A - Pentecost

Christ's Spirit

We looked ahead to this Sunday’s celebration of Pentecost - marking the birth of the Church and the end of the Easter season. Jesus assured his disciples that his Spirit dwells within them and, with God, they can achieve anything!

We shared with the children this week the myriad of opportunities we experience every day to feel the Spirit prompting us. From unloading the dishwasher to starting the day with a smile, the Holy Spirit urges us to live our best life. This week's curriculum focus on Global Goals was another way to see God's Spirit in action all around our world.

For a modern day experience of the Pentecost encounter, St Mary’s Church celebrates a vibrant international Mass this Sunday at 11:15am, with many different languages, cultures (and foods!) from our community represented. Do come and join us!

Pentecost Prayers

In celebration of our international school family this Pentecost, Miss Nicholls has kindly coordinated this wonderful celebration of prayers from around the world. God bless you children!

International Prayers .mp4

Prickly Visitors!

One of the targets of Global Goal 15 - Life on Land - is keeping animals safe and looking after our wildlife. In our English lessons, Year 1 are making fact files all about hedgehogs. On Wednesday, we were lucky to have some very exciting visitors come into school - Harry and Henry the hedgehogs! We learned so many facts about them...

- Hedgehogs have over 5,000 spikes on their body which they use to protect themselves.

- There are less than 1,000,000 of them in the UK

- Hedgehogs are nocturnal and if you see one in the day, away from its nest, it may need your help!

- They are omnivores and love to eat worms, snails, beetles, apples and berries, even frogs if they can catch them! But, do not feed them cows milk as is it bad for their tummies!

We are now filled with all the knowledge we need to write interesting fact files.

Climate Crisis

As part of Global Goals week, year 6 explored the impact of climate change. As a rights respecting school, we know that children have the right to speak freely on the issues that affect them and that adults should listen to them and take them seriously. Nothing is more important than protecting our planet and the children in year 6 are clearly very passionate about this. We looked at the devastating effect of bushfires on the Australian landscape and created powerful images through art to represent this.

In our maths, we analysed graphs, showing temperature over time, and compared this to the average in the mid 20th Century. Angelica, Noah and Francesco showed incredible skill in interpreting the data representations- well done.

Take a look at some of our incredible work...

Nursery Cake News

A few weeks ago the Nursery staff, Nursery parents and grandparents were busy baking and making some delicious cakes for the Nursery cake sale. We were overwhelmed by how many cakes were donated. Due to the amount of cakes we had, the sale was opened up to the school children and we even held a mini cake sale the following week.

Thank you to all those that baked and came along to buy a cake or two. We raised £208 for the Nursery to buy some new equipment for the garden area.

Roaring Music Success in Year 3!

This half term in Music, Year 3, has been learning ‘The Dragon Song’. It is a contemporary piece of music written in 2017 by Joanna Mangona and Pete Readman and tells the story of Lesley the Dragon, who flies around the world in search of friendship.

The children have learnt the song, played it on the recorders and glockenspiels, improvised and composed their riffs for the chorus.

Composing was fun as they all got to use the Chromebooks in pairs and create their riffs, which they then tried to play. This was the trickiest part, as they had to remember the note lengths and how many beats to hold the note for.

To add more excitement to the unit, the children explored how to read and play rhythms using the Boomwhackers. Boomwhackers are plastic tubes with a specific note. After the initial excitement, the children focused on reading the music and playing their whacker. They even achieved complete ‘silence’ within a piece of music in their final lesson in the right places!

Fishing for Sustainability

The Global Goal focus for Year 4 was Life below Water which allowed us to make some lovely cross-curricular links. In particular, we looked at the effects of sustainable and over-fishing in our oceans. The children considered how this would affect life underwater, linking it to their developing knowledge of food chains which we have learned about in Science. Then, the children used their mathematical skills of statistics and graphing to represent the percentage of sustainable and over-fishing. We decided that the visual representation of the data shown in a bar graph was a much more effective way to make the point than the tabular format showing raw data. We will revisit these statistical skills in our Maths unit after half term. Later on, we considered the problem of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and discussed how it came into being and ways to solve it. We expect to see a much more environmentally friendly Year 4 who reduce, reuse and recycle more than ever!

Quality Education!

In Reception, we have been learning about Global Goal number 4 - Quality Education. The children were marvellous at explaining why school is so important and understood that learning is key! The children then had the opportunity to learn some new skills and tried their hand at origami, baking, tap dancing, sign language and making playdough. What a fun but important day!

Printing Perfection in Year 5

We started the week off by researching our focus artist: William Morris. We found out lots of interesting facts about him, such as he also made tapestries, furniture and even considered becoming a priest before he turned to art! We then tried to replicate his style before we experimented with different methods of printing to see which were the most successful. After we had designed our tile, we made our own repeating pattern wallpaper inspired by the examples of his work we had seen earlier in the week. The children worked extremely hard, got very messy but ultimately had a wonderful time celebrating an influential artist.

Football Triumph!

Last Sunday, ourselves, Sam and Malakai went to Addlestone for a football tournament. Off to a great start, we won our first game 3-0 but unfortunately the next match was 1-0 to Walton Snakes, then we lost 2-0 to Woking Aliens. We were thrilled to hear we had got into the plate tournament. It was unbelievable. We beat our first opponents 6-0 so we reached the quarter finals. We were all very tired. In the next game we won 3-1, so that meant we had two more games to play. We won the semis and the finals, so we won the plate! We were joyful and exhausted.

Harry and Seb (3I)

Toilet Rescue!

The children in Year 2 have been busy writing letters to the PFSA asking if they can help to fund twinning a toilet! This is because they have been learning all about clean water as part of Global Goals Day. The children researched what it means to twin a toilet and the lack of education in some countries meaning that people do not have the knowledge and skills to build a toilet. Just £60 will help to provide the necessary resources for people to learn how they can build sustainable toilets.

In the eye of the beholder

In Science, Year 6 have been learning about light. We have discovered what light is and how we see. We have also looked at Newton's Theory of Colour and tested his hypothesis with our own spinners. This week, after observing and making predictions about optical illusions and creating a thaumatrope, we delved into the eye and what enables us to see. We challenged the children to create an explanation for how we see things, recording how light travels from a light source and enters our eyes in order for us to see. As well as this, we asked the children to include information about the effect of too much light or too little light, how we see near and far away and finally how your eyes alter depending on the amount of light.

Take a look at some of their fantastic work, including very detailed explanations from Oscar and Ayaan.

To Co-Op, and beyond...

This week Reception took a sunny outing to the Co-Op! All week the children have been planning a superhero party and thinking of food, games and music the children want to have at the party. At the Co-Op children had the opportunity to spend money on buying treats for the whole year group. Each group had a list of items they needed to buy and a wallet of money. They loved having the opportunity to collect food, speak to the cashier and collect their change. We cannot wait for the party on Friday afternoon!

Super St Andrew's

Congratulations to St Andrew's Class for an amazing class worship, all about the power of the Holy Spirit. The children explain how, just like superheroes, the Spirit gives us gifts that can transform the world: patience, love, kindness and self-control (amongst others!)

Through song, dance, story and prayer, the children captivated the whole school - sending us out with enthusiasm and excitement for Pentecost Sunday to come.

Witnesses to the Spirit

Our thanks and congratulations to this remarkable group of young people, all of whom have demonstrated through their words and actions this week that the Spirit is moving in their lives. Together, with the Holy Spirit, they are making our school a better place.

The Spirit of Wey Valley

Huge congratulations to our Junior Swim Crew, who all admirably represented St Joeph's at last weekend's annual swimming gala. The team performed with such commitment and sportsmanship that they earned "The Spirit of Wey Valley Award". Well done to you all!

Here comes the summer...

The nursery children are making the most of the nice weather this week by playing outside as much as possible.

We have had a variety of ongoing activities, including, but not limited to, water pistol painting, chalk mark making, sand castles, building and counting blocks, bug hunting and even some lovely hair make-overs.