Diary dates - coming up soon!

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

Friday 9th February - Term ends

Friday 9th February - FPSA Adult Disco: 8pm - 11pm

Monday 12th - Friday 16th February - Half term holiday (school closed)

Monday 19th February - Term starts

Tuesday 20th February - Early Years Mastering Number Parent Workshop: 2:00 - 3:00 pm

Thursday 22nd February - Early Years Mastering Number Parent Workshop: 2:00 - 3:00 pm

Friday 8th March - World Book Day

Monday 11th March - Parents' Evening booking system opens @ 8:00 am

Friday 15th March - Red Nose Day for Comic Relief

Friday 15th March - Parents' Evening bookings close @ 4:00 pm

Monday 18th March - Parents' Evening: 3:40 - 7:00 pm

Wednesday 20th March - Parents' Evening: 3:40 - 7:00 pm

Friday 22nd March - FPSA Happy School Bags Collection

Friday 22nd March - FPSA Quiz Night @ 8:00 pm

Tuesday 26th March - Jump Start Jonny visit! 

Wednesday 27th March - FPSA AGM: 7:45 - 9:00 pm

Thursday 28th March - Year 1 Marketplace event @ 9:15 am

Thursday 28th March - Term ends

FPPF Well-Being Warriors

Our two schools have combined together to create a team of Well-Being Warriors with the aim to focus on well-being for the children, staff and our families.

The staff team has representatives from different roles across the schools - Mrs Barker, Mrs Singh, Mr Wallace, Mrs B and Mr Lutteman (FPJS) and they are joined by five year 6 pupils who have recently completed Royal borough of Windsor and Maidenhead Well-Being Champions training.

We will be sharing our plans in newsletters but we wanted to let you know a few of our upcoming events and ideas aimed at supporting our children’s’ Mental Health and Well-Being.

Firstly, we will be organising a special day during National Children’s Mental Week (5th-11th February) for the children to take part in sessions such as Mindfulness and Yoga. The theme this year is ‘My Voice Matters’ and assemblies and sessions will be focused on this theme. More information to follow.

We will also be launching our new FPPF Well-Being Challenges, based around the main six pillars of well-being; Take Notice, Give, Learn, Active, Care and Connect. More information will follow on how you and your child can take part in challenges through the year to not only gain rewards in school but also help support each and everyone’s well-being.

For families, we want to draw your attention to our websites where we have some information that may be of use to you. We will be adding to this as the year progresses so please do send in any links or information that you feel may be useful to other families.

Finally, please do remember that there is always someone here if you need to talk to someone or need someone’s help. Mrs B, our Family Support worker, is always happy to meet with families to help them through challenges in their lives, especially at this time of year. The festive season can be difficult for some families so please do seek support if you need it.

Our Bumblebee, Caterpillar and Dragonfly children have been busy continuing with their project 'All About Animals'. They have been finding out lots of information and facts about animals through our non-fiction animal books. The children have been sorting books into fiction and non-fiction and discussing the differences between the two. They have absolutely loved creating a 'What am I?' guessing sheet about one of their favourite animals. The children challenged their friends to guess what their animal could be using their descriptive clues about the animals characteristics!

Early Years have been taking part in the Big Garden Birdwatch. They designed their very own binoculars to help them focus on the birds that they could see in the woodlands and used i-pads to take photos of the birds, inspired by our own wildlife photographer Mr Vogel. Following this, the children created some detailed drawings and paintings of some of the birds that they saw. After looking at Mr Vogel's photography of wildlife, the children were extremely keen to show him their pictures/paintings of birds - he was very impressed with their artistic and photography skills! 

This week our Bumblebees, Caterpillars and Dragonflies have been busy celebrating and learning about Chinese/Lunar New Year. They were interested to learn the story of the Chinese Zodiac and made lots of links to our previous learning about animals and celebrations. This year is the year of the Dragon so the children were extra excited to make some colourful dragons creations, as well as good luck messages and exploring noodles and rice! They have been challenging themselves and practising hard to use chopsticks, developing their fine motor and hand eye coordination skills.  The children learnt how to say Gong Hei Fat Choy and sang the song together. 

Year 1

We have been busy learning about the artist Laurie Hastings and how she uses different types of lines to create her sea inspired art work.  We have designed our own seascapes and have learnt how to copy our designs onto styrafoam.  We have used the styrafoam as a template in order to make a print of our original design.  It was a real 'WOW!' moment when our prints were revealed for the first time.  We are very proud of our final results!

As musicians we have experimented with the sounds that different untuned instruments make in order to create our own soundscape based on an emergency theme from a picture.  We then used adjectives to describe what was happening in the picture. 

The donated junk boxes have been put to excellent use, transforming them into different kinds of emergency vehicles!  Following on from our Sticky Knowledge about axles and wheels we have now created moveable vehicles.  We spent time adding details to make them realistic as well as evaluating the finished vehicle.

In maths we have been learning how to write the numbers 11-20 in words.  We have also worked hard on understanding the difference between volume and capacity.  We have been investigating this by using different units such as paperclips, scrunched up paper, cubes and water.  This has enabled us to use lots of comparative vocabulary.

We have continued to be authors over the last two weeks, writing some exciting dragon stories. We have also been thinking carefully about including descriptive words and phrases such as adjectives, expanded noun phrases and similes.  We also acted out some possible scenarios as part of the planning process and created some art work.

As part of our Inventor Sticky Knowledge we finally put all of our skills and ideas into practice and created our very own dragon stew. We all helped to prepare the ingredients (tomatoes being the trickiest to cut!!), cook and taste the stew. We certainly have some budding chefs!

We finished our focus on warm and cold colours thinking carefully about creating our very own Fire and Ice collages using a range of colours and materials. Some amazing masterpieces were created!

In PE we created our own dragon dance to mark Chinese New Year after watching a video clip of some amazing dragon dancers!  We had lots of fun trying to recreate some of their moves in time to some traditional music. We were lucky enough to be able to use a dragon from China which was kindly donated by Mrs Parkinson. Thank you so much, as it made our dragon dance sessions even more special!

We joined in the annual RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch by observing, identifying and counting the birds that we could see around school.  Our resident expert Mr Vogel joined us to lend a hand in the identification of birds and their different songs.  Afterwards we returned to class to create a bar chart.  Next we will submit our data to the RSPB.

During maths we have been learning about multiplication and division and finding different ways to show our learning.  We have also been looking at doubles and halves and how these are linked to multiplication and division.

We have also been focusing on our music Sticky Knowledge, learning how to play tuned instruments and using our voices expressively. We hope that you have enjoyed watching our musical masterpiece on Seesaw! :-)

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. 

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.

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.