Dear Parents/Carers, 

It’s been another fantastic week at Forest Academy, full of curiosity, energy, and joyful learning.

A heartfelt thank you to all who attended our RHE Consultation Meeting this week, it was great to see such a good turn out. Your contributions and reflections are deeply appreciated as we continue to shape a curriculum that nurtures respectful, confident and emotionally literate children. If you missed the meeting, the key information is available on the school website, and staff are always happy to discuss the curriculum with you.

We are also pleased to share that this term’s curriculum newsletters are now available. These outline the key learning for each year group and offer guidance on how you can support your child at home. Click here to view the curriculum newsletters.

Today, our Year 2 and Year 3 children visited the Paddington Bear Experience in London – the first of many carefully planned trips and enrichment opportunities this year. Experiences like this are thoughtfully chosen to extend classroom learning, inspire curiosity and create lasting memories. Thank you to all the parents who made a contribution towards this trip. 

We’re also excited to launch our ‘Beat the Bell’ Challenge, beginning next week. Due to an increase in late arrivals, we will be running this challenge once a week over the next three weeks to encourage excellent punctuality. Children who are in school before the bell rings at 8:45am on the challenge day will earn a special treat every Friday.

Here’s what to expect:

• Week 1 – Tuesday 23rd September: 15 minutes of extra play

• Week 2 – Wednesday 1st October: 15 minutes of extra device time

• Week 3 – Monday 6th October: Mufti Day

Let’s work together to help all our children start the day calm, ready and on time – every minute counts.

Looking ahead

• Tuesday 23rd September, 9:00am – Phonics Workshop for parents. This session is ideal for families with children in Reception and Key Stage 1 and will give practical advice on how to support early reading at home.

• Tuesday 23rd September, 9:30am – Open Morning for prospective Reception 2026 families. If you know families looking for a school place next year, please do share the date with them.

As always, thank you for your continued support and for being such an integral part of our school community. Wishing you a restful weekend

Mrs Lloyd & the Forest Academy Team  

In Reception, the children have been developing their fine motor skills by threading shapes onto strings. This has helped to develop their coordination. Using natural materials, the children were able to create faces. This is linked to the core book, 'It's OK To Be Different'. To help develop the children's understanding of numbers, the children were matching the digits to the number of objects or images. While using the Tap Tap activity, the children were joining shapes to create an image. They had to put the shapes in the desired place. Then use a hammer to tap the tack into the shape to hold it in place before adding another shape. This activity helped with their coordination and developed their use of shapes. Some of the children were able to name the shapes they had used to create their image. Rolling and squashing the playdough helped prepare the playdough for the children to cut out shapes. 

The children have been developing their knowledge of reading and writing by learning the names and the sounds of some of the letters. They know the image of the letter is the grapheme and the sound linked to the letter is the phoneme. The letters they have focused on are; s, a, t, p, i, n, m, and d. The children have also been practising how to write their names and the letters that are linked to their phonics.  We have also read the story of 'The Colour Monster' and discussed the different emotions that they feel.  We have identified the colours that are linked to these emotions, for example yellow for happiness and blue for sadness.

Elm class have had a busy week, starting with learning all about nouns, verbs and adjectives in English. We played a game, finding a word, then in teams, discussing whether it is a doing word, so a verb, or a describing word, an adjective or finally a place, object, person or feeling, therefore making that word a noun. The children then moved on to write sentences describing the narrative of "The Three Billy Goats Stuff' using some of the new words that they had learnt, underlining them in red for an adjective, purple for a noun and blue for a verb. 

We continued to focus on place value in maths this week, using place value charts and multilink cubes to represent numbers, allowing the children to develop digit understanding and its value.

In RHE, we were talking all about kindness, and ways that we can show kindness, words that we can use to make people feel kindness. We began to make a display by writing kind words onto petals, to make a kindness garden for the wall.

In Year 4 this week, the children discussed the importance of recycling as part of our English lesson, which led to learning the skills they needed to write to persuade. They were taught to use logic, reasoning, facts and statistics to write to persuade the reader or their targeted audience. They were asked to choose a subject related both our topic subjects - geography and science, which we will be learning about climate change and the impact on animals, including humans, plants and the environment. 

In art, we are focusing on the artist, Jill Pelto, a climate activist whose work is mainly related to climate change and its impact on the environment. The children were asked to create a mood board to exhibit their knowledge and understanding of climate change and its impact on the environment, animals and plants. 

In maths, the children continue to learn about place value in larger numbers to 10,000. They can identify and create numbers to 10,000 using a dice, and partition them into their place values. They understand the value of the digits in each number and can use the part-whole model to partition these numbers. Next week, the children will be learning how to use a flexible partition using their understanding of addition and subtraction as place value.

We have had a wonderful week in Rowan class, filled with creativity, curiosity, and hard work across all subjects. This week in maths, we consolidated our understanding of place value and extended our knowledge of negative numbers. The children also revisited strategies for adding and subtracting, showing increasing confidence and accuracy in their problem-solving. 

In English, we have been inspired by our core text, 'Pig Heart Boy'. The children planned and innovated their own first-person diary entries, showing a deep sense of empathy towards the main character. We explored how using descriptive language and a variety of sentence openers helps to build atmosphere. The children's writing outcomes were fantastic - showing a range of punctuation, sentence starters, cohesion and emotive language. 

Our geography lessons encouraged us to look more closely at our local area, exploring the changes that can be identified and discussing the factors that might have influenced them. 

Art was a particular highlight this week! The children practised a range of shading techniques, including cross-hatching, scumbling, stippling, and blending. They then applied these skills to bring an image of a heart to life on the page, creating some truly impressive work. 

It's been a week full of focus and imagination, and we are so proud of how engaged the children have been. Well done, Rowan class!

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