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PARK HILL PREPARATORY SCHOOL THE DEERSTALKER ISSUE 141 - 18th june 2021

From the Headmaster:

Just a little more perseverance required then.

We were so very hopeful that events post 21st June would be possible. The highly anticipated social, sports day, production and prize giving all to be squeezed in to bring the academic year to a successful close.

You will appreciate that navigating and interpreting the regulations has been a constant demand, not least when I and my colleagues are determined to provide all that we can in a safe and compliant way.

We are not permitted to hold outdoor events with more than thirty people in attendance. Even this, however, is determined by the venue and their demands and risk assessment. We can hold the sports day with children but are not permitted by St. Mary’s to allow any more than 30 parents.

I have explored various other tracks and venues who also apply this stipulation or, in most cases, are simply not permitting any spectators whatsoever.

Our Sports Day is a team event with every child competing in every event, earning points for their house. We looked at various scenarios of running individual year group sports days through the course of the day but were concerned that the ‘whole school’ ethos of such an event and competition would be lost; an occasion?

Our Prize Giving has always been a whole school affair, usually taking place just prior to Sports Day. Again, we are limited to no more than 30 people.

Throughout the last fifteen months we have done all we can to place the children at the heart of all we do. Trying to provide them with a sense of normality in a challenging and disrupted time. We also want you to feel as included as possible. As parents we simply want our children to be happy, their mental and physical health to be prioritised.

So, our current thinking.

Sports Day will take place at The Mo Farah Running Track but will now (awaiting final confirmation) take place on Monday 28th June. All children from Reception to Year 6 will be transported to the track and they will compete with their usual gusto and effort. First and Second Steps Sports Day will take place in school on Monday 28th June, 9.30am - 10.30am. Both events will be broadcast live on zoom and recorded.

I am going to add a caveat. Some large venues (having just watched a remarkable Quins vs Bristol game) are large enough to accommodate and enable larger gatherings within the regulations. If any one can help us or have any additional thoughts then please, please let me know.

Prize Giving will take place through zoom on Friday 2nd July at 9am - 9.40am prior to the similarly live streamed end of term production starting at 10.30am.

We have spent some considerable time discussing how to provide our Year 6 children with the very best send off at the end of their time at Park Hill. They have managed 11+ examinations and virtual school exams and visits with great determination. It was with a sense of disappointment that similar restrictions forbade even any production or sports day for our Year 6 leavers last year.

Therefore it simply seems the right thing to do, and I hope it is with our collective support as a school community, that we invite two family members of each of the Year 6 children only to join us in person for the end of term production on Friday 2nd July.

I would have much preferred the events to proceed as we hoped but we must not only abide to the regulations and the venue requirements but also to ensure we ‘simply’ play an important part in ensuring the health and welfare of each child, teacher and you, our families.

I do so hope that you will join us on zoom for these events. I am sorry that we simply cannot have all of you in person with us.

Hopefully the caution over these next few weeks will enable grater freedoms in the summer and more people to avail of the vaccinations.

Might I also encourage you to extend the invite to your wider families, grandparents, aunts, uncles etc to join us for the Prize Giving and Production to give both events as much sense of occasion for the children as possible. I think they deserve it.

Enjoy the images. Enjoy your weekend.

Alistair

Year 6 Residential (part deux)

A fantastic trip once again to our sister school St Felix. Yomping, roundering, cricketing, trebuchet building and squelching (courtesy of monsoon rain fall) but not enough to dampen spirits.

such trips are wonderful but wholly dependent on the support and encouragement of colleagues.

I trust you will,join me in thanking messrs Patel, Kilb, Papps, Gardner, Bond, Stevenson, Finch and Sims as well as the home team who compensate for duties and cover to give our children such superb memories.

Year 6

What a week it has been.

We started this week completing some poetry, using our articulated description from last week. Very interesting journeys were taken through the beach for these poems.

We also had the joy of opening and recreating our time capsule - with some very surprising results. The girls loved hearts at the beginning of the year and decorated everything with them. Now, geometric patterns are the decoration of choice.

A huge amount of growing has been done this year as, upon remeasuring, some had grown up 8cm in 9 months.

Then, on Wednesday, the residential trip began. Huge fun had with so many things taking place over such a short space of time: building Trebuchets on the beach (with an excellent reenactment of the opening scene of ‘Gladiator’), huge amounts of food consumed, a study of waves, photos under a microscope, party games, an introduction to badminton, and some cricket and rounders covers just the large items that took place.

The children were given more freedom and it was fascinating to see how they used it.

Morning one and everyone was up at 7:00 because they could. Morning two and only 3 made it up as most chose the lie in.

Well done all.

Year 5

With the Year 6’s off their residential trip, we wasted no time in setting up their classroom as a recording studio. After much hard work, wonderful attention to detail and certainly lots of perseverance, Year 5 Podcasts have been recorded, edited and I promise you they are worth the wait.

The ongoing effort in our allotment project has started to bear fruit, well more like sprout potatoes this week. After digging up the first of the potato harvest, it was fascinating to see how excited the children got over finding a muddy potato!

Year 4

A wonderful week to report in Year 4 ending in floods of work being produced. We began our week with writing stories inspired by Aesop’s Fable, ‘The Fox and the Crow.’ We took the theme of the story, using compliments to deceive a victim of their coveted possession, replacing characters and dialogue of our own choosing. We spent time in our other lessons cementing knowledge of the direct speech rules.

Leonardo’s ‘Vitruvian Man’, a theory on golden rules of ratio of the human form, inspired our Maths work as we measured our arm spans, hands, faces and our forearms to see if they would represent a portion of our height. We concluded that the dimensions of many of our body parts may not be in proportion with our height due to age and height. However, it was proven that the length of our outstretched arm span with be a good measure of our height.

In other areas we explored the effects of germs on bread as our experiments on microbes proved grimy. Well, perhaps that grimy hands will carry more bacteria as proven on slices of bread with a higher percentage of mould growth.

Well done, Year Four. We look forward to docking in next week. Mr Pappas

Year 3

A busy week in Year 3, from finding treasure using co-ordinates in Maths to continuing our Spike Milligan inspired poetry for our Father’s Day card. Making music with everyday equipment in the playground, to mini games of cricket at Ditton Field. So much to do!

The children have been given their end of term script for the production. They are definitely ready to get on the stage again after listening to their impressive first read through. Look out for Robin Hood and his Merry Men…and women!

Year 2

This week Year 2 have been very busy creating some beautiful Father’s Day cards and also creating a little surprise to go with the card. The children are very excited to give you these on Sunday.

In English we have started to create an all about me book for our new class teacher to get to know all about us including, our likes and dislikes, favourite subjects and even our worries.

In computing we created race tracks and the children drove their Sphero round. We had one child timing and another recording. At the end we saw who had the fastest time.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Year 1

During PSHCE, as we approach the end of our time in Year 1, we have been thinking about the amazing possibilities that Year 2 will bring us. I am happy to report that Year 1 are full of excitement and positivity about the opportunities unfolding.

In literacy and art our focus was portraits and similes - combining each skill to create Fathers day poems and cards.

We developed our understanding of halves and quarters - looking at notation and how to share quarters using part whole models.

Reception

Reception has been a hive of activity this week as we have been preparing something special for our Fathers and Grandads. They have been talking about why they love them. The children have continued to develop their vocabulary in PSED this week as we began to prepare for our next step into Year One in September. The children spoke about how they were feeling about this and they could explain their emotions in relation to our “zones of regulation”. We also had some special visitors this week from Second Steps who came up to see us. The Reception children were superstars at telling the nursery children all about what to expect in Reception and we then learnt a name game where we showed excellent turn-taking skills during the song. They were fantastic role models to the new cohort of Reception children.

In Maths this week we have been recapping our knowledge of 2D shapes and learning how to count the amount of sides and corners a shape has. The children used the Geoboards and elastic bands to create each shape as they listened to the description of a shape. Reception then went on a shape hunt outside and they took photos of different objects and used the “Markup” tool on their Ipads to draw the shapes they could see in the objects. They then used the text tool or a voice note to tell me about the characteristics of the shapes. In their free play the children have loved exploring our new water wall and they have been working together to fill up the jugs as one person poured water down the tube while the other person caught the water in their jug.

The children continued to work collaboratively to help them pick up and move paper cups using only an elastic band and pipe cleaners. They were amazing at this task and really worked together as a team in their small groups to create a pile of cups. They even challenged themselves to make a pyramid with the cups using the same method. The only rule was: you couldn’t use your hands to touch the cups.

In Woodland school we went on an edible plants hunt and tried to match the photos of plants to the real plant - the children learnt what strawberries, peas, beans, figs, mint and wheat looked like. They even tried some of the mint leaves and said that it tasted “minty”. Reception even found the school’s first red strawberries which appeared to have ripened overnight in all the hot weather and the heavy rain this week!!!!! The children loved trying these strawberries and we have left some others to ripen a bit more.

Finally, Reception were very excited to have another visitor on Wednesday when Mrs Gibbons came in to say hello to them. They were amazed to see baby Arthur and asked Mrs Gibbons some lovely questions about Arthur. It was so lovely that they got to see Mrs Gibbons again.

Second Steps

This week in Second Steps we have had so much, especially with the wonderful weather we have had, we made our very own beach. We used our tuff trays that had sand in and filled them up with water, the next day we found our paddling pool and continued on the fun.

With the term nearly coming to an end, we had our first settling in day, we went up to reception in the morning to spend time with our new teacher, see the new uniform that we would be wearing, see their morning routine and to spend sometime in our new room. It was a success, Second Steps had so much fun, we loved playing in our new room and we are excited to do it again next week.

In woodland school we went on an insect hunt, we found a lot of spiders and snails, we noticed one of our garden pots was empty, so we was able to plant some beetroot. We had to dig the soil up and we found a bulb hidden away, after a closer look we found out it was a daffodil bulb. We planted the beetroot, we watered it and are now waiting to see how it grows.

We had so much fun making our Father’s Day cards, we decorated our rockets and stuck our faces in side the rocket.

Miss Finch and Miss Wood

First Steps

First Steps have had an exiting week starting of by practicing our skills in preparation for sports day! Doing running, jumping, developing our gross motor skills as well as catching and throwing to develop our hand eye coordination.

The children really enjoyed having the measuring blocks in the classroom! They were using them to count, build towers and progress in mathematics with their friends.

First Steps were thrilled to make their own ‘cool’ cards for dads, uncles and grandfathers and used paint and colouring pencils to decorate them to add their personal touch. They also told us, what they liked to do with their dads.

All the children loved the sensory walk where we had soil, flour, water, shaving foam, bubble wrap and foil on the floor and they got a chance to feel all the different textures with their bare feet! They used their descriptive language to express their feelings too.

One of First Steps member, shared with the class that for dinner her and her family do Mussel Mondays! From this she kindly brought in the mussel shells and said she wanted to paint them with her friends. This was such a lovely activity which all the children thoroughly enjoyed and as we have a new covering for our outdoor area, we used these shells to create natural wind chimes.

This week we had have a very special visitor in our phonics session; Mr Crocodile. He was looking for some of his toys but talking differently. We realised that he was segmenting the words! First Steps children worked really hard and helped Mr. Crocodile to find all his toys, such as p-i-g, b-u-S and c-a-t!

To end this week we did an exiting experiment where the children observed how sugar cubes dissolve in hot and cold water. We asked children their prediction about the experiment and 7 children said hot water would dissolve the sugar cubes faster than the cold water! Well done little scientists!

Mrs Guniz Mrs Mousi Ms Bambi

Key Events

Friday 25th June - Kite Festival

Monday 28th June - Sports Day

Thursday 1st July - Inter House Tough Mudder

Friday 2nd July - Prize Giving & 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 -

Created By
Park Hill
Appreciate

Credits:

Alistair Bond