

The Buzz
Autumn Term - 2nd November 2023

Message From the Head of School
Welcome back, I hope you all had a lovely half term with your families.
We have had a lovely first week back focussing on our principle of ‘Excellence’. Mr Hoy led an assembly on Monday to introduce our playground zoning. School council consulted their classes before half term to see what they would like to play with in our playground during playtime and lunchtime and this is what they decided. It has been lovely to see the children enjoying the zoned activities this week, I think bowling is my favourite.
In September 2020 we consulted with all stakeholders including Governors, staff, and parents on our Relationships, Sex and Health education (RSHE) policy to ensure it is right for the age and stage of our children. Here is the link to this policy that has recently been reviewed HISN RSHE Policy.docx (hpp.school). If you have any comments you would like to share with the leadership team please complete this google form, https://forms.gle/x7uJ1tHxYhM8iheP7
Thank you to all parents who attended parents evening this week and for the positive comments about the teaching and learning here at Hampton Infants School & Nursery. I want to thank all our wonderful teachers for their efforts during parents evening week.
Remembrance Day Parade
We are now selling poppies in the school playground and HISN will also be part of the Hampton Remembrance Parade on Sunday 12th November. We need two children who will be able to represent the school to be part of the parade with school staff. They will need to be at the Methodist Church at 11.55 and parents will need to be available to follow alongside. If you would like your child to participate, please contact Mrs Harris in the school office for full details.
Author Day
On Wednesday we enjoyed a wonderful ‘Author day’ which hopefully inspired our children to become authors and keep up their fantastic writing. They listened to ‘Alice’s wish and a magic fish’ by Lesley Rathbone who is an HPP parent. The children asked some great questions and found out how Lesley got her ideas for the book reading her son stories during lockdown. Children participated in a workshop with Karen Inglis and will hopefully be able to tell you all about them. Signed books are available to purchase on Parentpay.
The children made the following comments about author day:-
"I really enjoyed when the author read to us some of the secret lake, I want to read more!"
"I really enjoyed listening to Alice's wish and the magic fish."
"I thought it was interesting hearing about how an author works."
🎅Christmas 2023 Diary Dates🤶
Friday 24th Nov Mufti day for fair donations (bottles and or toys)
Saturday 25th Nov HISNA Christmas Fair
Friday 1st Dec HISNA Christmas Shopping Day
Tuesday 12th Dec
9.15am - 10.00 am 2J & 2MC Christmas Show
10.30am - 11.15am 2H & 2C Christmas Show
Wednesday 13th Dec
9.15am - 10.00am 1C & 1Y Christmas Show
10.30am - 11.15am 1D & 1B Christmas Show
Thursday 14th Dec
9.15am - 10.00am RP & RF Christmas Show
10.30am - 11.15am RC & RK Christmas Show
Friday 15th Dec
Christmas Jumper Day (full Mufti) - Whole School
10.30am - 11.00am AM Nursery Christmas Show
2.30pm - 3.00pm PM Nursery Christmas Show
Tuesday 19th Dec
Nursery and Reception Christmas Party - children to come to school in party clothes and bring festive packed lunch
Year 1 & Year 2 Christmas Lunch - uniform
Wednesday 20th Dec
Year 1 & Year 2 Christmas Party - children to come to school in party clothes and bring festive packed lunch
Reception Christmas Lunch - School Uniform
Nursery Last Day of Term
Thursday 21st Dec
HISN Rec, Yr 1 & Yr 2 End of Term (1.20pm pick up)
January 2024
Monday 8th INSET DAY
Tuesday 9th Children Return to School
Attendance
🌟Certificate of Excellence 🌟
Last week certificates were given out to children who focussed on the HPP principle of PRIDE
AM Nursery Izzy
PM Nursery Adrian
RC Arthur
RF Vishu
RK Livia
RP Otis
1B Louis
1C Sam
1D Ted
1Y Jind
2C Jacob
2H No certificate
2J Ryan
2MC Elissa
🗺️ Spotlight on Geography
At Hampton Infant School & Nursery, we want our children to develop a deep and curious interest in the world around them; understanding their place in the world through a widening geographical perspective, both locally and globally.
Our children will have a well-rounded knowledge and understanding of diverse people, places, resources and natural and human features, coupled with an understanding of the Earth’s key physical and human processes. As pupils progress in their learning across the school, they build on prior knowledge and skills to help them to deepen their understanding of how humans and physical geographical processes interact.
We also want children to have the opportunity to gain knowledge and skills through rich learning experiences in the classroom and through fieldwork and educational visits.
What Geography looks like in the Early Years Foundation Stage
As part of our EYFS curriculum, children will begin to make sense of their own life story including their own family and where they live. As part of our topic ‘Celebrations’, the children are asked to create an ‘All about me box’ with their families which they can bring in and share with their class. These boxes can include items such as a family photo, anything from a hobby that they enjoy, a piece of clothing, a picture of their favourite food or a picture of a family celebration. This activity provides an opportunity to reflect upon their own experiences and learn about those of others in order to understand that some environments are different from the one in which they live.
Forest Friday
Every Friday afternoon, the EYFS children take part in forest school activities. This includes an outside activity, snack and story. Forest Friday provides the children with opportunities to develop their knowledge and understanding of the world. It also has positive impacts in terms of the children’s confidence, social skills and language and communication skills.
What Geography looks like in Key Stage One
In Key Stage One, the children will develop this understanding further by learning in more detail about the local area, United Kingdom and the wider world. There is a focus on subject-specific vocabulary and this is reflected on our working walls. In year one, the children will complete a field work activity which will involve a walk of the local area looking at key features and using the geographical terms human and physical features to describe what they see. They will also begin to compare where we live as an urban area to other places around the country that maybe more rural.
In year two, the children will have opportunities to study our school and its grounds with a focus on map reading skills. We also provide cross-curriculum links throughout design and technology project ‘Jungle Jeeps’ and our science topic ‘Plants’. The children have opportunities to study the different places plants can grow such as the desert and rainforest and how they adapt to the different conditions in order to survive. This closely links to our hot and cold topic in Geography.
👋 Makaton Sign of the Week
The Makaton sign this week is 'please'
📚 HISN Lending Library
As you know reading is a huge part of school life at Hampton Infant School and Nursery. To further support reading at home we are working hard to set up a lending library with fiction and non-fiction books to support reading at home.
We would appreciate donations of good quality, undamaged picture books and chapter books as well as children’s magazines and non-fiction books. If you have any books at home suitable for children age 3 years to 7 years old that you are happy to donate, please drop them off at the school office labelled ‘lending library donations’. All families will be invited to access the lending library - more information to follow.
Please send donations into school by Friday 17th November 2023.
Nursery
It has been so lovely to welcome the children back after half term this week. We have all been very excited about Halloween and really enjoyed reading our focus story ‘Room on the broom’. The story inspired us to make magic potions using potion bottles, cauldrons and lentils.
We have also enjoyed cutting out a paper pumpkin and all worked really hard to use the scissors safely. We have been learning how to hold them properly to allow us to cut paper. We have been busy making magic wands too – we had fun decorating them with ribbon and sparkly stickers! We have been learning Halloween songs and also learnt some Makaton signs for some key Halloween vocabulary.
Towards the end of the week we had fun scooping out the inside of a pumpkin, looking at the seeds and feeling the inside too. It was a lot of fun!
Thank you for all of your kind donations of junk modelling, messy play resources and items from our ‘Amazon wishlist’. We are so grateful to have your help and support and the children have loved using the resources in their play.
Reception
Happy Halloween! The children have enjoyed celebrating and learning about Halloween and the themes and events that take place. The children have been getting into a spooky mood as they were creating potions which were full of disgusting things such as eyeballs, frogs legs and dragon scales! Inspired by Julia Dondaldson’s ‘Room on the Broom’, the children created their own wands and used them to cast their own spells. They also decorated pumpkins and made their own spooky monsters in the creative area! There was also lots of lovely language floating around the Reception wing as the children were heard excitedly discussing their Halloween costumes and where they went ‘trick or treating,’ they all had a very spooktacular time!
Year 1
The children have returned from the October break full of enthusiasm for all the new learning that is to come in this exciting half term leading up to Christmas.
Our new topic this half term is ‘The World Outside Your Window’. We have begun the topic by looking at the different seasons and how the weather, the clothes we wear, and our local environment changes along with each season. We have also been looking at urban and rural settlements, identifying their features and the similarities and differences between the two, and linking these to Hampton and our local environment.
In English, we have been using the text ‘Room on the Broom’ by Julia Donaldson to inspire our writing. We have been describing and comparing the characters in the story using our knowledge of adjectives and conjunctions, and we are looking forward to trying our hand at creating our own potions.
We have been using our knowledge of number bonds to help us when practising our addition skills in maths. We have been using ten frames, bar models and part-whole models to help us work out number problems, write addition number sentences and represent these in various ways.
This week we have begun studying materials and their properties in science. We began by looking at and feeling different objects and discussing what materials they might be made of and why.
In geography, we have been identifying physical and human features as well as looking at similarities and differences between rural and urban settlements. We will be using these to discuss the features of our local area in the coming weeks.
In PE, we have been thinking about how exercise makes us feel as well as developing our rolling skills and how we can accurately roll a ball onto a target. We learnt that bending low helps the ball to roll smoothly and not bounce, and that we need to roll a ball with more power to make it go further. We identified that we can gain more power to roll the ball further by using a higher arm swing and rolling at speed.
This week in art, we have been learning about the artist Paul Klee. We created our very own version of his artwork ‘Burdened Children’ using black fine liner pens, taking them for a ‘walk’ across the paper to create our masterpieces!
Year 2
We hope you all had a wonderful half term break. Year 2 have had a busy start back to school with a new focus book in English. We have been reading 'The Great Kapok Tree' written by Lynne Cherry this week. In the book we learn about how rainforest animals save the Kapok Tree from being chopped down as they whisper the reasons why they all depend on the tree. The children have loved discussing all the different animals in the story and emphasizing why the rainforest is important to all the animals and people in the world too.
We have also loved our author day this Wednesday where we were lucky enough to meet not one but two authors! We loved listening to their stories and we have been inspired to become Authors ourselves.
In Maths we have been thinking about our number bonds and how our number bonds to 10 can help us with addition number sentences with a focus on adding to the next 10. We have then used this knowledge to help us add across 10's using our base 10's to support our understanding.
We have been very excited to start our Geography topic this term looking at Maps and exploring where we are in the UK. We used Atlas' and digital maps to explore the locations in the UK including London, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast. We found each of these capital cities on a map before making our own maps and naming the surrounding seas of the UK too. We loved discussing when we have visited these places in the UK and what we remember about each place.
In computing this term we are learning about digital media and using a variety of media to take photographs. We practiced taking photographs this week using cameras and ipads and loved working with our friends to take a variety of photos; being careful to think about the subject of our photo and how to keep the camera in focus.
Before half term all children participated in an NSPCC ‘speak out and stay safe’ assembly and children actively joined in and listened to the important message.
In every class we have a worry box that children can post a note in. This may be their name in EYFS and an adult checks this box regularly and gives children an opportunity to talk about their worries privately. These boxes are used well and children feel confident speaking to staff about their worries. Please ask your children where their worry box is in their classroom and check they remember how to use it.
Safeguarding children is everybody’s responsibility. If you have any concerns about the welfare of a child please call SPA on 0208 547 5008 or out of hours, phone 020 8770 5000.
Click on above tab to view HISN's virtual school tour
Contact details
Email: office.hisn@hpp.school
Website: hpp.school
Location: Hampton Infant School and Nursery, Ripley Road, Hampton, UK
Phone: 0208 979 1815