St Adrian's Catholic Primary School
To learn, to love, to live
Thank you so much for the very thoughtful and generous gifts that I have been given to end the year. It has been a great privilege to teach all of your wonderful Year 2 children. They have shown themselves to be very hardworking and they are kind and caring friends to one another. The children are really ready for Year 3 and they will have a smashing time with Miss Osman. I wish you all a fun filled summer in which you will all be able to spend precious time together with family and friends.
It has been a very hot week, but the children have still continued to show what great learners they are. They started the week with a Teddy Bear’s Picnic in the shade as temperatures were already reaching 30 degrees. The children revised their Design and Technology learning by making wraps and they enjoyed rereading the recipe instructions that they wrote during this topic to help them to make another delicious wrap.
Starting with a performance by the cheerleading club,, the children have celebrated their talents all week, finishing with a very successful talent show. Well done to all the Year 2 children who auditioned for this event. They really are a very talented bunch! Here are some photos that show what a wide range of opportunities the children have in the many school clubs available to the children here at St Adrian’s. There is a club to suit everyone’s interests!
The children have coped very well with the heat this week, but next week is set to be even hotter, so please do send your child in with at least one full drinks bottle. Why not send in a second bottle, filled with frozen water as this will be great for the children to enjoy later in the day.
What a busy week the children have had as part of our Commonwealth Games celebrations. The Sponsored Bounce was great fun for all of us and Sports Day was a wonderful event with the children displaying super sports skills as they joined in with all the games activities.
When we visited Ashridge, we found many exciting minibeasts in the woodland and grassland habitats there. As part of our learning in science, on our return to school, we were keen to create a microhabitat at school where we could explore minibeasts every day. Our bug hunts have shown that minibeasts like spaces that are damp, dark and in the shade, and we have had great fun this week finishing off Bugingham Palace, a bug home for all kinds of creatures. We will enjoy finding out what creatures will move into their new home over the next few weeks.
It was lovely to see so many families visiting school, for our first Open Evening in three years. The children have worked incredibly hard this year and it was a wonderful way to celebrate their amazing learning. Thank you for sharing the evening with us.
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.
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.
