St. Matthew’s Open Evening

Last Friday you will have received an email from Mr Quinn inviting you to the school Open Evening which will be held next Monday (17th July) from 3.45pm until 6pm.

This is a lovely opportunity for you to visit the school with your child at anytime during the evening (appointments not necessary).

You are encouraged to visit both your child’s current classroom where you will be able to look at their work and then to visit your child’s new classroom where you will be able to meet their new teacher!

Seesaw will also be open and I am currently looking into how parents can download a zip file of their child’s work…details and instructions to follow at the end of term!

We hope to see many of you next Monday.

Parents & carers of children starting Reception in September 2017 are also most welcome to come to the Open Evening.

Meeting about end of year reports

Dear Reception Parents/Carers

This Thursday (13th July) there will be a short meeting in the Hall to explain the end of year report format for the Early Years.  The meeting will start at 2.45pm and will be finished in time for a normal school pick-up.

I will post the powerpoint here on the blog on Thursday evening for those of you who are unable to attend the meeting.  If you have any questions after reading it please do come and find me.

Thank you

Ms Cronin

150th Celebration Week

What a fantastic week we had celebrating the school’s 150th birthday! We spent some time finding out about what life would have been like when our school was first opened and our class was given the job of creating the 1867 collage for the whole school timeline. We also wondered what the school might be like in another 150 years and came up with some interesting ideas; including coming to school in a flying car and the school being on the moon!  Going backwards and forwards in time are both very tricky concepts for Reception-aged children and I was so impressed by how hard they all tried to understand and imagine these ideas.

On Friday, we really did go back in time as St. Matthew’s was transformed into a Victorian-era school.  The costumes were fantastic (thank you parents!) and the children did an incredible job of going along with it all!

Here are some photos from the day:

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Handouts for New Reception Parents

A very warm welcome to those parents and carers whose children will be joining us in our Reception class from September.  We hope you will find this blog to be a useful resource both before the start of term and during the school year.

Please bookmark our blog and/or set up email notifications for new posts so you can keep up-to-date with what is happening at school.

Here is the presentation from our Welcome to Reception meeting that was held yesterday.

meeting for new reception parents 2016

And here is the ‘Off to Reception’ powerpoint which you might like to share with you child before they start in September.

Off to Reception powerpoint

Please remember to hand in all starting school forms to the school office before 14th July.

Finally, if your child has any allergies or special dietary requirements – you must let Mrs Morgan in the school office know BEFORE 14th July.  

Thank you!

A message from Year 6…

This week we thoroughly enjoyed reading two pirate stories that a couple of the children had brought into share with us.  They were The Pirates Next Door and The Pirate Cruncher.  Both worth a re-read if you happen to come across them!

 

We also spent some time looking carefully at the formation of the letter ‘e’ which is one letter many of the class find tricky.  If you have a moment, do encourage your child to practise the correct letter formation; they could write it with their finger on the carpet, or on your back or even with a stick in some mud!

Our star of the week did a fantastic job of filling his number bag with 12 items, all related to the number 12 and representing it in different ways.  I was especially impressed by his consideration of different ways of grouping the number 12 (e.g. 6+6 but also 4+3+5).

Weekend challenge: Can you find some different ways to make 12? How many different ways can you find? Write them down using the number signs + and =.

Our new number of the week has been chosen as the number:

Finally, we received a rather special message after our assembly last week.  A huge thank you to Year 6 and Mr Hunt who took the time to write to us and let us know what they liked about our assembly!

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Ahoy there!

We are all so very proud of just what a super job the children did on Friday morning!  They all spoke with great confidence, remembered exactly what to do when AND even managed to put some intonation and expressed into their lines!  I can honestly say I was so impressed by every single one of them!

A huge thank you to all the parents for supplying such fantastic costumes and for helping your children to learn their lines.  Thank you also for supporting us by coming along on the day.  When asked, many of the children said their favourite part of the assembly had been seeing you smiling, laughing and clapping.

Unfortunately, in all the excitement, I didn’t manage to take a photo of the entire Jolly Crew.  If anyone has one, taken at the end of the assembly, that they wouldn’t mind me posting here, I’d be most grateful if you could send it to me via the school office email. Thank you!

Many, many thanks to the Khan family for sending in this photo…what a jolly crew!

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As you can imagine, most of our week was spent practising for our assembly! We did, however, find some time to read an old favourite – ‘Can’t You Sleep Little Bear’ – which tells the story of little bear, who can’t get to sleep because he is afraid of the dark.  His father, big bear, reassures him until he finally falls asleep.

 

We also wrote some father’s day messages for our own daddies, and printed some handprints to make a father’s day keepsake bookmark.  These were sent home on Friday and we hope they made their way to our daddies today.  Happy father’s day!

The final half term!

Welcome back to the final half of the summer term in Reception – we hope everyone had a lovely, restful half term break.  We are looking forward to finishing off the year with lots of learning through play and hopefully lots of fine weather!

This week, we were very pleased to welcome a new classmate!  As we do not use the children’s names on our blog, I will not be introducing her by name here, but I have no doubt your child will be able to update you!  We warmly welcome her, along with her family, to both our class and our school.

We continued with our topic this week, reading all about the different creatures that make a “Commotion in the Ocean”.

 We have also been very busy practising for our class assembly which will take place next Friday 16th June at 9am.  We hope many of you will be able to join us on Friday for the assembly.

Our new number of the week has been chosen as number: