and 2 tombola cups. The cups should be filled with stickers, trading cards, stationary, small toys and sweets. Please return filled tombola cups on Friday 24th November (which is non-uniform day). These cups form the 'Kids Tombola' stall which is located in Holly classroom.

Our Christmas Fair stalls cannot run without your help. Please sign up to be on a stall for one hour (or more) using the following volunteer sign up page: https://volunteersignup.org/QXRYM

Finally, please sell as many raffle tickets are you can. We have some great prizes for the raffle.

Junior School Discos - Friday 8th December (4pm-5pm & 5.15pm-6.30pm)

It's time for the Juniors to get down and boogie! Tickets on sale soon.....

Useful Information for Parents and Families

GEMS - Q3 2023 Bear Cubs - 08092023.pdf

Half Term & Christmas Gymnastics & Trampolining Oct 2023.pdf

RBWM Recovery Service Poster Short.pdf

BM RBMHRS Guided Self Help Poster.pdf

Autism in Girls Talk

Tuesday 21st November @ 7:00 pm

at Furze Platt Senior School’s Theatre.

We are joined by Cathy Wassell, who runs the charity, Autism in Girls Network, to talk about how girls are often diagnosed much later than boys due to misconceptions about how it presents itself. Cathy is the mother of a child with autism, who was only diagnosed aged 13 after a mental health crisis.

She can talk both personally and professionally and personally about the challenges of getting a diagnosis and gives practical tips and techniques for those who care for children and teenagers.

Ticket prices are £5 to cover the cost of hosting Cathy at our theatre. Book here: www.ticketsource.co.uk/furzeplatttheatre

Generic2023.pdf

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