From the Headmaster:
I’m going to say it, hold on tight…
Sometimes you do need to travel through a storm to fully value or at least recognise just what is important to you.
When I look back on these last four or five weeks in the small but mighty world of Park Hill I cannot help but feel satisfied and confident that we have not lost sight of what is important and needed at this time, for our children.
The creativity of the art exhibition, the emphasis on being outdoors, smiling faces, familiar faces, exploring new spaces. The beach, sand between toes and adventures to be retold.
The climax of a 600m race, elbows out, grit, driving tired, fatigued legs to the end, carried by the wave of noise.
The dawning, creeping realisation that we might, might just be in the lead. Daring to dream that yet another fast time, and no, no he hasn’t taken off too early, in fact he is going to maintain that ferocity of pace for the three whole laps, might just lead to a team victory.
I meant what I wrote in my letter to you all this week. I am acutely aware of my privileged position. Around young and inquisitive minds. I am able to marvel at their boundless enthusiasm and desire to challenge. All set in an environment created and nurtured by my colleagues who share this enthusiasm.
it’s infectious and a delight. Stopping to watch, from the similarly privileged position from the centre of the track as our (in this case) Under 9 Girls relay team rocketed around the track, the occasion etched indelibly on my mind and to be savoured like a Chateau Musar for years to come.
As wonderful was the sight of school colours tied, carefully, proudly by parental hands this morning. Worn with pride, achieved through hard work, perseverance and resilience.
And I get to see all of this, every day.
Enjoy the images. Enjoy your weekend.
Alistair
National Music Composition Competition - ISA
Forgive the spelling mistake from the judge at the Independent Schools Association, but what an impressive comment to make about Yash who won first place at the ISA Music Composition Competition. 559 schools and another accolade for our talented children. As a perfect segue into the next section I have added his composition into a movie montage from the athletics.
Expect to hear this ambient, down tempo, chill hop piece at Cafe Del Mar this summer. (Yes, I enjoyed writing that sentence.)
Assembly
School Colours, National Composition success and a brief visit to the Inter House Crystal Maze - a-maze-ing....
Athletics Championships - ILG
What a day! The venue was so impressive, the Lee Valley Indoor Athletics Stadium proved a perfect arena for the efforts of all of the schools that took part. Nine schools in total, with teams of four competing in 60m, hurdles, 600m, javelin, ball throw and long jump, finishing off with a 4x50m relay.
Now. Some will view great masterpieces by Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Monet as sights to behold but I would like to add relay exchanges to that list. I will argue (albeit politely) that a smooth exchange, with both runners in full stride and baton into the 'v' equal to Mona Lisa any day...
I wasn't disappointed as each of our teams seemed to effortlessly impose their athleticism on the day. The black vests clearly intimidating enough to come away with three out of the four age category wins, by some margin.
I've organised and be involved with a few athletics events if my time, this one will join the memory bank of truly special days that I know will give all of our athletes (and staff and barmy army supporters) a spring in our steps for some time to come.
Impossible to choose just one image to capture the emotion of the day, so please do click on each one. However, I think the expression below captures the determination and grit that we do so value at Park Hill...
Inter House Crystal Maze
Critical thinking, cognitive flexibility, problem solving and applying knowledge. Fairly crucial skills and abilities that we all need. Well do not underestimate the thought that went in to the activities.
An example? Well, how about Augmented RealityMakr, where marks (geotagged) needed to be aligned by the children on their iPad to make tree numbers. These three numbers were then rearranged to then open a padlock, or four...brilliant stuff!
My thanks to all of the teachers who are clearly fans of the original (and best) series with Mr O'Brien.
Year 6
This week, the children have been reintroduced to poetry and descriptive language. We have created elaborated description, focusing on expanding upon small events (like ripping a piece of paper).
Additionally, as our final year project, we are credit f storytelling islands. We have designed, and how are building them out of Papier mache.
Maths has been all about revising the areas we have struggled with. This week was operations involving BIDMAS and fractions/decimals.
Year 5
A phenomenal week in Year 5 this week, on reflection it is remarkable to see how much we fit in to just 5 days.
In English lessons, we are in full swing with creating biographies about the heroes in our lives. Brace yourselves for thought provoking, emotionally stimulating and simply fascinating spellbinding stories coming to Spotify and Apple Podcasts soon. We are about 2 weeks away from publishing our work.
Maths lessons have taken the children on a learning journey through the world of line graphs and conversion graphs. When we finally get the green light to travel abroad, the Year 5 children should be well informed on how to track the value of purchases made in other currencies and convert then to GBP.
I am sure you will know all about the wonderful Crystal Maze event that we held at school on Thursday. In addition to the wonderful contribution the children made to the cause of their relevant Houses, it is most appropriate to use this time to recognise the additional efforts by Year 5 children to take on leadership and nurturing roles with the younger ones. It is almost as if they are getting ready for being at the top of the school.
Year 4
It was a superb return to school for the Year 4 Badgers as they navigated their way through the curriculum.
In Maths we investigated Area and Perimeter problems where we found longest and shortest perimeters with set amounts of area. Similarly we explored largest and smallest areas with set perimeter lengths. These investigations led us to calculating the cost of covering the bark areas with fresh bark. If you need a quote then look no further, Mr Sims.
Aesop’s Fables where the central focus of our week as we read and retold a selection of moral themed stories that have been passed on by story tellers for many years. Our story tellers were Michael Morpurgo and Michael Rosen. After reading the same story in two versions, we analysed the differences then set about writing our own fables inspired by the story of ‘Crow and Fox’.
Our new topic in Humanities seemed to evaporate, then condense until it began to precipitate much learning on the subject of waters’ travels. I’m hoping there wasn’t too much surface run off of knowledge back in to sea, but that would be okay as we will repeat the same process again and again as we discover the Water Cycle. Wherever water may exist: London, Paris, Scunthorpe or Park Hill School, we have learnt how the water cycle has been occurring for millions of years. Perhaps the water we drink today may have also been consumed by the dinosaurs!…or a pet cat.
On Thursday, children really enjoyed the Crystal Maze on Thursday and relished the opportunity to work through several physical and mental puzzles and challenges. Sadly, Richard O’Brien (or his lookalike) wasn’t able to witness events, but he received great reports on Year Four’s participation.
In other areas we learnt about: Hindu deities in our Religious Studies; played our maiden cricket game at Dutton Field; made considered drawing and painted responses to pictures from Southwold.
A warm and welcoming week back. Great effort Year Four
Year 3
Year 3 have had a thoroughly enjoyable first week out. From classifying trees in Adventure school to fractions in Maths. Spike Milligan inspired poetry was great fun, exploring rhythm and rhyme to create amusing animal poems.
A real highlight of the week was our Inter-house Crystal Maze where we put all our critical thinking caps on to solve riddles and challenges. A great deal of fun and a little water at the end helped us keep our cool!
Year 2
Wow what a fun week Year 2 have had. Chrystal maze was by far the highlight of the week. It was great to see the children problem solving and working as a team. Well done to St George’s for winning the house competition. In English this week Year 2 have been looking at Robin Hood, the children created a newspaper report on him, making sure to contain interviews and wanted posters. We then stained them with tea and burn the corners to make them look super old. In maths we have been doing some complex addition using the column addition method.
Year 1
A week of firsts which brought great excitement…
The crystal maze experience on Thursday.
This was such a joy to behold, Year 1 were great team mates, collaborating and sharing ideas and really supporting each other.
A large and bulky beetle found in the playground with spiky legs, fluffy white hairs, fanned antennae and tiny bright black eyes turned out to be a cockchafer. Charming but a little clumsy and rarely spotted. They live in a wide range of habitats but prefer healthy areas with grasses and flowers - a true sign that our efforts developing the school grounds have paid off.
Fractions - although we revisit the topic of fractions (halves and quarters) were are now now using part whole models to find equal groups and explain our reasoning.
Reading Dear Greenpeace by Simon James - we learnt to identify information - learning the difference between opinion and fact.
Reception
Reception this week have been looking further into how they can listen to instructions to enable them to complete an action. We have been listening to instructions that involve several ideas or actions to help them draw a picture. At the end of the week they were able to apply these skills to enable them to work in pairs to describe a simple line drawing picture to their partner. The final results demonstrated that they had each given their partner accurate instructions and they evaluated that it could have been easier if their partner had given specific instructions such as where on the paper they had to draw the shape.
The children have been creating representations of bugs for our minibeast garden display and they have been writing labels for their creations using their phonic knowledge. The results have enabled the children to demonstrate confidence in writing for a specific purpose.
In computing we have been applying our directional knowledge of commands to move a bug in Keynote using “motion path”. They then had to type a list of instructions that describe the path of their bug.
In music we have been learning a call and respond rhyme about minibeasts and using our body to move in ways that match the adjective that was used for each bug such as slide, wiggle, crawl, flutter, spin and scurry.
Finally the children have been learning to cooperate together to enable them to complete teamwork challenges. They had to create a marble run that would allow the marble to effectively reach the bottom. We then tested the marble runs out and decided which one was the most successful. We have also been completing a relay race where each child had to take it in turns to transport a full cup of water from one end of the bark area to the other. Some of the children even challenged themselves to carry the water whilst walking on the rope.
What a fantastic first week back Reception.
Second Steps
It has been a busy week for Second Steps.
We have been making and playing with moon sand. We had to stop year 5 taking it from us, we think they had more fun with it than we did.
The children have been very good with their phonics work this week. Using the a programme iPads called phonics bloom they were matching sounds, matching initial letter sounds and matching picture with CVC and a few longer words.
The children have been very creative with their role play this week. We have been on lots of trips to Peppa Pig Land, Puppy Land and digger land. Getting the car ready, packing the boot, making sure we’ll had our seatbelts on and off we went.
During sports the children were working in teams to move equipment from one lend of the playground to the other, building different shapes with the blocks.
The children found a cupboard spider, which parked their interests. We told Miss Gardner and she had a May bug in a specimen jar which she brought with her. The children had great fun going on a bug hunt around the school.
Miss Finch and Miss Wood
First Steps have been super busy everyday this week and have been having loads of fun! At the start of the week we had a fantastic phonics session using a mirror and a few objects like a car, a train, a cow and a bear etc. The children used the mirror to look at how their mouth shape and sound changed depending on the object they chose. Then in P.E we developed our knowledge of colours through a physical game where we had to move around in different ways like hop, run or skip to the correct colour which was shouted out. We got creative this week and painted our own ladybirds and made some bumble bees out of clay. We also decorated our spiders from last week with glitter and paint.
For Woodland School this week we developed our number skills with a number hunt in the bark area. There were hidden numbers from 1-10 and once the children found the number they then had to count the correct amount of bark and show on their finger the number amount too. Well done First Steps!
On Thursday we had a very interesting assembly about Eid and Ramadan. We learnt about fasting, the mosque, how Eid is celebrated and much more! We also got to enjoy some Turkish delight from Mrs Guniz and coloured in and made mosques.
Mrs Guniz Mrs Mousi Ms Bambi
Key Events
Friday 21st May - Art Exhibition - Whole School Exhibition
Friday 28th May - ILG Athletics Championship Lee Valley Athletics Stadium
Friday 11th June - Inter-House Crystal Maze
Wednesday 16th June - Pupil Reports published
Thursday 17th - Friday 18th - Year 5 and Year 6 Bikepacking Expedition (optional)
Friday 25th June - Kite Festival
Saturday 26th June - Prize Giving, Sports Day - All children to attend
Saturday 26th June - Parent Social 6pm
Thursday 1st July - Inter House Tough Mudder
Friday 2nd July - End of Term Production
Illness & Medical
We continue to abide with the DfE Regulations.
We ensure that anyone developing those symptoms during the school day is sent home.
These are essential actions to reduce the risk in schools and further drive down transmission of coronavirus (COVID-19).
We would like to remind you that if your child is absent from school due to sickness (vomiting, diarrhoea) they must be clear for at least 48 hours prior to returning to school. You must inform the school office directly on 020 8546 5496 if your child will be absent that day.
Should your child develop symptoms or receive a positive result from a PCR test for Covid-19 you must immediately inform the school office - secretary@parkhillschool.com
This email is monitored during the school day and at set intervals during the weekend. If our line is busy, we have a backup answer service where an operator can take your message and we, as a school, are alerted accordingly.
We receive daily updates to the regulations every 24 hours and this information is reviewed and any alterations to the regulations immediately adopted. We abide by the PHE and DfE advice.
We must abide by the rules, rule of six, social distancing etc for the duration of each easing (hopefully) of the restrictions. However, having reviewed movement around the site and the layout of our buildings we would like to extend the invitation to those of you who drop off your children between 8am and 8.10am and would like to, you are welcome to take your children to the classroom door (Reception, Year 1, Year 2, First & Second Steps) and enjoy the gardens and chance to see far more of the school than we have been permitted to share with you for over a year! I would ask that masks are worn and that you enjoy the chance to walk through the school just like it was before! We will naturally review this each day and communication with you accordingly. We may need to limit the numbers on site during those ten minutes and ask for your patience if required.
Social Media
#confidentcurioushappy
There are also some wonderful images from our Little Adventurers available through their own instagram page -
Useful Links -
Credits:
Alistair Bond