From the Head
I am grateful to you for your understanding as the concrete foundations for our new building were laid today; I appreciate that parking outside St Olave's is never easy but know that concrete lorries outside school make it that much harder! However, I am excited to show you the result of today's work; we are now seeing the outline and foundations of the building taking shape.
I am delighted to announce that we have been awarded the Bronze Accreditation from Transport for London for Active Travel. Highlights of how we achieved the award include:
- appointing Junior Travel Ambassadors (JTAs) who worked hard to develop more active travel and road safety throughout the year
- a fantastic project with Mrs Warner, the Nursery children and Chrissie the lollipop lady working in conjunction with the JTAs to improve the children's road safety skills
- the School Parliament and Mrs O'Sullivan campaigning with the local community for 20 mph speed limit on Southwood Road -this is now planned to be changed in the future
- the popular ‘Be Bright Be Seen’ sale of reflective items, which Mrs Fowler Wright ran with the JTAs
- the Cycle Challenge Reward Cards and Bikers' Breakfast in the garden which led to a genuine and sustained increase in cycling to school
Our Year 6 children were told their positions of responsibility this week and have already made an excellent start to their various monitor jobs and responsibilities. We are extremely proud of them all as they demonstrate kindness, thoughtfulness and helpfulness towards all members of our school community.
On Friday 19th October we will be celebrating our annual World Food Day in school. This is a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the huge variety of cultures that make up our St Olave’s community and I will be sending out further information early next week about how you can help to make the day extra special for the children.
On Friday 9th November, we will be wearing blue for ‘Wear Blue for Bullying UK’. As part of our ongoing work to prevent and take a stand against bullying at St Olave’s, we are supporting this national day. Children are invited to wear something blue as part of their school uniform (PE kit for Year 3 and Year 6 can be worn/brought in a bag). Donations will be collected on the gate in the morning - thank you in advance for your support.
On Friday 16th November we will be holding a Children in Need Spotacular! Children will be taking part in spotty activities during the day and we ask for a suggested donation of £2 per child.
The FRSC Second hand uniform sale is taking place on Monday afternoon in the Year 5 classrooms - thank you to the members of the FRSC who are organising this and to parents who have donated good quality second hand uniform. Please try and support this event as uniform can be purchased at significantly reduced prices and is all in good condition.
Finally, thank you to all of you who came and celebrated our Harvest Festival this afternoon. Mums, dads, brothers, sisters, grandparents and friends filled All Saints’ Church and watched the children perform, many for the first time, their poems, songs, stories and prayers. Thank you for your incredibly generous donations in support of the two charities supported in our local community; Reverend Annette was genuinely touched by the donations received from St Olave’s and asked me to pass on her thanks to you all. I hope that you all enjoy a relaxing weekend and I look forward to seeing you next week.
Kind regards, Miss Holloway
FRSC NEWS
PARENT LOTTERY
Congratulations to this month’s winners:
- 1st prize - Mrs Rana Thapa
- 2nd prize - Mrs Kiley
- 3rd prize - Mrs Henry
UPCOMING EVENTS
- Second hand uniform sale - Monday 8th October 3.00pm - 4.30pm
- Quiz Night - Friday 16th November 7.00pm
- Christmas Fayre - Saturday 1st December 11am - 2pm
MATCH FUNDING
Many large companies offer match funding benefits to employees - where they match a figure your chosen charity raises - up to £700 per time. We'd love to hear from anyone whose company offers this benefit, as we are a registered charity and could therefore increase the revenue from the events we run enormously. If just a handful of parents stepped forward it would make a massive difference. Your HR department will be able to confirm if your company participates in the scheme - most large banks do, as well as other sectors.
VOLUNTEERS NEEDED!
We would love to have some committee members from Nursery and Year 6; please see any member of the FRSC or Mrs Farrell on the gate if you would like to find out more. Anyone willing to offer help, services or donations, please see Mrs Farrell for further information.
THE GIVING MACHINE
Great news! We’ve joined TheGivingMachine – a site that lets you raise free donations for St Olave’s School Trust every time you shop online. Register to support St Olave’s School Trust and help us raise as much as possible.
https://www.thegivingmachine.co.uk/causes/st-olaves-school-trust-266085
School Nurse
The School Nurse is in school every Wednesday 11am - 4.00pm. Should you have any concerns about your child and would like to see the Nurse, please contact the School Office.
Year 6
Year 6 were excited to explore our new English app ‘Literacy Planet’, we were very impressed with the quick way they navigated their way around the different activities. We hope they enjoy using it and home learning tasks will be assigned in the future. We are also continuing to practice our times tables daily using Times Tables Rock Stars, some of the children have reduced their answers per second by an average of 3 seconds. We continued our ‘Shackleton’s Journey’ by using an image of ice to write a poem using figurative language, this tied in well with ‘National Poetry Day’! Have a look at a selection of our poems below. In IPC the children debated ‘for’ or ‘against’ selective breeding in dogs. The speeches were well structured and the children listened well to each side of the argument. 6M had their turn to go down to the allotment with Mr Pradic and came away with a variety of sizes of beetroot. We have also been rehearsing our performance for the Harvest Festival, we hope to see you at All Saints Church, watch out for the doughnut challenge!
Year 5
During English this week we wrote detailed character descriptions for ‘Liam’ from Cosmic. Year 5 have been learning about fronted adverbials and used these within their writing this week. We have enjoyed tweeting our work to the author of Cosmic, Frank Cottrell-Boyce and he has tweeted us back! We look forward to sending him more of our writing in the near future!
In maths, we consolidated our learning of place value with a quiz. We then started using our place value knowledge to add and subtract numbers greater than 4 digits. We were able to use a visual place value method using counters and the more formal column method.
During our swimming lesson this week, we began timing our lengths of backstroke and front crawl, in preparation for the swimming gala. What a fantastic group of swimmers Year 5 are!
There was a real sense of awe and wonder in our science lesson on Wednesday when the school’s telescope was revealed to the Year 5 children. This telescope will be available for Year 5 to borrow during the year! The kit not only contains a telescope but also a microscope and set of binoculars! There was much excitement in class and the teachers are keen to borrow the telescope too!
We were extremely proud of Year 5’s efforts during our Harvest Festival, all of the children spoke loudly and clearly - well done Year 5, we’re very proud of you.
Year 4
The children have been building their knowledge of volcanoes for our topic ‘Active Planet’. Now that they know about tectonic plates and the magma which bubbles under the surface of the earth, they have been able to explain why volcanoes are formed. Over the weekend, the news about the earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia related very much to what we have been learning. This week at school we took time to find out about this natural disaster and the very real consequences for the people in this area. The children showed great sensitivity and empathy and we had a quiet time to think and say a prayer for all those affected.
Using plasticine each child made their own cross section of a volcano. They took real care when putting it together, as you can see on the clip. Taking a photo of this on an iPad and editing it with labels was a great way for them to use technology to enhance their learning.
Thank you for your support with enabling your child to bring the right kit for games and PE each week. They have been very well-organised, which is great.
Please can you encourage your child to be using Times Table RockStars at home at least 3 times per week. It is a fantastic way to boost their times table knowledge, which in turn improves their division knowledge.
The home learning for this weekend is a consolidation exercise covering the maths we have doing in class over the last few weeks. The first question is on negatives numbers which we haven’t explored in detail yet, so please just encourage your child to ‘have a go’, we will be extending our knowledge on this area next week. Thank you.
Year 3
Year 3 have had an amazing week as they enjoyed Stone and Iron Age life as well as rehearsing “The Rainbow People” for our Harvest Festival.
On Monday we visited the Chiltern Open-Air Museum. The children enjoyed workshops about aspects of Stone and Iron Age life, including shelter building, pot making and fire starting! We hope that these photographs manage to capture the excitement and joy which the children experienced in the beautiful Buckingham countryside.
The children should be congratulated for their efforts towards the Harvest Festival mini-production of The Rainbow People. Drama and reading clearly, together with the tricky action of waving a ribboned stick have been successfully rehearsed this week. Photographs of the children’s performance at the church should feature in next week’s newsletter. Good luck, everybody!
Year 2
The children performed wonderfully at The Harvest Festival this afternoon. Thank you so much for practising their poem at home.
This week the children have been learning about the life cycle of a butterfly. They were amazed to find out that a monarch butterfly only lives for about 2 weeks and therefore needs to lay its eggs quickly so that the life cycle can start all over again!
In maths we have started our new work on addition and subtraction. We have used different methods to consolidate our understanding. We will continue this unit over the next few weeks. You may like to practise your mental addition in the car on the way to school by adding the numbers on a number plate or the front of a bus before they whiz by.
Year 1
To link with our Harvest festivities, we read the story of ‘Tattybogle’ by Sandra Horn. The children identified the different British animals that were shown throughout the story. They thought of a variety of exciting and well chosen adjectives to describe them. The children used their describing skills to write a character description of Tattybogle. We were so proud of the children’s performance of our Harvest acrostic poem at the Harvest festival this afternoon. Thank you all for supporting your children to learn the poem. They all performed with such confidence and had huge smiles.
As the weather is becoming more autumnal, the children have been noticing the changes in the trees and leaves. They enjoyed collecting some orange and red leaves which they have used to create autumn hedgehogs. In Maths, the children have been learning how to order numbers using concrete resources and pictorial representations. They also explored how to use ordinal numbers such as 1st, 2nd and 3rd etc.
In our ‘Who am I?’ topic we have focused on safety in the home. The children were excellent at spotting different dangers and suggesting ways in which we could make it safer. We will continue to think about how we can be safe in different contexts e.g Road Safety, E Safety, Emergency Calls. Please support their learning in school by discussing ways in which they can be safe in the home and when you are out and about.
Reception
Have you ever had to say thank you?
Reception this week been learning about being kind and saying thank you after reading the story ‘The smartest giant in town’. In recognition of their excellent start to the school year Miss Holloway presented both classes with a surprise present. Like the animals in our story, we wrote a thank you card to show our gratitude.
Our learning this week has also included making giant feet, painting giant ties, writing shopping lists, giant construction, preparing for our harvest performance...we certainly have been the busiest children in town.
Just a polite reminder, on Friday 12th October Reception will be visiting the Library.
Nursery
The Nursery children have enjoyed reading the story “The Smartest Giant in Town”. They have had lots of fun making giant feet and trying to walk in them. Not an easy feat!
We have also been getting creative with junk modelling and been very busy making scarecrow hats in preparation for Harvest Festival.
Next week we will be reading the story “The Highway Rat”.
Have a lovely weekend.
Other
SCHOOL COATS
Now the weather is more autumnal, please make sure your child wears a coat to school every day. The children will be going out to play, even if there is light rain. Please make sure all school uniform is named. A few children are missing either their named blazer or winter coat. Please can you check this weekend that your child has their own uniform. Thank you.
Active Travel
Many pupils from Year 4 completed applications to be the new Junior Travel Ambassadors. The quality was very high so it was a difficult decision to make. Well done to Aanya, Indie, Glyn and Holly for their excellent ideas, which they presented very clearly. They have started their new role straight away, helping to organise the Walking and Bike Challenges for the school.
Are you and your family doing the Walking or Bike Challenge? If so, please tweet or e-mail a photo to: @StOlavesYr4 or j.scott@stolaves.org.uk . The best one each week will be shared in the newsletter and the child(ren) will win a small prize!
School Parliament
The MPs convened for their first parliament meeting last week and already they have lots of suggestions! We will be running and supporting a number of different campaigns throughout the year so please look out for and support these as all of the ideas come straight from the children and all campaigns are planned around the things they believe are important.
Mrs O’Sullivan
Pet Club
This week we were visited by Miss Dean and her dog Harry. He was pleased to meet everyone and was very well behaved. Thank you Miss Dean for bringing your pet to spend some time at school.