The Buzz

Dear Parents/Carers,

It was wonderful to welcome back all the children this week and I hope you all had a relaxing break over the last few weeks. We are very much looking forward to the Spring term which is always incredibly busy and very productive; lots of fun and busy learning for our children.

We have recently updated our attendance policy inline with changes from the Department of Education. Attendance of children in school has become a real focus. Please ensure you are familiar with the policy and see the link below.

HPPA is supporting Rags 2 Riches day in February. More information will come out shortly, but if you are having a new year sort out, please keep these clothes to one side.

Reminder that the deadline for applications to year 3 and for reception places is next Wednesday 15th January. All year 2 pupils at HISN will be allocated a place but parents must apply in order for this to happen. Please ensure that your application is done in good time or it will be considered as late and processed as such.

Next week we are pleased to host a coffee morning with our Child Wellbeing Practitioner who will focus on supporting parents to manage their child's emotions. Details are below so please come along.

As it is so cold, please ensure your child has their coat in school and do encourage them to wear it!

Please remember to label your child's uniform/hats/scarves/gloves to avoid them getting lost. Lost property can now be found at the office entrance.

Have a good weekend once it arrives and Happy New Year to all our families.

Helen Lockey

Executive Headteacher

Certificates have been handed out for following the HPP Principle of : -

Happy New Year! It has been great to see the children back at Nursery - we are so proud of how well they have settled back into school life. It's been a busy one this week - Inspired by our focus text: "Happy New Year Spot!", we have been thinking about saying Hello to January 2025 and have been coming up with some New Year's wishes, with many children wishing that they could go to the park and ride their bikes when the weather gets warmer. It's been wonderful to hear all their holiday stories - we have heard all about how people celebrate New Year's, including lots of you staying up late to watch the New Year's fireworks. Sounds like you all had lots of fun!

This week, the children had their first PE lesson in the school hall. We had lots of fun reminding ourselves of important listening rules to help keep ourselves safe as we move around. We learnt that we must always look around us whilst we move so that we do not bump into our friends. We also remembered that we need to have super listening ears on too - we need these to listen to instructions as well as helping us understand the rules of the exciting game we played. The children were amazing as we played 'Traffic Lights', using red and green colour splats to know when to move and when to freeze like a statue.

In Maths, this week we have been very excited to start exploring our numbers to 10. To help us recognise our numerals, we have been making counting wands and have been practicing using them to count a lineup of objects, making sure we count each object only once to find the total.

We have been so proud of our Nursery children. They really are getting back into the swing of things! We wonder where our learning will take us next week.....

We all know how important talking at home is for exposing children to a wide range of vocabulary and ideas. This all helps them with their reading and to become future writers. Each week we will share an idea with you for 'talk homework' with your child.

With the weather truly displaying all signs of winter, this week would be a great opportunity to talk to your child about what they see outside in this chilly weather. Might they see the frost in the morning? Can they see their hot breath as they breathe out? What do they notice? What does this wintry weather look like, or feel like? How can we keep ourselves warm?

It has been lovely welcoming Reception back to school this week. The children loved sharing their holiday news and were excited to talk about their visits from Father Christmas. The frosty weather sparked a lot of conversations and the children were fascinated to see the ice on the playground and outdoor equipment. Our focus text has been 'Happy New Year, Spot!' which we've used as a hook to encourage the children to talk about how they celebrated the start of 2025. In continuous provision, the children have been making New Year's potions in the sensory Tuff Tray, creating fireworks in the craft area, writing numerals within 10 in glitter in the mark-making area and more.

This week, the children started Dough Disco, a guided playdough session designed to build their hand strength and fine-motor development to support their writing skills.

In maths, the children have been honing their ability to subitise and developing their reasoning through describing how different groups of dots are arranged. They've also been linking subitised amounts with 1:1 counting actions. In Phonics we are continuing to embed the children's understanding of the sounds /k/, /l/, /r/ and /u/ which the children have been reading and writing in vc and cvc words.

We all know how important talking at home is for exposing children to a wide range of vocabulary and ideas. This all helps them with their reading and to become future writers. Each week we will share an idea with you for 'talk homework' with your child.

This week, you could talk to your child about the frost they might see in the morning. What do they notice about it? What does it look like, or feel like? What shapes can they see?

Happy New Year to you all and welcome to the new spring term! We would like to thank you for all of your kind Christmas wishes and generous gifts. We hope you all had a relaxing and fun-filled festive period. We have thoroughly enjoyed our first term with the children, and have been amazed by all they have achieved so far – we are really looking forward to what lies ahead during this spring term.

We have begun this term’s history topic by looking at various modes of transport and how this has changed over time. We have discussed the similarities and differences between the old and the new, discussing which we would prefer to travel in and why.

In English, we have been focusing on the suffixes ‘er’ and ‘est’. We have been using these words to write sentences to compare. For example, “The night sky is darker than the sun” “The lion is quicker than the snail” “Samantha is the tallest in the class”.

In Maths, we have been consolidating our learning from last term with numbers up to 20. This has included addition and subtraction number problems, missing numbers, completing number tracks and writing numbers in words and numerals.

In science, we continue with our topic on ‘Materials’. This week we have conducted an experiment to find out which material provides the most protection to an object. More specifically, we wrapped an egg up using different materials and dropped it from a height. We made predictions as to which material would protect the egg from breaking and then recorded our results.

Please remember, you can access details of the year 1 curriculum, along with more detailed information about our weekly spellings, phonics and other home learning ideas on the school website.

Happy New year from the Year 2 team! We hope you had a lovely Christmas and a restful break. The children have come back excited and ready for another for great term ahead.

Before the Christmas holidays, our Year 2 children had an amazing time sharing their stories and adventures inspired by The Snowman by Raymond Briggs with Reception classes. All classes were filled with excitement as each student took turns telling their own version of the Christmassy tale. We were so proud of how confidently the Year 2s shared their creative ideas. It was a delightful way to celebrate the end of the term.

This week, we kicked off our exciting new topic, Sky Riders, where we are exploring the achievements of the Wright Brothers. Our journey into flight history begins with learning about their ground-breaking contributions to aircrafts. To bring this topic to life, we’ve dived into our latest focus book, Taking Flight by Adam Hanchen, which will take us on an inspiring adventure through the skies!

In Maths we have been continuing our learning of exploring 3D shapes. Specially looking at the different properties of shapes, including faces, vertices and edges. We have been focusing on investigating practically to be shape experts.

Our science topic this term is plants where we will begin by exploring different parts of plants and then thinking about what plants we have around us. We will be making observational drawings of plants before thinking about what plants form part of our diet.

On Tuesday 14th January at 9am we will be holding a parent coffee morning in the Rose Hall at Hampton Junior School.

Parents from HISN and HJS are welcome to attend.

Reminder - all clubs start back next week.

Please communicate with the clubs directly if your child needs to be collected early from their club as the office is not able to facilitate this.

The well being and safety of our children is everyone's responsibility. If you have concerns about a child please contact SPA on 547 5008 or out of hours on 0208 744 2442.

Click on above tab to view HISN's virtual school tour

Email: office.hisn@hpp.school
Website: hpp.school
Location: Hampton Infant School and Nursery, Ripley Road, Hampton, UK
Phone: 0208 979 1815