This week’s newsletter for Rossall Nursery, Pre-Prep and Prep School.
Dear All,
In exactly one month’s time, children will be putting out their carrots, mince pies and glasses of milk for The Big Man and today we officially started the countdown to that most magical time of year. The Prep School Christmas Tree Light Switch On is always a wonderful start to the festive season. I was delighted to welcome so many family members to sing Christmas songs and take part in the countdown. The tree has been adorned with the homemade baubles that the children hung earlier in the day and I am delighted to announce that bauble sales raised another £280 for Brian House – thank you!
Well done to Pippa, Kennedy, Theo, Harry, Abrianna, Dolly, Rhiannon and Jasper, who won our decorate a bauble competition!
On Thursday, our Year 6 girls travelled to St Mary’s Hall for a hockey festival. There were some fantastic performances against a number of teams from across the North-West. Mrs Santamera reported that the girls played with great spirit and determination. There were no winners given it was a festival, although we would have finished very high up had it been a competition! An in-depth report can be found further on in the newsletter.
Congratulations go to our courageous and resilient girls, for both the way in which they played in the Wyre & Fylde U-11 football cup, and also for the manner in which they dealt with having to withdraw from the competition following the injury to one of our players. Amelia broke her arm during a match, something that was witnessed by all the girls playing. I am pleased to say that Amelia is now back in school following her operation, and has plenty of people queueing up to sign her cast. I was so proud of all the girls for the way in which they conducted themselves in what was a difficult situation for all involved. We often speak about team spirit, community and camaraderie but in this case, it was abundantly clear for all to see. My sincere thanks to staff, parents and the medical staff at Fleetwood Town for all they did to support Amelia and the girls.
All Prep pupils were afforded the opportunity to take part in House Football, in what is affectionately known as the ‘Christmas Cup’! It was wonderful to see the house colours on display and I know that the children were exceptionally proud to wear their house tops, particularly as they sang The Carmen before the games! There were some hard-fought matches in some terrifically windy conditions.
Congratulations to our winners for 2023 – Clifton!
Have a wonderful weekend.
Mr M Turner
Headmaster of Preparatory School & Nursery
Manchester United Ladies 1 V 3 Manchester City Ladies
On Sunday evening, a group of Prep School football supporters travelled to Old Trafford. What a fabulous experience to witness this highly anticipated Derby match in the Women’s Super League! For many of the children, it was the first time they had attended a match in this historic stadium. As always, the Rossall Prep children were immaculately behaved, had loads of fun, and finished the night off with an ice-cream and a sing-song!
St Mary’s Hall Mixed Hockey Festival
What a wonderful way to spend a Wednesday afternoon, and our final fixture for the girls of 2023!
Year 6 once again showed their talent on the hockey pitch. We took two teams over to take part in a mixed festival at St. Mary’s Hall. The Rossall Prep teams performed magnificently, winning many of their games. It really has been a joy to see the progress each of the girls have made this Michaelmas term on the hockey pitch. Their enjoyment of ALL sports is reflected in their performance, dedication and commitment.
Well done girls!
Year 6
“A winner is a dreamer who never gives up.”
This is a quote from Nelson Mandela that I (Mrs Scott) stumbled upon yesterday and I thought it was very apt right now for our Year 6 children. This week, we have been completing our termly formal assessments across Prep School, reflecting on the progress children have made in Maths and English. In Year 6, however, we are no strangers to assessments. Since the beginning of the year, our children have been preparing for the Year 7 entrance exams. The teachers have continually raised the bar for the children, and – as we expected – the children have continued to meet and exceed expectations. We really are all winners, because we have set our sights high, and we continue to work towards our goals without giving up.
Aside from assessments, there has been a lot of learning happening in our classrooms. In English, we have continued to learn about endangered species – this week was kakapos and polar bears – and we combined some research about them with grammatical features such as dashes for parenthesis in formal writing. Our Topic work has seen us explore the ways in which humans threaten ecosystems around the world, including through pollution and population growth.
In Science, we have continued learning about living things and focused on microorganisms. We have set up an investigation to observe the conditions in which mould will grow. To do this, we have swabbed areas like door handles with cotton buds and then transferred this to slices of bread. We expect mould to start growing on the bread, showing the presence of microorganisms. But which area will produce the most mould? We will have to observe over time to find out and will update you next week!
Year 5
Our Viking invasion of Martin Mere may seem long ago, but it has continued to drive our learning in History and inspire creative research and inquiry work from our Year 5 settlers. We have enjoyed learning about Saxon England, and creating a fact file in the IT Suite on King Alfred ‘The Great’. Not only was he ‘great’ for valiantly defending his kingdom and uniting the country, but for translating literature from Latin to Anglo-Saxon, which enabled many more people to be educated – what an amazing fact!
Talking of reading, our class novel ‘Arthur and the Golden Rope’ has captivated the imagination of the class, and our character’s adventures have inspired us to write poetry about his quest to steal treasure from the Dragon of Death. We had a lot of fun listening to each other’s rhyming couplets, and our progress with syllables and rhyme really was quite sublime!
Year 4
Excitement is brewing in Prep School as all the festivities kick off!
We have loved decorating our Christmas tree this week with wonderful and creative baubles, as well as singing Christmas Carols, drinking hot chocolate and taking part in the Christmas Lights Switch On.
This week has been another busy week in Year 4. As well as completing our assessments, we have been busy practising for our Christmas concert performance too.
In Maths, we have started our new topic of learning, ‘Area’. We have enjoyed finding the area of certain shapes by counting squares and half squares and noticing how important multiplication is when exploring the area of shapes. Looking at how many rows and columns there were helped us to figure out what number sentence we would need to create to find the total measurement.
In English, description was the main focus of our learning this week. We have continued to up-level our vocabulary by using our Thesaurus skills and consolidating our understanding of subordinate clauses to vary sentence types in our writing.
In Topic, a new Google platform (Jamboard) was introduced to promote teamwork to produce a poster-style piece. We compared Victorian holidays to holidays from the World Wars and of today’s modern era. It was interesting to find out how people chose to spend their spare time with a big focus on how visiting Blackpool was big for tourists back then.
Year 3
A wonderful week in Year 3!
In English this week, we finished our book ‘Winter’s Child’ and reached its joyful ending. We used the book to learn about similes to describe settings and actions, which was a great opportunity for us to share our creativity! We then wrote a ‘senses grid’ where we used our senses to describe the book’s final scene, applying our learning of adverbs and similes to this.
This week for Maths we have started our new unit on multiplication and division. This week we covered the fundamentals of this topic in order to deepen our conceptual understanding by looking at equal groups, arrays, sharing and grouping.
In topic this week, we moved on to our next ‘Riotous Royal’: Queen Anne. We learnt how she was a well-liked queen although she was very ill, and of course, the most important thing she is renowned for: The Acts of Union, joining the country of Great Britain together.
In Science, we consolidated some of our learning from our fantastic visit to the Science Department last week, deepening our understanding of magnetic fields and how magnets behave with each other and other materials. We also conducted an investigation in class to test the strength of different types of magnets.
On Thursday it was time for our next Astronomy session for Rossall Rotation. We had the opportunity this time to touch some moon rock and learn about how long it would take to get to the moon and to the closest star. We loved our session with Dr Lister.
Finishing off the week with our Christmas Lights Switch On was such a magical event and now we are truly ready for the Rossall Christmas Spirit to spark!
Year 2
Thomas A. Edison may have said that “being busy does not always mean real work.” But it really does in Year 2! This week has been no exception. We began with our termly assessments in English and Mathematics – I was so impressed by the manner in which they embraced this challenge. The children were really focused and showed exactly what they are capable of.
If that was not enough, we also reached the end of unit of work in Mathematics. The children have really grasped the concept of addition and subtraction, even completing some very tricky word problem questions. Next week, we will move on to shapes – I just hope the children do not find learning about triangles pointless!
In Science, we have been learning all about habitats and the children were able to discuss the different features of these and how certain animals and plants have adapted to survive in various conditions. Rossall Rotation very much reinforced this learning as the children took the opportunity to build their own bug hotels.
We have also been very busy preparing for the Nativity dress rehearsal, with less than a week to go costumes have been fitted, lines have been learnt and choreography finalised. Family and friends we look forward to seeing you on Monday 4th December, you won’t want to miss it!
Year 1
We know it is only November, but it’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas in Year 1, with the arrival of the Pre-Prep Christmas tree and our Christmas themed crafts beginning to surface. We are really excited to show off our singing and our decorated baubles at the Christmas Light Switch On and we have enjoyed some festive baking during Rossall Rotation, where we made chocolate pastry Christmas trees. I hope the children shared them. They were delicious!
We have had a really busy week with rehearsals and lots of reading. The children have really impressed me with the progress they are making and their eagerness to read out loud. In swimming, we tried to swim without our armbands, and practised front and back crawl and our lifesaving star floats.
In PE, we continued with our gymnastics and used different parts of our bodies to balance. In Music and Dance, we have been rehearsing for our Nativity and can’t wait to wow our families with our performance.
Reception
The lure of all things cute and fluffy is irresistible to most children and many adults – but you don’t need to have your own pets to get your little ones used to animals. Learning to care for animals and treat them with kindness is an experience that children can easily transfer to their relationships with other humans too – it helps to build empathy, understanding and respect for both their peers and adults.
And it doesn’t have to be all about the cute and fluffy. Our children have demonstrated respect and interest in all kinds of creatures – whether it’s a wriggly worm, a slimy slug or a pretty butterfly. This term we have been looking at lots of types of minibeast, including spiders, ants, worms, slugs and flies! We have collected minibeasts from our woodland area and even our playground. The children enjoyed looking closely at them through magnifying glasses. We carefully let the animals go at the end of the lesson.
This term’s book ‘I’m Going To Eat This Ant’ has inspired the children to ask lots of questions about anteaters. Through discussions and videos the children have found out more about anteaters and learnt that as well as ants, they love to eat termites too. We carefully labelled some pictures and used our floor book to record facts we could remember about anteaters as a class. We have learnt there are four types of anteater, each with their own distinct characteristics. More importantly, the children have learnt about the different habitats and countries that the anteaters can live in. This has encouraged the children to use lots of new vocabulary over the last few weeks.
If your child would like to learn more about minibeasts you could watch Minibeast Adventure with Jess on CBeebies together, and use a Minibeast spotter to record the creatures you find when you’re out and about.
Nursery
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have” – Maya Angelou
This week in the Nursery we have focused on Understanding The World.
The Sanderlings
The Sanderlings have been encouraged to engage with the world around them, which has included thinking about sounds, people, objects and emotions. Whilst out in the garden and on walks, the babies have been looking up and around them to see what they can see, smell and hear. We have used Language modelling to support the development of words, whilst allowing the babies to explore freely and follow their interests, as this is how children learn best. The Sanderling team have actively encouraged the babies to try and be aware of emotions and show empathy with comfort objects for other children in the room.
This week has also been the start of festive activities. The Sanderlings have a festive box filled with lots of baubles, tinsel and trinkets for the children to explore. Finally, The Sanderlings Christmas tree has been put on display which the babies have loved helping with and exploring.
The Sandpipers
The Sandpipers have been engaging with the world around us, for example by learning about different sounds and different movements, which the children have found really funny.
The Sandpipers have also been experimenting with a range of tools to create marks on paper and in the tuff tray such as sticks, paintbrushes and fingerprints. The children have enjoyed activities that have meant they can use their vivid imaginations. The Sandpipers have also been talking about colours and what can happen to colours when they are mixed together: they found it magical watching the colours change. The children have made orange, purple and brown.
Finally, The Sandpipers have been creating sounds with a variety of instruments and there have been lots of Christmas craft projects ready to take home.
Pre-School
Pre-School has been in the Christmas spirit and joined in with lots of different activities. At the start of the week, the children enjoyed exploring the Christmas tuff tray filled with baubles, beads, garlands and tinsel whilst talking about how they celebrate Christmas at home. Miss Emsley set up an activity where the children decorated Christmas trees on the clear vertical art easel, which the children enjoyed doing using different colours to paint their own lights and baubles.
Towards the end of the week, the children explored the seaside on an afternoon walk and celebrated ‘World Hello Day’. The children greeted everyone with different ways to say hello, such as “hola” and “ciao”.
Awards
Year 6
This week, certificates in 6S were awarded to Lulu for independently improving his work after receiving feedback and Millie for applying herself fully in lessons and making more conscious choices in all that she does.
In 6R Nilanth was awarded a certificate for taking feedback on board to improve his learning, and Sophie for showing resilience and perseverance when completing her assessments this week.
Year 5
This week, our awards go to Rocco and Florence, for outstanding enthusiasm in all learning activities and friendship to others.
Year 4
This week, our certificate winners were awarded for their their fantastic independent learning in English.
Year 3
This week in Year 3 the certificates go to Josephine and Alicia for both showing wonderful effort across their learning as well as being kind and helpful role models!
Year 2
This week, our certificates go to Hugo for Independent Learning and Aria for being a kind and caring friend.
Year 1
This week’s certificates are awarded to Ares for fantastic progress with reading, and Jasper, for good listening skills and independence during Rossall Rotation.
Reception
This week’s certificates of achievement award go to Lucas and Dotty. Lucas and Dotty are such sensible members of our class and excellent role models for all their peers. Both children are growing in confidence everyday and they have especially enjoyed holding positions of responsibility within the classroom.
Well done to both!
The Grumpy Sheep
Rossall Prep School invites you to attend The Grumpy Sheep in the Performing Arts Studio at 9.30am.
Our Nativity this year takes place across 2 days with Pre-Prep on Monday and Nursery on Tuesday.
Christmas Dates for your Diary
Visitors’ Carol Service
Save the Date
In 2024, Rossall celebrates its 180th anniversary. To mark this we will be holding a ball on Saturday 1st June. Initially, tickets will be sold as tables of 10, at £80 per person. Booking is now open.
Please contact [email protected] for more information.
