Rufford Park Primary School

Week 4, ending 25 November 2022

Mrs Amos (a.amos) on: Oak Tree Class Blog

Northern Soul has been our theme music all week – such a splendid way to start each day! It was so entertaining seeing the children join in with some ‘oldies’ this week!

In Maths this week, we have needed to recap and revise Addition and Subtraction methods, as crucial aspects seem to have been forgotten by most! You may notice that this forms part of our homework  - do please join in with the addition/subtraction game in a bid to support their learning.

This week’s English has finished with thoughtful character studies about the man in The Piano – and I have been so pleased to see the effort from each and every child to improve their handwriting in their published piece.

Yet more skills have been learned in Tag Rugby with Matt this week – we now know the three main ways a rugby ball can be thrown. These sessions are so much fun!

Ukelele lessons are going from strength to strength, too. Silent Night and Jingle Bells are being learned right now, so hopefully we can impress you with our playing before the Christmas holidays. 

Don’t forget it’s the Christmas Fayre on Saturday – thank you for all the donations you have been sending in for the Christmas Movie Treat. (We are extremely hopeful that we could be the winners…. watch this space!)

Have a super weekend,

Mrs Adrienne Amos

Week 3, ending 17/11/22

Mrs Amos (a.amos) on: Oak Tree Class Blog

A short week for us at RPPS, but it still gave us many opportunities for furthering learning! The children came in each morning to Rockabilly tunes, while they completed Early Bird Maths. Some children are still needing to work on recalling their Times Table facts, so extra time with Miss Hanna has been provided in the mornings too.

In English, one area we have been developing (along with handwriting, grammar and spellings!) is the use of effective sentence openers. By looking at a poignant video from LiteracyShed called The Piano, different sentence opener ideas have been encouraged in written tasks. Hopefully, this short unit will feed into all writing tasks over the next months. It would be really helpful if parents could help children identify some effective sentence openers in reading books, as your child reads to you.

In Science, we are beginning a new unit on Electricity and in PE we have started learning the rules and skills for Tag Rugby. The Dunkirk Evacuation made for a very interesting History lesson – we spent a lot of time discussing how this event really helped changed the direction of the Second World War.

Ukelele lessons are progressing well – we are all enjoying learning new notes, chords and songs each week. Monday mornings are so much fun! And we also had a lot of fun ‘buddying up’ with our two Reception classes this week, encouraging their learning of nursery rhymes, by sharing the ones we can recall! Twinkle Twinkle seemed to be the favourite one! I think Mrs Millen and Mrs Mace have photos of this heart-warming session on their class blogs – do have a look if you can by clicking the link here.

Homework this week continues with learning our spelling rules (-able words) and some Maths is coming home each week now too. Please encourage your child to complete their tasks independently and to bring their homework into school each Wednesday morning. If your child has also brought home a Times Table booklet this weekend, it means that more time needs to be spent on these at home as well. I would like each child to complete an activity page a week and bring the booklet in each Wednesday, too.

Have a very nice weekend! (Lucky children get an extra day!)

Mrs Adrienne Amos

Week 2, ending 11 November

Mrs Amos (a.amos) on: Oak Tree Class Blog

This has been a great week for us in Oak Tree. We have finished our amazing double page spreads in English, on the Role of Women in WWII and we have come in each morning, listening to punk/punk pop music! 

These tunes have set us up well for motivated, enthusiastic learning.

As well as this, the children have spent a lot of time considering ‘Why we Remember’. Remembrance Day 2022 has had much more of a meaningful impact on our children this year, I feel, as we have been studying World War 2 for the term. Some children were able to invest time and thought when considering local fallen WW2 soldiers, by creating a Poppy Pebble. We hope, that by the end of Friday, every soldier from Yeadon who died, will have had a commemorative pebble, cross or wreath made in their name by the children in Y5/6. (Please see our photo.)

It has also been an exciting week for some of our athletes as SEVEN Oak Tree Class pupils represented Rufford Park Primary at an inter-school cross country event. It was really exciting to clap out of the classroom our seven sporting hopefuls on Wednesday afternoon.

Finally – a word about Reading in Year 5. Children can record any reading in their red reading records. This could be their school banded book, school library book, book club book or a book from home. As your child is now in Upper Key Stage Two, they can record independent reading in their reading record (as long as they can summarise what they have read!) alongside any reading they complete with an adult. Our goal is that children learn to enjoy reading for pleasure and achieve well during their time at Rufford Park and we want every child to leave at the end of Year 6 a confident and capable reader.

An interesting statistic from The Reading Agency, a national charity helping to create a world where everyone is reading, is that children who read books often at age 10 gain higher results in maths and English at age 16, than those who read less regularly. 

Reading for just 20 minutes per day equates to being exposed to roughly 1,800,000 words per year compared to reading for 5 minutes per day which equates to around 282,000 words a year. 

Have a super weekend – full of exciting reading, hopefully!

Yours, Mrs Adrienne Amos

(PS Do remember that next Friday is a Training Day for RPPS!)

Week 1, ending 4 November

Mrs Amos (a.amos) on: Oak Tree Class Blog

Welcome back after the half term holiday!

Oak Tree Class seems to have hit the ground running this past week, continuing with excellent work on writing non-chronological reports as if we have had no break! The children’s reports (our exciting double-page spreads!) are shaping up nicely and I am really looking forward to them being completed next week. Hopefully, we shall have the published pieces displayed in school soon and you should be able to pop in and see them for yourselves. The children have been really proud of their efforts.

In Maths, we have been looking at factors and multiples (including common factors and common multiples) and although these are quite tricky concepts to grasp, the children have been managing very well – some pupils have really impressed me by reaching the extensions in lessons.

We started an energetic badminton unit in PE. It was lovely to see so many children achieving the key objective AND having fun.

A geography lesson seems to have been our ‘biggest hit’ this past week, as it gave the children the opportunity to use the atlases. Much hard work could be seen as we looked at the many countries that were involved in WW2. Well done to those families who have managed to bake from the WW2 Ration Book. Your photos are fab!

Blues music has filled the air each morning; I am looking forward to hearing some (carefully chosen!) punk music next week!

Have a lovely weekend,

Mrs Adrienne Amos

Week 7, ending 21 October

Mrs Amos (a.amos) on: Oak Tree Class Blog

We have reached the end of the first half term and now we get a week off! Woop woop! The children in Oak Tree Class certainly do deserve a week off, after all the splendid work they have done over the past seven weeks.
This week has been no different to all the others – lots of work but lots of fun too.

Britpop has been our soundtrack, featuring Oasis, Blur, the Charlatans and others – for some, this has been a brand new style, so it’s been good to see their musical horizons expanding, as well as their other skills in the curriculum.

By far, our favourite session this past week has been the practical food tasting lesson for DT. On Monday, the children were encouraged to try four seasonal, locally grown foods: kale, beetroot, swede and butternut squash. I was delighted to see how many children were willing to ‘have a taste’ of vegetables they had never seen (or even hear of!) before. Some even asked for seconds! This DT session was a really important one, as it gave the children a greater variety of choice from which they can plan their own healthy, seasonal meal next half term.

We have furthered our knowledge of the developing role of women during WW2, and linked a little bit of this in a Code-Breaking maths lesson, too. Our PE units on Handball and O.A.A have finished this week and we are looking forward to Badminton and Gymnastics next half term.

Thank you for all the photos you are emailing (oak@ruffordparkprimary.org.uk) of the children and their Rationed Food items/baking. They truly do look yummy! Keep this up, if you can over half term – and I shall print out and display all the photos in November, when we return to school.

There are lots of exciting things to look forward to before Christmas, in our next half term, too. Thank you to everyone for making me feel so welcome at Rufford Park this term.

Have a super week!
Mrs Adrienne Amos