Weekly Newsletter
Friday 29th September 2023
This week in school
Open classrooms/meet the teacher Monday 2 October The gates will be open from 2:45pm next Monday so that you can come in and join your child(ren) in their classes to see where they are working, some of the things they have been doing this month, and to say an informal 'hello' to their teacher.
Dojo messages to staff Dojo is a fantastic way of being able to share achievements and encourage a high level of communication between school and families. Unfortunately however, we have had instances this term where messages which have been unpleasant and demanding have been sent to school staff across a number of classes.
Obviously these sorts of messages cause upset and worry, especially when they are received late at night or over the weekend. Usually the only time available to upload observations, notes and photos is during the evening, but this does not mean that the staff are available to reply to messages from families at these times.
Can we also remind you that the class teachers are the key contact about your child(ren) so please get in touch with them rather than the teaching assistants, who may not always be available due to their working patterns.
We do expect parents to follow the STAR MAT code of conduct in all communications with school https://web.starmat.uk/assets/Documents/Attachments/STAR-MAT-Conduct-of-Parents-and-Carers.pdf
STAR MAT cross country competition A team of children from Years 3-6 travelled to Tadcaster Riverside Primary to compete in the STAR MAT cross country competition on Tuesday. It was a hugely successful afternoon, with our school coming away with 3 first places and 2 third places across the age groups. Very well done to all the runners!
Starting school in September 2024 Applications will be open from 12 October. If your child is due to start school in September 2024 (if they will have their 5th birthday btween 1.9.2024 and 31.8.2025) then you need to apply for a primary school place for September 2024. Applications should be made online at https://www.northyorks.gov.uk/education-and-learning/school-admissions and the deadline is 15 January. You can still apply after this, but your application will be dealt with after all the others and you may not get your first choice school.
Even if your child already comes to our nursery, you still need to apply for a place in Reception.
Y6 applications for secondary school September 2024 Information has been coming out about applying for secondary school places, and the local schools are having their open afternoons and evenings. We would definitely recommend that you go along to these with your child so that you can make your decision. The deadline for applications is 31 October 2023: applications after this date are treated as 'late' after all the others, and may mean that you don not get a place at your first choice of school.
Term dates 2023-24 The term dates for this school year are on the school website at https://brayton-cofe-primary-school.secure-primarysite.net/term-dates/
We have had to make a slight change to the training days in 2024: children are now expected back in school on Monday 8 January 2024 after the Christmas break, and there will be a training day on Friday 24 May 2024 instead of this.
Jewellery No necklaces, bracelets, rings or other jewellery should be worn to school. If your child has earrings, these must be removed for PE sessions, or earrings can be left at home on PE days. Earrings for school should be small stud types so they don't get caught and cause any injuries.
Free School Meals
Free school meals: save up to £450 a year With so much in the news about the cost of living and now energy prices going up, you can check whether your child could be eligible for a free school meal, whatever school year they are in. All the information is on the NYCC website at https://www.northyorks.gov.uk/free-school-meals Some of this information may be out of date, especially around eligibility, so please get in touch if you are unsure.
If you would like any advice or support with this, please contact the school office. We treat these matters with complete confidentiality and are always happy to help if needed.
Thank you for your continued support.
Allyson Buckton (Headteacher) & Mel Walmsley (Deputy Headteacher)
Whole School Attendance
Up to date attendance figures are now available every week, showing a decline for us, which is reflecting the high amount of absence due to illness over the last 2 weeks. The poster shared on Dojo last week has sound advice about whether your child should be absent, and how long for (in the case of illnessed such as chicken pox). Please remember, we will always contact you if your child is unwell during the day, so please make sure they are here as much as possible. With your help we made massive improvements in attendance over last year and this is now better across school than it has been in a very long time!
We would also remind you that, according to the new guidance for schools, ANY leave for holidays should be unauthorised: there is no longer the 'up to 5 days/10 sessions' which can be authorised at the Headteacher's discretion. Last year we put forward 38 requests for Fixed Penalty Notices to be issued, which the Local Authority have advised us that they have actioned.
DIARY DATES
Monday 2 October - Open classrooms 2:45pm-3:30pm
Wednesday 11 October - School photographs (individual and sibling)
Thursday 12 October - Applications for Reception September 2024 open
Tuesday 17 October - Harvest at St Wilf's (am) TBC, please save the date
Thursday 26 October - School closes for half term
Friday 27 October - Training day (school closed to children)
Tuesday 31 October - Closing date for secondary school applications
Monday 6 November - School opens
Friday 22 December - School closes for Christmas
Monday 8 January - School opens
Friday 9 February - School closes for half term
Thursday 21 March - School closes for Easter
Friday 22 March - STAR MAT training day (schools closed to children)
Monday 8 April - School opens
Monday 6 May - May Day Bank Holiday
Thursday 23 May - School closes for half term
Friday 24 May - Training day (school closed to children)
Monday 3 June - School opens
Friday 19 July - School closes for summer
Monday 22 July - Training day (school closed to children)
Happy Birthdays!
Many many many many happy returns next week to.....
Max Willis
Kian Bird
Isla Lodge
Aurora Jamieson
Noah Whitaker-Doherty
Tsvitoslava Medvid
Maya Prosser
From St Wilf's
As autumn rapidly approaches it is time to think about the Autumn Fair.
The date has been set for Saturday 11th November between 10am and 1pm.
There will be time to set up late Friday afternoon or earlier in the morning.
The format will be very similar to last year.
If you are able to help in any way please let Pat Jarvis or Lis Middup know.
We will need volunteers for all the usual stalls; tombola, raffle, toiletries, nearly new children's things, along with a cafe.
If you have a new stall you'd like to introduce please let us know!
This week in classrooms
Nursery - Stars
The children have continued to explore Autumn and introduced Harvest this week. We have read the story ‘Scarecrows’ Wedding’, learning lots of new vocabulary and joining in with some of the phrases. We have enjoyed singing the songs ‘Big Red Combine Harvester’ and ‘Dingle Dangle Scarecrow’, joining in with all the actions.. In the provision, we have played with the small world farm and made scarecrows. We have used conkers to mark make, count and weigh. In phonics this week, we have continued to focus on our listening skills. We have played sound lotto and lots of guessing the sound games. In maths we have explored 1-1 correspondence by moving objects (1 person for each train carriage) and the number 1.
Star of the Week: Mia Mountain
Reception - Moon and Mercury
We have enjoyed our book of the week ‘Once There Were Giants’ by Martin Waddell. It tells the story of a baby girl and how she changes and grows and becomes a parent herself. Afterwards, the children shared their baby photographs and were extremely excited about the changes which they have gone through from being a baby to now. We also thought about our own families and realised how different they really are. In phonics this week, the children have been taught ‘g, o, c, k’. Look out for their next new eBook on Oxford Owl and please try to read this three to four times a week to consolidate their learning. In maths we have read ‘The Button Box’ and talked about how many ways we can sort, played ‘Guess my rule’ and compared sets of objects. In worship we have been thinking about Harvest. We discussed what it means when we ‘harvest’ food and we learned about where food is grown. The children understood the importance of being grateful for the food we have and realised this also links to our lunchtime prayer. Some children even thought about what it would be like if we didn’t have enough food and what we could do to help. It’s so lovely to see their compassion shining through at such an early stage.
Star of the week
Moon: Alex West Mercury - Teddy Abdullah
Year 1 - Galaxy and Venus
It’s been another fantastic week in Year 1, it’s full steam ahead as we continue to grow into our Year 1. In Maths, we spent time practically exploring greater than, less than and equal to. Using pom poms, pencils, numicon, matchsticks, lego, you name it we’ve used it to represent numbers in our work. In P.E we have continued to develop our ball handling skills and stopping skills into our football practice, this has involved lots of teamwork to provide ample challenge for them to work together. In Computing, the children are really getting to grips with their mouse skills. We’ve had a range of games to choose from to develop this aspect of our learning, this week the children have been able to design their own house by clicking and dragging. There’s been lots of opportunities for children to be kind and supportive of their classmates by offering words of encouragement. There’s also been time to get creative, we’ve made some beautiful collage work using strips of coloured paper to produce some collage pumpkins.
Star of the week
Galaxy: Henry Hare
Venus: Mila Firth
Year 2 - Earth and Mars
This week we have been working super hard on our non chronological reports. We have pulled together all we’ve learnt in our sentence stacking lessons along with the information we now know about pirates to create some really good reports. In maths we have been comparing and ordering numbers and estimating using number lines. We learnt about another intrepid explorer called Matthew Henson who explored the Arctic about 150 years ago. We enjoyed comparing his experiences and equipment with the modern explorer, Felicity Aston who we learnt about last week. In music we have continued our work on pulse and sea shanties and had fun adding pitched percussion to our performance. Our RE this week involved learning about The Qur’an and we thought about our own words and phrases that are important to us. We are enjoying practising our football and hockey skills in PE. Well done year 2, another super week.
Star of the Week
Earth: Beatrice Robson
Mars: James Smith
Year 3 - Jupiter and Saturn
This week the children have completed their own independent versions of the ‘Stone Age Boy’ . We were really impressed at how they created their own detailed sentences that included the grammar features covered during our sentence stacking lessons in previous weeks.
In Maths we have finished our Place Value unit. This week the children have been using their fluency, reasoning and problem-solving skills to compare numbers to 1,000, ordering numbers to 1,000 and counting in 50s. Our next unit is addition and subtraction.
In Science, we have continued learning about ‘Animals, Including Humans’, using our resident skeleton ‘Mr Bones’ to help us answer this week’s big question ‘Do human and animal skeletons have similarities?’
This week in PE we have been working on developing control and performing the basic skills needed for the games with control and accuracy in football and moving with a ball keeping it under close control in hockey.
Finally, on Friday in computing we started our second project of the year ‘Digital Storyboards’. The children are using the website ‘https://www.storyboardthat.com/’ to create backdrops to scenes and edit them.
Stars of the week
Saturn: Braxton Walton
Jupiter: Jack Riley
Year 4 - Neptune and Meteor
It has been another fantastic week in Year 4, where the children have impressed us yet again! In Writing, we have started to look at our new unit of work, where we have been researching the different features of newspaper reports. The children have been fantastic at identifying these and it is clear that they have retained their prior knowledge on this subject. In Maths, we have finished our Place Value unit and spent the week focussing on rounding numbers to the nearest 10, 100 and 1000. In History, we have focussed on the different monarchs that reigned England over the Tudor time period. The children have placed these on a family tree starting with Henry VII and finishing with Elizabeth I. In Geography, we have looked at different major UK cities and the children have completed their own fact file on one of the following five: Canterbury, York, Portsmouth, Glasgow or Belfast. Some of the facts they found were extremely interesting and ones which their peers found fascinating! In DT, the children have started to design their own pizzas, based on our design brief for this term. They have loved exploring all the different potential toppings they could place on the pizza.
Keep up the good work Year 4. We look forward to seeing what amazing things you achieve next week!
Stars of the week:
Meteor: Scarlett Mead
Neptune: Edward Possnett
Year 5 - Asteroid and Pluto
Quite a hands-on week! A third of the year group went on the cross country trip to Tadcaster, so the remaining children were able to have a longer PE session and logged onto TT Rockstars. In history, we have been looking at how brutal the Vikings were, but it took a turn on Thursday when the children learnt that they were also settlers. They learnt that they were farmers and used scales to pay for items. In Science, they did an experiment about soluble and insoluble solids. This was the first time the children were in charge of their own experiments in Year 5. While they were all very excited, they did it sensibly and showed that this is something we could do again in the future. Finally, in English, they had been working on their character descriptions and trying to include as many Year 5 objectives as they could. They are looking great and their descriptions have been amazing. Well done Year 5, we can not wait to start learning about narratives.
Stars of the week:
Asteroid - Abigail Lawlor
Pluto - Tom Wilford
Year 6 - Nebular and Constellation
Wow, is it Friday already?! This week in Nebular and Constellation, we have really begun to show some really excellent learning behaviours inside the classroom. In class, we have made our way through the murky depths of multiplication using squared and cubed numbers, four digit multiplied by two digit numbers, rules of divisibility and prime numbers in maths. We have used many different types of grammar terminology to create character descriptions of the infamous Captain of the Titanic, Edward Smith. We have also used the class structure of Titanic to identify the trends that led to emmigration from Britain in 1910’s Britain. In our guided reading sessions, we have continued our journey onto the Queen of the Seas with our characters Patrick, Berryman, Rockwell and James. Using the question strands of VIPERS to understand more of the story and the characters motivations and learnt a multitude of new vocabulary (which we hope to see appearing within the children’s writing!). In RE, we also used different sources of information to discuss the big question of whether Science and Faith are complementary or conflicting.
Another good week everyone. Keep working hard!
Stars:
Constellation: Isaac Tweddle
Nebular: Eliana Cartwright