Newsletter

Active lessons in different places…

History out in the woods: marching like a Roman soldier; getting in the 'tortoise' formation (or at least attempting it!); making rather sturdy [read: HEAVY] shields. Good learning fun. 

Relay race in the library to learn about the Dewey System: where can you find those non-fiction books about bones; how about autobiographies of famous people? Year 4 learned in a fast paced and exciting group relay race. Fun times!

We have fun in the Rose Garden, even when we are physically outside of the classroom!

This is my last note as Deputy Head Boy. I have really enjoyed this term and I’m still singing songs from Moana, especially Shiny, which was my favourite part of the performance because of the glowsticks!

Some of you football fans have probably been watching the World Cup. Hopefully England can go one step further than Euro 2020. Come on England! Hopefully it’s coming home!

It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas now that my Advent Calendar has been opened! There are Christmas Parties and Secret Santa to look forward to, as well as the Nativity - it feels like a very long time ago that I was a dancing camel in Pre-prep!

This week the children have definitely started to get into the festive spirit after decorating the Christmas tree in the dining room. We have also celebrated Isadora’s birthday with lots of pizza and cake, the girls watched Home Alone which is a Christmas classic. 

We also enjoyed watching England beat Wales on Tuesday night, the goals definitely deserved celebrating. 

Some of us are off to the Barn Dance this evening, which we are excited about. There has been lots of dancing in the boarding house all week as well as the groups perfecting their performances ready for Boarders' Feast on Thursday 15 December. 

Have a great weekend everyone.

Year 3 have been finding fractions: fractions of shapes and fractions of groups of items.  They even had great fun out into the woods in their Outdoor Ed lesson making fractions from natural things. 

Year 4 undertook a capacity investigation this week and tried to find out who drinks the most coffee in the staff room. They first got a sense of measurement by guessing the capacity of measuring beakers that were covered in paper. It was shocking to find some were equal when the paper was ripped off! The children then guessed the capacity of different cups and mugs. They definitely achieved the learning objective by the end of the lesson, along with the additional information that Mrs. Foster's mug holds the most coffee: 400ml! 

As part of their Statistics and Probability module, some of the Year 6 pupils were tasked with researching a topic of their choice and collecting data on it. They then used the knowledge and skills they had been taught to illustrate the data by a means of their choice, such as a pie chart or pictogram. The last part of the process was to interpret the data and pose some questions on it that their classmates needed to answer. 

Aside from the curriculum content that is taught in maths lessons, a very important feature is the starter and plenary activities that take a few minutes at the start and end of lessons. These can range from fun activities such as the maths game from the Channel 4 programme Countdown, to team games that involve strategy and to good old fashioned mental arithmetic tests. The main benefit of these activities is that, whilst mathematical knowledge is obviously important, they emphasise and require the application of important ‘skills’ such as reasoning and problem solving, which are a vital component of being a successful mathematician. 

In EAL all of the pupils have made posters about the countries they have drawn in the EAL Fifa World Cup sweepstake. They have looked at size, shape and location of their country, flags, languages spoken, typical foods, unusual facts and, of course, their best football players. Several HMCs have been earned! 

On Sunday a group of King’s Hall pupils from a range of year groups travelled to Yeovil Athletics track and Leweston School to compete in a Biathlon time trial. All pupils were brilliant and recorded excellent times in both their runs and swims. We now have to wait until the national ranking list is produced to see how many of us qualify to the National Finals later in the year.

Our pupils had a fantastic time playing squash with Taunton School last week. Lots of pupils competed in their first ever game with lots of learning and progress. Well done everyone and thanks to Mr Drew.

The Pupil Council invites you to participate in Christmas Shoeboxes for Ukraine. The idea is to pack a shoebox with new toys for a child and wrap it up in Christmas paper, put a label on the front noting the age group suitability of the contents; then please bring the completed wrapped boxes in to school for the attention of Mrs Foster.

Here are a few ideas of what you might like to put in the box:

• Toys eg. stuffed teddy, interactive game, skipping rope, fidget toy
• Hygiene items eg. hairbrush, toothbrush, packaged bar of soap, compact mirror, sanitary products
• School supplies eg. pencils, pens, pencil case, crayons, notebooks, stickers
• or other essentials such as gloves, hats, sunglasses

Thank you in advance of your kindness towards this worthy cause.