A - 4th Ordinary

The Mercy of God

This week, we focused on the theme of mercy as we looked ahead to the Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A). We heard the famous text from which we discern the “Gospel Values”, The Sermon on the Mount - containing the Beatitudes. Jesus shared with the people the recipe for true happiness; and one of the ingredients is mercy.

Having the strength to relent, to give up our anger or frustration and to show compassion instead, reveals a confidence of faith that Jesus describes. We can be merciful in our thoughts and actions when faced with testing experiences. Having recently attended a School Council meeting, it feels like an area of our school life that would benefit from a merciful mindset is the Pokémon card craze. Some children are frustrated by the popularity of them, some are upset and angry because of bad experiences, some have behaved unkindly but need the mercy of the community to acknowledge their fault. Let's pray that the mercy of God will make our school a happier place this week.

Data Heads

This week in Year 2 the children have all enjoyed a 'Computing Day'. This enables us to cover the objectives for the Computing curriculum for this half term in an immersive style. The children have learned about making tally charts and pictograms, before inputting this data onto iPads to create their charts. The skills that the children were learning also linked to many of the Maths objectives for their age group too, such as interpreting and constructing simple pictograms and tally charts.

Maybe your child would like to have a go making a chart at home? https://www.j2e.com/j2data/

Sources

As part of our RE unit, Sources, Year 6 have been learning and exploring the value and purpose of the Bible in everyday life and how it aids Christians today. As part of the lesson, we held a debate considering whether or not it is appropriate or acceptable to shorten the Bible and which aspect is most important when using the Bible in everyday life: celebrating, living or sharing? The children had to consider many different elements as well as link their ideas to scripture. Freya in 6N commented that, 'We can live as Holy Christians because we have the Bible'. An interesting thought from Ayaan was, 'It is not only the living that spread the Good News but also angels'. Many children commented on the Bible as a tool for teaching and how this links to how we live. Lili explained that, 'Through living we can fulfil our vocation' and Carin explained that we, 'Can live through celebrating and sharing'.

Nursery New Year!

This week in nursery it has all been about celebrating the Lunar New Year. The children have been learning about the Lunar New Year story, how the animals crossed the river to gain a year named after them. They really enjoyed acting this story out and playing with the masks independently afterwards. The children have also explored some Chinese role play food and utensils as well as dressing up in some clothes and making a class dragon head to help us act out a dragon dance. We have been busy developing those important muscles in our hands and fingers to support our fine motor skills. We have achieved this by mark making with chopsticks in coloured sand, using pens to decorate rabbit templates (it’s the year of the rabbit this year) and using scissors to cut out lucky money envelopes and make our own lanterns.

Sounds Good!

Year 4 were investing pitch this week in science. We used water in glass bottles to try to recreate a simple nursery rhyme. We noticed that the more water the bottle contained, the higher the pitch of the note it made when we beat it with a spoon. We adjusted the pitch by adding or removing water to create the desired note. We reflected afterwards that we could improve the experiment by working in a quieter area (6 groups in a classroom affected the quality of the sound that we could hear) or we could use a different container which might make a clearer sound.

Book Launch

We are very excited to announce we have a budding author in our midst! Alfie in Year 3 has been busy writing and illustrating books at home over the last few weeks, and has brought in his new releases to show us!

We really enjoyed the different genres of books that Alfie has written - his humorous story called "The Lost Leg", and his non-fiction writing about dinosaurs and football. We have been especially pleased to see lots of the features of writing which we have been looking at in Year 3 appearing in his books, including adverbials, speech and onomatopoeia. Alfie has even taken the time to create a wordsearch at the end of some of his books and written a synopsis on the back of each of them.

Well done, Alfie! I'm sure it won't be long until we're queuing outside bookshops to be first in line for your latest bestseller!

Happy Lunar New Year!

This week in Sign Club, we celebrated Chinese New Year and learnt some animal signs from the zodiac. A big thank you to Lilly and Junaid in Year 4 for demonstrating the signs! Sign club would like to wish a lovely new year to all!

Lunar new year BSL.mov

Getting into groups

Year 1 have enjoyed Computing mornings this week, with a focus on 'Data Handling'. We spent time practically sorting objects into groups based on their properties. We then took to the iPads and were all given a group/category and challenged to find objects from around the school that would fit this category to photograph. From this, we linked data handling to our last Computing topic on photography! Finally, we searched the web for objects and created documents of images that had the right properties for our groups. We needed to remember that, when searching for objects to fit a certain criteria, specifics are key!

Year 3 Statistics

This week, Year 3 have been tackling statistics in maths. Children have built on their learning from Year 2, collecting data, recording it in tally charts and drawing pictograms. They used the results to draw bar graphs. Accuracy and presentation have been key in displaying their findings. The children particularly enjoyed working in pairs carrying out a dice rolling activity. They recorded the frequency of each number rolled during 10 minutes, noting their results in tally charts. They used these results to draw bar charts, and honed their reasoning skills answering a set of questions about the data they had collected. Children were then challenged to write their own question for their partner about the results.

Call the police!

The children walked into school on Thursday to be greeted by upturned tables and chairs! Along with all the paper going missing. What happened?

Luckily, the children had been learning all about police officers this week and put on their detective hats. After a little investigating the children found some fingerprints around each classroom. CCTV images showed us the 3 main suspects: Mrs Spacagna, Mrs Evans and Mrs Galivn. After a little questioning, all 3 suspects gave their reason to be in the classroom. Mrs Evans was collecting some Post-it notes, Mrs Spacagna was saying hello and Mrs Galvin was seeing if the recycling bins had been emptied. There was one final clue to who the culprit was... a blue paper trail leading all the way down to...... Mrs Galvin's office!

The children were fantastic detectives and made all kinds of resources to help them, such as walkie talkies, torches, badges and hats. Using their knowledge of fingerprints from our experiment finding our own prints on balloons.

What a day it was! And, Mrs Galvin apologised. She only took the paper to teach us a lesson about not wasting it!

Lego Maths

This week in Maths Year 5 have been learning about equivalent fractions and we started the week by using Lego to create a fraction wall and investigate different equivalent fractions. The children enjoyed using practical equipment to understand how to find equivalent fractions.

4F Forgive

Our thanks to 4F for a beautifully devised worship this morning, sharing with us the power of forgiveness. The children explained that, when we choose to forgive it's like setting a prisoner free (it's just that we later discover the prisoner is actually us!) When we choose to let go of the hurt and pain that others cause us, we also let go of the hurt and pain that we carry around by begrudging those people. The children retold the parable of the prodigal son, in verse, to help us understand that our father in heaven is also ready and waiting to forgive us.

Forgiving Friends

Congratulations to this week's Witness Award winners, all of whom have shown great strength of character in their willingness to forgive others this week. Well done and God bless you:

Harry
Luna
Angelica

KOOSA Kids February Half Term Holiday Club at St. Joseph's Primary School, Guildford.pdf

Report abuse