The Bulletin Edition 25

It was excellent this week to meet with the two parents who so kindly and most generously co-chair the HPPPA, our Parents’ Association. Their energy and warmth were, as ever, entirely infectious! It was great to have an update on the HPPPA’s social media presence via the Instagram app (do give them a follow, if you have not done so already!) and to hear how various events this term are shaping up.

On their behalf, we sent out a little reminder yesterday about the very jolly sounding social event for parents scheduled for Saturday 17 May. Tickets are already in demand it seems, as it promises to be an excellent and very relaxed evening, giving parents a chance to come together, unwind, and enjoy one another’s company in true HPPPA style.

Secondly, and equally importantly, the co-chairs also brought us up to speed with plans for this year’s Summer Fair, which takes place on Saturday 14 June. A huge amount of thought, planning and preparation has already gone into this event, and there is plenty more to come. I am genuinely so grateful to the HPPPA for leading so ably on this much-loved fixture in the school calendar.

This year, the funds raised at the Summer Fair will go towards the purchase of some very exciting LEGO technical kits, which will support the pupils’ learning in both Computing and Engineering lessons. The more parents (with their children, of course!) who are able to join us for the Fair, the better. Our assembly theme at the moment is ‘Bright Days’, and this certainly feels like one we can all look forward to!

Year 6 took a trip to the ‘Home of Rugby’, The Allianz Twickenham Stadium on Tuesday. In the week of the 80th anniversary celebrations of VE day it was fascinating to hear about the link between Rugby and the acts of remembrance of players who served in the First and Second World Wars. Features such as the Rose and Poppy gates, as high as a trench was deep and decorated with poppies fashioned from German WW1 Artillery shells were very poignant. As well as hearing and seeing plenty of history, the boys heard about the growth and success of the women’s game, sat in the players seats in the changing rooms and saw the groundsman keeping the pitch in tip-top condition.

We hope you all had a wonderful Bank Holiday and enjoyed the opportunity for some well-deserved rest and relaxation. Although it has been a shorter week, it has, as ever, been a very busy and productive one here in Pre-Prep!

We have been looking at healthy eating and what contributes to a healthy lifestyle. We have been looking very closely at the five different food groups that make a healthy and balanced diet, learning new words, such as protein and carbohydrates, along the way. We have been sorting different foods into healthy and unhealthy foods and know that five portions of fruit and vegetables a day are very important in a healthy diet. Although cupcakes, doughnuts and other sugary treats are unhealthy, we are allowed them ‘as a treat’ now and then, just not all the time! Drinking lots of water to keep our bodies healthy and hydrated - just like our beanstalks – is just as important, making our bodies function properly. This led onto learning about how plants drink. To investigate this, we placed sticks of celery into blue and red food colouring. We were amazed at how quickly we could see that the celery was absorbing the water; it only took 2 days for the celery to change colour. It showed us how plants transport water from their roots to their leaves. We also revisited how we need keep our teeth healthy and how important it is to brush our teeth every day.

Reception have been following the topic, ‘Water’, thinking about rivers, streams and ponds. We have been taking a closer look at the life cycle of a frog and enjoyed learning about the different stages and sequences, from frog spawn, tadpole to frog. We have been practising this last week our ‘Bright days’ class assembly; we took the assembly theme along-side our mindfulness and water topic. We discussed how water can be mindful as it helps to calm and sooth and we learned that many cultures around the world equate water with healing and energy. On Friday we enjoyed sharing our class assembly with Pre-Prep; all the children read beautifully their piece out loud. We had a ‘ribbit’ great time learning how to draw frogs, following a step by step guide; it was fabulous to see how unique each frog looked! Our fabulous frogs are up on display in the hallway.

Our English lessons saw us taking a trip to space! We donned our space helmets and boots and wrote about what we would hope to see on a day trip to the moon. We thought about adding adjectives to embellish our sentences, conjunctions to stretch out our writing, and varying punctuation to make it more interesting for the reader. The children impressed with their descriptions of Space, with some children even using alliterative adjectives to describe what they saw on their adventure.

In mathematics, the children have continued with their learning of fractions this week by learning to use a fraction of an amount to find the whole, and starting to make comparisons between fractions. They brought together their learning so far in this block to understand the concept of unit fractions and non-unit fractions. They began to generalise that a unit fraction is any fraction with a numerator of 1 and that a non-unit fraction is a fraction where the numerator is greater than 1. Lots of hands-on activities helped develop the children’s understanding of this new concept.