St Adrian's Catholic Primary School
To learn, to love, to live
Everyone is welcome! Whether you are the parent of one of our lovely children, or you are thinking of sending your child to our wonderful school, come along to celebrate all of the learning that has taken place this year, meet the teachers and visit the classrooms.
Wednesday, 6th July 2022 from 4pm until 6pm.
We have been so lucky in the month of June. We started the month with a Habitats visit to Ashridge, last week we learned about Judaism in an inspiring workshop and this week, we reinforced our learning in history with a day long series of activities focussing on the Great Fire of London. We all looked tremendous dressed up in our 17th century outfits and our teacher for the day, Master Jonathan taught us many things about how people lived 350 years ago. As the day progressed, we learned more about how the fire developed and what the people of London would have done to try and stop the fire. During the afternoon, we explored artefacts collected from the fire, and considered what they told us about the owner and their life.
We could not have run the day without the support of nine adults from Year 2 and Year 3 and we are very grateful for their invaluable help and enthusiasm. Thank you!
As part of our whole school learning about our sister faith of Judaism, we took part in a workshop that taught us all we needed to know about the Jewish day of rest called Shabbat. The workshop took us back to our autumn RE, where we had learned that God rested on the seventh day and the Jewish people do this as part of their Shabbat on Friday, going onto Saturday at sunset.
The children had great fun exploring the Jewish resources, such as the kippar (cap), Torah (religious text), yad (pointing stick) and tallits (prayer shawl) and showed great respect as they learned about this fascinating religion which has so many connections with the Catholic faith. Our morning ended with our own liturgy where we enjoyed grape juice and challah bread, followed by a whole school assembly where we taught the rest of the school a Shabbat song and found out lots of new things from other classes.
Shabbat candles, shabbat candles. Burning bright, burning bright. Challah on the table, challah on the table, it’s Friday night, Friday night.
All through the year, the Year 2 children have been caring for the plants growing in the raised beds next door to the classroom.
We have thoroughly enjoyed watching the different insects using the Bee and Butterfly Garden that we created and having grown them from seed, all of our vegetables, including onions, peas and courgettes are busy growing. This week was very exciting as we were finally able to harvest our strawberries and we used them to make milkshakes. They were very delicious!
The Year 2 children have had a wonderful trip to Ashridge. They were blessed with warm, but not too hot weather and thoroughly enjoyed exploring the habitats there, learning to identify and name a number of trees including sweet chestnut, holly, hawthorn, oak and beech. The children enjoyed exploring the habitat below the logs and leaves and found many minibeasts including centipedes, harvestman spiders and rove beetles. It was a very exciting day and the children were superb, with one parent commenting ‘I am absolutely blown away at how well behaved and engaged the children were today. They are an absolute credit to the school’. We are very grateful to the parents who were able to accompany us to Ashridge, without whom we could not have run the trip.
As part of our Platinum Jubilee activities this week, we have created an amazing display to show just how grateful we are to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. Thank you Ma’am.
We watched a great cartoon in which Queen Elizabeth’s beautiful hat is blown off her head by a gust of wind. Off trot a loyal guard and a cheeky corgi to see if they can rescue the hat. This was the stimulus for our own stories and our next task was to create a story that told what happens next. We had great fun writing our stories, which showed just how good we are at creative writing, spellings, handwriting and punctuation now! For our maths challenge, we thought about the number 70 and all the different ways we could make 70, using the number skills that we have developed this year.
Click on the link below, if you would like to watch this lovely Platinum Jubilee cartoon at home.
Along with Year 2 children across the nation, throughout the month of May, we have been involved in lots of end of Key Stage practical activities and written assessments to show just how much we have learned during our time in Key Stage One. We have worked very hard and to celebrate our achievements, we all enjoyed a delicious ice lolly together, in the beautiful bee and butterfly garden that we have created.
We love maths every day, but Wednesday was a particularly joyful day, because we were involved in creating a new Guinness World Record as part of an online community of 5362 schools around the country!
The day began with a warm up activity led by Katya Jones, of Strictly Come Dancing fame. That was very exciting, but only the starter as we then joined in with a mass chant focussing on the 5 times table. This was a great way to show that learning times tables can be fun and we were overjoyed when we discovered that enough schools had joined in with the live stream to make a new world record. Throughout the day, we then took part in lots of activities linked to the 2, 5 and 10 times tables. As a finale, we all brought a certificate home to show just how clever we are!
If you would like to join in with the National Numeracy number heroes competition, please follow the link below, where you will find more details: https://www.nationalnumeracy.org.uk/number-heroes-competition
Over the last few weeks, we have been watching the caterpillars in our class change, as they ate and ate, grew bigger and bigger, developed cocoons and then emerged from their chrysalises as beautiful butterflies. We even created a beautiful bee and butterfly garden in our outside area, which the insects will be able to visit when they need to collect nectar and drink. This week, we were overjoyed to let our butterflies go free – some fluttered away straight away, but some brave butterflies stayed close to us for ten minutes, so that we were able to get a really close look at them. Your challenge as you take a look through the photos is to Spot the butterfly!
This week, we planted up the herbs that came into school as part of the Coronation of Mary liturgy. They smell wonderful and we are looking forward to watching the bees and butterflies visit them once they start to flower through the summer. Take a look at our infant gardens as you pass through them to see what you can spot.
During our May Day liturgy, the Chaplaincy Team led us as we gave thanks for Mary, the mother of Jesus. All the children created a poster that celebrated Mary’s role as Queen and these have been used as a prayer focus for all the classes. Thank you so much for all the amazing plant donations that have been used to really show how deep our thanks is to Mary. Our service ended with a tremendous May Pole dance by Year 4.
We are all overjoyed to finally receive our set of new reading books. Here we are, juggling with five books each – it was trickier than we thought to hold the books out and look at the camera at the same time! We shall enjoy reading them at home along with a library book that we choose from our Top 50 reads for Year 2. There are so many books to choose from!
In preparation for our May Day liturgy, we wrote prayers asking for help as we try to keep the peace in our own lives. Here are our beautiful Mary, Queen of Peace posters that we were very proud to show everyone in school. Thank you so much for contributing such wonderful plants for our floral display. We shall enjoy planting and caring for them and then watching them grow across the next few months.
