Author: Miss Dale

We are currently finishing off the new Maths Workout. This will provide a list of games and resources which can be accessed to practice mental maths skills at home. Maths workout will be focussed around the maths bubble planner that we introduced last session and each pupil will have their own planner which means parents will know exactly what to focus on at home in order to challenge and support with maths homework.

The Big Maths Beat That quiz sheet will be introduced into the back of the book so that parents can see progress and success.

We hope you will give us plenty of feedback to let us know if these new approaches are improving the homework experience for our learners.

The tree house is beginning to take shape in the playground thanks to a small group of determined parents and young farmers. It is brilliant that people are willing to give up family time to support the school in the latest development project – much appreciated.

We hope that pupils will have the opportunity to get up onto the tree house before the snows come!!

Thank you to other families who have stopped by to support!

A reminder to pupils attending the swimming lessons – you know who you are!

Swimming lessons start on Monday, the first day of term!!!

It was great to get a really dry, sunny start to the week and parents were very surprised when we turned up almost clean at the end of the first day!

We had planned den building and camp fire cooking skills – building on the skills learned last session but we also wanted pupils to transfer skills from the classroom into the woods so we planned maths, art and drama activities too.

We used different tools to cause vibrations to coax worms out of the ground – Scott’s group won with a worm 20cm in length.

Tuesday was all about trees and pupils had to calculate the area of leaves with the seniors also working out the average area of leaves on a tree. We took rubbings and observation drawings of the leaves both in the playground and in the woodland.

In the afternoon we went to the outdoor classroom in the woodland and pupils created faces on the trees using mud and found objects from the woods. Some pupils chose to create scary monster faces. Working with mud was great fun!

Wednesday was all about mini beasts and pupils went on a bug hunt, classified bugs and observed and drew mini beasts. Staff were impressed at the confidence of pupils – no one was nervous about studying mini beasts.

Today P4-7 pupils and Isla are teaching the rest of the school how to add a new post about their learning to the Blog!!

Please find the hot off the press issue of the Holywood News Letter – Kenya Special edition 2013.

I hope you agree that pupils have worked hard to capture just some of the events and activities we have worked on in recent times.

Read and Enjoy!!

Miss Dale

I have been reading some of the past newsletters and it really is amazing to think back on events and learning that we have involved pupils, parents and the wider community in.

ENJOY reading all about once again in the HOLYWOOD NEWS section.

Can we get comments from past pupils?

Miss Dale

Rhian Davies was very impressed with the standard of the bike and scooter costumes. Amazing support from family – thank you!

Remember to keep pedalling – there is only three days left in the Big Pedal and we are currently leading the group in Rhian’s I bike schools. We are in the top 50 for small schools across the whole country – check out the Big Pedal website to see how we are getting on.

Thank you to everyone who dressed up funny, bought  a red nose or our weirdly decorated cakes in order to raise money for Comic Relief. We will let you know how much we raised in the next newsletter.