Dear Parents/Carers, 

It’s been another purposeful week at Forest Academy, full of engaging learning and exciting opportunities for our children.

On Tuesday, some of our parents joined us for a phonics workshop, where they enjoyed a fun and interactive session designed to support early reading skills. The workshop provided a hands-on experience, giving parents and children the chance to explore how phonics is taught in class – including learning about letter sounds, blending, and segmenting words.

It was a valuable opportunity that helped strengthen the connection between home and school learning, and we are grateful to all who attended. We’re pleased to announce that we will be holding a follow-up Phonics and Early Reading Workshop in Autumn 2, and we warmly encourage all Reception and KS1 parents to attend on Tuesday 11th of November at 9:00 am. 

This week also saw our children taking part in the Pupil Parliament elections. We were impressed by the thoughtful speeches, mature campaigning, and enthusiasm shown by all candidates. It’s inspiring to see so many children keen to take on leadership roles and represent their peers. See below for a full list of elected representatives.

As always, thank you for your continued support. We look forward to another positive week ahead.

Mrs Lloyd & the Forest Academy Team  

Year 1 have had a brilliant start to the new school year, settling into their routines with growing independence and enthusiasm. The children have quickly adapted to the structure of the day and are showing a positive attitude towards their learning.

In maths, Year 1 have been developing their counting skills through a variety of fun games and practical activities. They are becoming much more confident with number recognition, ordering, and counting forwards and backwards — and are now beginning to explore counting in twos, fives, and tens!

Their sentence writing is also going from strength to strength. The children are working hard to remember capital letters, finger spaces, and full stops, and many are now beginning to add extra detail using adjectives and conjunctions.

This term, they have been exploring printmaking in art, using sponges, leaves, and other textured materials to create bold and colourful repeating patterns. They have really enjoyed working collaboratively, sharing ideas and experimenting with different techniques to make some beautiful group artwork.

Outdoor learning has also been a highlight, with the children engaging in activities that encourage teamwork, curiosity, and problem-solving. Whether they’re collecting natural materials, building structures, or working together on outdoor challenges, it’s been wonderful to see their confidence grow in a more hands-on learning environment.

We’re incredibly proud of how well the children have started the year and can’t wait to see all the wonderful learning that’s still to come!

This week in English, our budding biographers have been hard at work! The children started by coming up with lots of creative and thoughtful questions they might ask someone about their life. Then came the exciting part — they put their interviewing skills to the test with none other than our Headteacher, Mrs. Lloyd! She kindly shared stories and memories from her life, giving the children plenty of inspiration (and some wonderful notes) to use in their own biography writing.

In maths, we have wrapped up our place value topic. Over the past couple of weeks, the children have mastered a variety of skills, including partitioning numbers up to 1,000, estimating on a number line, and comparing numbers with confidence. They’ve worked incredibly hard and should be proud of their progress. Next week, we’re moving on to an exciting new challenge — addition and subtraction!

In art, we’ve been continuing our exploration of the vibrant work of artist Corey Barksdale. This week, the children began experimenting with different shading techniques, discovering how these can bring depth and detail to their own creations. It’s been wonderful to see their confidence and creativity grow as they put these new skills into practice!

This week, Year 5 have been busy applying skills learnt in English to write an entertaining narrative. They generated descriptive vocabulary and figurative language to describe a setting before integrating dialogue to advance the action. Every child worked hard to remember to correctly punctuate their dialogue and put inverted commas around the words that were spoken by characters. I look forward to the class writing their own version of the next chapter of our core text, 'The Boy and the Globe' next week.

In maths, the children learnt how to compare and order numbers to 1,000,000. They were able to apply their previous learning on place value to successfully identify larger and smaller numbers. The children then moved onto rounding to the nearest 10, 100 and 1,000 using a number line for support.

In history, the children learnt about the key events during Henry VIII's reign and how this impacted Tudor society. They also learnt about the Tudor class system and the types of food eaten by Tudor people. In science, the children learnt about the life cycle of plants and were able to explain this through a comic strip. 

In RE, the children learnt about the importance of Sewa to Sikhs and how they regularly serve their local community. In art, the children learnt how to sketch a portrait of a face before experimenting with painting techniques. In French, the children learnt to recognise, recall and spell numbers 21-31.

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