Dear Parents/Carers, 

Welcome to the final newsletter of this half term. On Tuesday, our Year 6 class visited Croydon Fire Station as part of the Junior Citizen scheme. The children took part in engaging fire safety workshops, learned the rules of safe travel, and practised essential life skills. Their behaviour, both during the session and while travelling to and from the station, was exemplary—they even received compliments from members of the public. Well done, Year 6! 

Attendance this week has been excellent. On Tuesday, we reached an impressive 98.8%, with only three children absent. A huge thank you for your ongoing commitment to school attendance. As we return after half term, let’s also give focus to punctuality, ensuring every child is in class and ready to learn before the bell rings.

Today, we proudly supported Show Racism the Red Card, the UK’s leading anti-racism education charity. Children were invited to wear something red to show their support for a society free from racism. This campaign aligns closely with our current core value of 'Respect'.

We are extremely proud of our diverse school community. Through our global curriculum, we aim to prepare pupils to become informed, respectful citizens of the 21st century, and agents of positive change. As part of this work, children were invited to create anti-racism posters as a home learning project.

Originally, we planned to display only the winning poster—but the quality of the entries was so impressive that we have chosen to showcase many of them around the school. Our Rights Respecting Ambassadors, Learning Ambassadors, and Health and Wellbeing JLT members carefully judged the competition and selected the top three entries. Well done to all the children who took part, and congratulations to our three poster winners - Adam (Y6) first place; Cleo (Y6) second place and Shayla-May (Y3) third place.

Thank you to everyone who attended Parents’ Evenings this week. These meetings are a valuable opportunity to understand how your child is progressing and how best to support them. If you were unable to attend, please do arrange a time to speak with your child’s class teacher early next half term. Thank you also to those who completed our Parent Survey during Parents' Evening. If you didn’t get the chance, the survey can still be accessed by clicking here.

We are also delighted to welcome Miss Bobb, who has recently joined the Forest Academy team as a Learning Support Assistant. We’re thrilled to have her on board and know she will be a valuable addition to our school community.

Looking Ahead to Autumn 2

We have a busy and exciting half term ahead, with more school trips, class assemblies, and festive celebrations. We will continue to keep you informed of all key dates and events—so please keep an eye on your app messages and weekly newsletters.

A reminder that school reopens on Monday 3rd November, following our two-week half-term break. We hope all our pupils—and you, their families—enjoy a restful and happy break together.

Thank you, as always, for your continued support in making Forest Academy a wonderful place for children to learn, grow and thrive.

Finally, to all those in our community who will be celebrating, we wish you a very Happy Diwali—may it be filled with joy, light and togetherness.

Mrs Lloyd & the Forest Academy Team

In maths, the children have been exploring the concept of comparing quantities. They have been identifying which set has the most, which has the least (fewer), and recognising when sets have equal amounts. Using practical resources such as counters, cubes and everyday objects, the children counted the items in each set to check and confirm their thinking—developing both their number sense and reasoning skills.

Building on this, they also practised creating their own sets of objects to represent different amounts, before matching them to the correct numerals. Once confident, the children progressed to ordering sets from the smallest to the largest amount, focusing on numbers up to five. These early counting and comparison skills lay an important foundation for later mathematical understanding, and it was great to see the children growing in confidence.

In English, the children have been learning about families as part of their ‘All About Me’ theme. They enjoyed drawing pictures of their own families, thinking carefully about each family member’s features and who lives in their home. Using their early phonics knowledge, the children then labelled the people in their family portraits, showing growing independence in their writing.

In our phonics lessons, the children have made fantastic progress with learning how to segment and blend phonemes to read three-letter words including s-i-p, p-a-t, t-i-p and t-a-p. 

We are incredibly proud of all our reception pupils for completing their first half term at Forest Academy. They have settled in brilliantly, adapted to new routines, and shown real enthusiasm for learning. It has been a joy to watch their confidence grow, and we look forward to seeing all they will achieve in the weeks and months ahead.

Year 2 have had another fantastic week of learning as they have been excited about writing the final drafts of their diary entries. They worked hard and remembered to use a range of time adverbials such as first, next, sometime later and finally. They also included lots of emotive language and worked hard on up-levelling the adjectives to make the writing interesting. Once the diaries were polished, we published them.

In maths, we have been working on recalling and retaining number bonds to 10, 20 and 100. The children enjoyed a practical lesson using Numicons to show number bond facts. They have linked the number bonds knowledge with simple addition and subtraction problems.

In RE, they have been looking at different religions and how they perceive God. They looked at how the Jewish faith sees God as their sovereign and someone who is everywhere. In addition, they learnt all about the Mezuzah and the Shema prayer and how Jewish people use them.

This week in year 4 the children have worked extremely hard to finish their speech about climate change, the impact and what could be done to minimise the impacts and possibly stop it completely. They worked collaboratively to create the final outcome for the core texts they studied this half term. To understand the extend and seriousness of climate change, the class visited Spring Wood Park as a field study on the subject.

 In art, the children used the skills they learnt from Jill Pelto's work to create an image about the devastation caused by climate change mostly  through human activities to create awareness about how fragile and vulnerable our planet has become. They used line graph and water paint to illustrate and express their understanding and feelings about the endemic climate crisis.  

In maths, the children have learnt and understood how to add and subtract two 4 digit numbers involving more than one exchange. They are able to use their knowledge of place value and key vocabulary to explain the strategies they need to use to find the answers to the questions. They are able to spot when an answer to a calculation is incorrect and the steps they need to take to rectify it. 

In geography, they created a double page spread using all the information they had learnt about the UK and Sri Lanka. They showed the physical and human features, the climate zones and the population in both UK and Sri Lanka. The compared differences and similarities in both countries and how human and physical geography impacted the lives of the people. 

We can hardly believe that we have reached the end of the first half term of Year 6! The past two weeks have been packed with incredible learning, new experiences, and fantastic progress. Your children have worked extremely hard, showing great focus and determination in all they do. They should be incredibly proud of their efforts, and we are certainly very proud of them. A well-deserved break is just around the corner!

In Engish, our budding authors have been honing their narrative writing skills. They produced some truly moving third person accounts describing the character named Cameron's experience in hospital. The children were challenged to bring the story to life and create a real impact on the reader. To achieve this, they expertly wove in powerful figurative language, including striking similes, thoughtful metaphors and clever personification. They produced cohesive and emotionally engaging stories. 

The children have been tackling complex multiplication and division with fantastic confidence. They have secured their understanding of several key skills, including, solving multiplication problems with 4-digit numbers by 1-digit numbers (e.g., 3475 x 8). They have developed efficient strategies for division, including dividing by factors. They solved challenging multi-step problems involving both multiplication and division. They understood and correctly applied the order of operations using BIDMAS and used mental calculations and estimations to check the reasonableness of their answers. 

To round off our topic on the circulatory system, the children created fabulous double-page spreads to showcase everything they have learned. Their work demonstrated a brilliant understanding of how our heart, blood, and blood vessels work together to keep us healthy. They were truly fantastic!

A real highlight of the past fortnight was our fantastic trip to Croydon Fire Station as part of the Junior Citizen scheme. The children had an amazing time participating in a range of important and interactive activities. They listened to brilliant fire safety talks from the firefighters, learned the rules of safe travel, and even had the opportunity to board a TfL bus inside a mock underground station to practise emergency procedures. The children had so much fun and were an absolute credit to our school, upholding the Forest values with impeccable behaviour and enthusiasm throughout the day.

We want to say a huge well done to all of our Year 6 pupils for their hard work, positive attitudes, and resilience this half term. They are a wonderful group of young people, and it is a pleasure to teach them.

If you have concerns about a child (or their families) welfare, contact Croydon Council’s Single Point of Contact (SPOC) 

Telephone: 020 8726 6400 

Out of hours: 020 8726 6400 (ask for out of hours team) 

Email: childreferrals@croydon.gov.uk 

Office Hours: Monday – Friday 9:00 – 16:00 

If you think a child is at risk of immediate harm telephone 999