On Friday 10th June, year 3 took part in an amazing Egyptian day to kick off their learning on the Ancient Egyptians.

In the morning, the children learnt about Egyptian writing (or hieroglyphics!) and created their own cartouches. Following this, we all watched a fantastic show where we entered an ancient tomb and became enchanted by a historical curse!

During the afternoon, the children worked in 2 groups to learn more about Egyptian gods and artefacts.

And all whilst dressed as Egyptians too! See the Year 3 section for more photos.

On Friday 10th June, year 4 took a coach up to London's Embankment. There was much excitement on the coach and, I'm sure our wonderful parent helpers will agree, many renditions of the songs that Mr Clark have taught the children over the last 8 weeks!!

First, we went on 40 minute river cruise along the Thames. The weather was glorious and we were able to sit on the upper deck of the boat and listen to our tour guide tell us all about the London landmarks that we could see. It was particularly interesting to see the entrance to the Tower of London where Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard would've been taken before they were beheaded!

Afterwards, we went onto the London Eye. It was incredible to see the London landmarks from above and we were even able to pick out Wembley Stadium in the distance!

We finished our trip with a picnic lunch in Jubilee park before returning to FPJS.

A great day was had by all! Thank you to all the year 4 children for their amazing behaviour and representing FPJS so brilliantly and also to our parent volunteers for all your help!

Goodbye and Good Luck to Mrs Emma Hawkins, our finance officer who joined us during the lockdown period of 2020. Emma has been a fantastic staff member who has worked incredibly hard during her time at the school, and has supported all the development of the behind the scenes work in the school office. Emma leaves us for a different type of challenge at RBWM and we wish her every success.

A huge congratulations to Mrs Slyfield and her husband who welcomed baby Rosie Slyfield into the world on Friday 3rd June at 11.45am. Baby Rosie and Mrs Slyfield are both doing well and everyone at FPJS hopes to have a cuddle with the newborn soon!

Mrs Rosie Lawrence-Davis trained as a teacher with us in 2016 and we were thrilled when she accepted her first teaching role at FPJS. She very quickly moved to her current role as Y3 team leader where she has been both a fantastic teacher and manager. Mrs Lawrence-Davis and her husband have recently moved house, and Rosie has been commuting from Guildford each day! Mrs L-D has successfully secured a phase leader role in a new school in Guildford where she will begin in September. We will miss her very much as FPJS, but wish her every success in her new role.

Mrs Lorna Fraser, our current Admin Officer has simply been the control centre of Furze Platt Juniors! Lorna joined the school in 1998 and has worked an incredible 24 years service! Lorna will be retiring from her role at the end of this academic year, and she is very much looking forward to spending time with her grandchildren. Lorna's knowledge of all the pupils and families over the years is second to none and we will be truly lost without her knowledge, her calm demeanor and her wonderful smile. We wish her all the best for her retirement and thank her for all her hard work over two decades!

We are delighted to introduce you to Mrs Cindy Barry, who will be taking over as Year 3 team leader from September. Mrs Barry is a highly experienced team leader who is currently working at Dedworth Green First school, who has a passion for maths and is an avid Arsenal supporter! Mrs Barry also lives very close to the school and is thrilled to be joining our team!

It has been a fantastic start to our last term!

In maths, we have been learning all about measurement and capacity and have been thinking about how to convert between metres and centimetres as well as how to read different scales when weighing. Feel free to put these new skills to use over the weekend in your cooking and baking!

Our English learning has seen us mastering the perfect present tense and honing in on our grammar. This week, we have used kungfu punctuation to really think about exactly where those full stops, exclamation marks and question marks go.

We have continued to work hard on our sewing, designing our final book mark on the iPads and creating a pattern that we will follow as well as creating our own Egyptian mummies too! In topic, we started our exciting learning on Egyptians with a wonderful show and workshop from Freshwater Theatre - I wonder if anyone was able to rid themselves of the curse!

Mrs Lawrence-Davis Y3 Team Leader

Our last term in year 4 has arrived and the children have started, once again, in spectacular style.

We have begun a unit in English looking at playscripts. Last week saw us learning about stage directions and body language and this week we have been analysing short films. This is all building up to us creating our own movies on what year 4 is like so that we can share these with the current year 3 children before the end of the year. Keep an eye on Seesaw to see all our hard work!

In maths, last week focused on reading data from bar charts and pictograms and this week we have moved on to learning about different types of angles. We will be continuing our shape learning next week as we move on to looking at lines of symmetry.

In our topic lessons, we have been learning about continents, countries, the equator and the northern and southern hemispheres. It has become clear that we have some expert geographers among us!

Our first week back culminated in an excellent trip to the London Eye and a River Cruise along the Thames.

What a great start back!

Mrs Barbosa, Y4 Team Leader

I can't believe we are in the final term of the school year already!

We have now started our last history unit of work all about the Maya civilisation. The children already have a good overview of the time period and how it fits in to their previous learning on the Ancient Egyptians and the Ancient Greeks. We have been researching the Maya number system, comparing it to Roman numerals and deciding which is the most efficient system to use.

Meanwhile, in Design and Technology, the children have started to research different types of bread found all over the world. In the coming weeks we are looking forward to taste testing a variety of breads before designing our own recipes to bake.

In Maths we are learning all about position and direction. The children have learnt how to correctly read co-ordinates and also reflect and translate shapes. In English we are analysing the fantastic poem, the Jabberwocky. In the coming weeks we will be creating our own poems based on this and will be using Garage Band to perform our poems.

Mrs Pierron, Y5 Team Leader