On Friday Year 3 walked to Down To Earth Farm, to find out how our learning about Healthy Humans corresponds to the biology of animals. We learned about animals diet, physiology and behaviour by interacting with farm animals and exotic animals from around the world!

Real Life Superheroes

On Friday Year R didn't turn up for school, instead we were visited by two classes of 'People Who Help Us'.

This helped us all finish our topic in style!

Dental Nurse and Head Of Kitchen Science Visit

Last week we had two visitors. 

On Thursday Mrs Lacy, the Head of Kitchen for our school, came to answer questions about healthy eating and explained how school dinners use healthy alternatives to provide a balanced diet. 

On Friday one of our parents, who works as a school nurse, brought in all her tools (as well as cans of coke and bags of sugar). She reminded us how to care for our teeth and answered all our questions.

The children we very pleased to have this opportunity to have their questions answered. They were very polite and inquisitive.  

Cross County Final race

It was the final race of the cross country league this evening. There were personal bests galore as nearly all Oakwood runners took advantage of the absence of several schools who opted not to race.

The league results will be calculated on a best out of three. The first 4 runners over the line in each weeks will form Oakwood's A team, the next 4 the B team and so on. Teams will then be ranked based on their accumulated positions, the lowest score winning. The boys teams were down the leaderboard before today's race but could improve. The girl's A team were ranked 2nd before today's final race so we will wait for the scores to be calculated with anticipation.

Oakwood Children in Need

A massive thank you to Oakwood for raising a grand total of £290.12 for Children in Need!!! Well done!

Year 3 Fabulous Gymnastics

Y6 Victorian Fayre

A big THANK YOU to everyone who visited the Y6 Victorian Fayre yesterday afternoon. There were: arts and crafts, toys, games, cakes and even a tea shop (with a mountain of cake).

The children did a great job in running everything and raised a super amount of money!

If we go down to the woods today ...

As part of our English and Geography topic 'Oakwood Explorers' we went on a woodland walk to our local woods. We recorded lots of words and phrases using our senses about the words.

Year 4 Testwood Lakes

Year 4 had a lovely warm day at Testwood Lakes, practising their orienteering and map reading skills. The children had to make dens using compasses to decide on the best position and use maps to locate and identify features they could see from a rather cow pat filled field! Year 4 were excellent explorers, well done.

Autumnal story telling

Year 4 spent the morning rehearsing an autumnal poem and were able to perform them through story telling. Have a look at how we did!

Cross Country Week 4

Friday was week 4 of the schools' cross country league (week 3 having been rained off).
There were some excellent results in both the boys' and girls' team and again lots of children beat their personal best!

Although Friday was the last of the scheduled Cross Country races there were whispers that the cancelled race might be re-scheduled for next Friday (18/11/2016). We will keep you updated as soon as information is released by the organisers.

Year 3 Curriclum Bulletin: Healthy Humans

Topic

Our topic this term is 'Healthy Humans' which combines our understanding of the parts of the body with helpful routines and behaviour.  It is an important and fun science-based topic which fuels our English, PE, Maths and DT lessons. It is taught in Year 3 because we hope children can get into good habits early on, and in order to give families the opportunity to share their own advice for good health.

The main outcome for this topic will be a pop-up information book about the body and how to look after it.






Reading

This half-term, children will be continuing their journey towards becoming more fluent and enthusiastic readers. We will be guiding them through higher-level texts, building their enjoyment and giving them confidence to access novels.

We will be building on our Retrieval Skills (locating answers), Inference Skills (working out answers) and Choice Skills (explaining the authors decision making process) by using quick R.I.C. activity starters at the beginning of lessons.

Reading lessons have been restructured into two taught lessons a week, focusing on developing specific reading skills. These will alternate between fiction and non-fiction texts and involve the whole class.  We will still have 'fun reading' sessions once a week, and the opportunity to select books in the class library.

Reading logs are still at the forefront of sharing successes and challenges between school and home. Children benefit from encouragement, questioning and sharing the pleasure of reading together at home, so we welcome notes from parents. We also encourage children to reflect on their reading by using the question prompts on the back of their log to write a comment each time. Time is given in school for the children to record their class reading. Reading logs are checked once a week by the class teacher and we ask that they make 4 entries a week.

Our Class Novels this half term are: 'Waiting for Anya' by Michael Morpurgo and Usborne's 'Understanding Your Body' by Rebecca Treays.



We base our English work around our 'Healthy Humans' theme. We will continue to embed grammar, handwriting and spelling (including spelling conventions and topic vocabulary) skills. We will use the storytelling technique of memorising a similar text, to write a discussion text exploring whether or not packed lunches should be banned from school. We will also combine our Design skills to make an information pop-up book about how to look after the body.


Maths

This term we will extend our knowledge of key number facts, and consolidate our written calculation methods - applying them to various contexts including measures and money. We have already introduced the properties of 2D and 3D shape, and we will be investigating real life statistics from our own exercise achievements.

We try to make sure that, as well as making brains ache, maths is fun and engaging. Central to this is the use of maths games, songs and ICT. Children will often access specific online resources via our Google Classroom which they can access from home.

Logs

Logs are an integral part of Year 3 homework and we ask that children work on a different log for no less than 10 to 15 mins at least x3 a week. We also ensure that children have opportunity within school time to work on their logs. The logs system not only supports key English and Maths skills but allows children to achieve them through a series of small steps which installs confidence and a sense of pride when they achieve the different badges. The Year 3 teaching team do our very best to test children's logs daily, in dedicated curriculum time but often in breaks and lunchtimes. We are always impressed with our children's enthusiasm for their logs and but this can mean that we have children waiting to be tested. We have reminded children that it is not only their Year 3 teachers that can test them, but that any adult in the school.

Home Learning

This year your Year 3 child will bring home a range of home learning tasks from reading comprehension and maths tasks to mini projects. We greatly encourage parental involvement in your child's homework: often a home learning task might be a speaking and listening activity centered around talking to an adult about their learning and researching topics a little deeper. Homework tasks are usually given out on a Wednesday and collected in/discussed/shared on a Monday. There are times - like when children have been on a trip - this might change but we endeavor to ensure that ample notice for any task is given.



PE
Tuesday - Keep-fit (outside)
Thursday-  Gymnastics 'Inside the Body' (inside)

Dates for your Diaries

Friday 11th November - Year 3 trip to Cemetery

Year 3 attend Remembrance Service at Hollybrook Cemetery

We remember.

Year 2 Guy Fawkes Portraits

I had the pleasure of teaching Year 2 today. They were focusing on drawing portraits in proportion. They sketched portraits of Guy Fawkes linked to their recent topic work.

School Games Basketball league - Week 1

It was week one of the schools' basketball league today. As last years winners and current holders of the league trophy, Team Oakwood were determined to do well. And do well they did!

Team A played two games, beating Ludlow A 14-0 and Bassett Green C 12-0. Their scorers were Tymaine (7), Alan (5) and Leah (1). Player of the week was Tymaine!

Team B only had time for one game this week but were equally impressive in their performance - beating Ludlow B 16-6. Scorers: Joe (5) and Zahra (3). Team B Player of the Week was Joe!

Well done to the two teams and good luck next week.

French Fashion Show

Mes Vetements! On Friday 4th November I was very proud to present Year 6 showing off their French language skills. They donned fabulous outfits and took turns to describe the models in French. What a show! Magnifique!!!

Pattern Frenzy

Year R spent last week looking at patterns.

We created loads of repeating patterns in different ways.

Some of us even managed to create patterns with more than 2 colours/objects. Can you spot them?

Year 1 Toy Adventure

To launch our topic "All about Toys" the children were invited to bring in their toys from home for an adventure!

The children enjoyed showing the toys around the classroom. They also played games, explored the playground, had a woodland walk through the leaves and met up with other toy friends.

Making mountains in Y5

To kick-start our Fierce Earth geography topic Y5 spent an afternoon learning how to identify a mountain and discovering the different types of mountains. We created demonstrations to show our classmates each of the five ways in which mountains can be formed: fault-block, dome, plateau, volcanic and fold.

Curriculum Bulletin: Year R

People Who Help Us

Topic

• We learn about the real life super heroes that help us every day.
• We read lots of non-fiction books about superheroes and specifically look at the clothing they wear.
• We use our fire station role play area to create signs. This is a nice website with activities to help make Sparkton safer and this one with fire safety videos for children. 
• We talk about which adults are safe to give us medicine.
• We design, make and decorate superhero vehicles from junk modelling materials, here are last year’s vehicles to inspire you.
• We begin writing simple sentences to match superhero vehicles and how they help us by applying our phonics knowledge, hearing and writing main sounds in unknown words and writing taught high-frequency words from memory.

• Last year we had lots of real life superheroes come and join us to talk about what they do for their job, we hope you can help us out this year too, look who came.

Reading

•  We continue to look for the initial sounds in words and sound talk simple cvc words with support.
• We can spot more high frequency/tricky words within sentences and say them from memory. This is a good matching game.

Maths

• We begin to add two sets of objects together and find how many there are all together. Check this activity out for adding two sets together.
• We start to look at different coins and use these to buy superhero vehicles.

On 25th November we will be having a ‘People Who Help Us’ dress up day to end this fun topic, we look forward to seeing the different costumes.

Winter and Christmas

Topic/Reading

• We read the rhyming story ‘The Snowman’ and continue rhyming strings both orally and in writing.
• We read the ‘Nativity’ story and begin sequencing and retelling it in different ways for example with puppets and pictures. This helps us to act in our Christmas Performance, have a look at some of the parts your child could have this year.

• We continue to develop our reading and writing skills. Writing ever increasingly more tricky sentences and labels, using the high frequency words and phonics sounds we have learned. We are also reading harder sentences by applying everything we have learned so far.
• We create winter pictures on the computer program ‘Dazzle’ and begin to type a caption to match.
• We learn about how Christians celebrate Christmas and talk about what different families do.
• Christmas crafts play a big part of our last few weeks at school, we make cards, calendars and decorations for you to cherish at home, if you would like some ideas to do at home over the holidays, have a look at Activity Village.
• We will bake and decorate cookies, ready to eat at our Christmas party. A great way to finish our first full term at school.

Maths

• We begin to subtract numbers by taking sets away. Work out the answer here has good subtraction word problems to solve.
• We use Santa’s presents to describe and compare weights and use our hands and balances as a way of measuring.

Keep an eye on our posters each week for more specific updates and phonics sounds and high frequency/tricky words being taught to each group.

Helping the Little Red Hen

Year R got busy baking bread to help the Little Red Hen who found that her friends were just too lazy to help, but still wanted to eat the bread.
Do you think that is very fair?

Curriculum Bulletin: Year 6

English

Daily independent reading time - We give our Y6 children daily independent reading time to help them read more. Please help by making sure your child has their reading book with them everyday.

SPaG (Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar)

We will be working on:

• Varying sentence structure
• Clauses
• Punctuation needed for the Y6 curriculum

Class Text

• The Ruby in the Smoke (A mystery story of epic proportions; following the heroine Sally Lockheart as she tries to uncover the truth about her family)

Writing

• We will write a survival style information guide about Victorian schools.
• We will study a range of Poetry - writing our own, learning a range off by heart and performing 'Slam poems'.

Maths 

We will be working on:

• Fractions of a whole (including decimals and percentages) 
• Geometry

Science/Geography

We will be learning:

• About Evolution and natural selection
• Darwin's journey aboard 'The Beagle'

ICT

We will be working with:

• Audacity to create Mystery Story podcasts
• Garage Band to create our own music

Homework

Homework will continue to be set on a Thursday and due in the Following Thursday. Children may now receive both English and Maths homework in a week if it is necessary/beneficial.

Reading Logs will also be checked in school on a Thursday. It is very important that these are filled in correctly so teachers can see how much reading, and at what level, is being done outside school hours.

Dates for the Diary:

• Y6 Victorian Fayre - Thursday 17th November 1:45-3:15 (Please come in and support us by buying a cake or our Victorian themed products)
• Y6 French Fashion Show - Friday 4th November. Keep an eye on the blog to see how this goes!
• Y4&6 Christmas Production - Wednesday 14th December 1:45pm and 6.00pm