This week’s newsletter for Rossall Nursery, Pre-Prep and Prep School.
Dear All
We have had the full range of weather this week but it has not stopped the children from throwing themselves into all aspects of School life. I was delighted that Rossall Rotation was back on the timetable. Our unique programme of enrichment enhances the educational experience for all our children. Rossall Rotation is designed to broaden the pupil’s horizons by offering a rotating series of enrichment activities. The program provides children with the opportunity to try their hand at a range of new and stimulating subjects, all aimed at fostering creativity, curiosity, and personal growth. Each rotation focuses on developing skills that are not only academically beneficial but also valuable for life beyond the classroom.
The beauty of Rossall Rotation lies in its diversity. Throughout the year, children will rotate through different modules, each designed to offer unique and exciting learning experiences. Astronomy, Cooking & Baking, Forest & Beach Schools, Golf, and the Farm all form a part of what makes Rossall Rotation so distinctive.
It was a delight to welcome so many of you to our House Cross Country on Friday afternoon. The event was a fantastic success, filled with energy, determination, and plenty of House spirit. The children are fiercely proud of their houses; Assheton, Clifton & Hesketh.
Children from all year groups took part in the races, showcasing their resilience and enthusiasm. It was lovely to see Pre-Prep complete their fun runs and then support the older children in their House races.
Finally, a very warm welcome to our new Nursery Manager, Mr Joshua Himsworth. Mr Himsworth has thoroughly enjoyed his first week at Rossall, getting to know children, staff and parents. We enjoyed our ‘Meet Mr Himsworth’ event this afternoon with our Nursery family and look forward to working with him over the coming years. He is already a firm favourite with the children!
Have a wonderful weekend.
Mr M Turner
Headmaster of Preparatory School & Nursery
Congratulations to the newly elected School Council for 2024-25
Year 6 Delilah, Dolly, Aaron and Hattie
Year 5 Stanley and Willow
Year 4 Darcy and Harry
Year 3 Lexi and Nektarios
Year 2 Xander and Isabelle
Year 1 Dotty and Milly
Reception will join in the Lent Term
Year 6
It is hard to believe it is only the second week of term. So much learning has already happened and children have settled into routines excellently.
In English, we have been diving deeper into our text ‘Star of Fear, Star of Hope.’ We love exploring the lives of Lydia and Helen, the two main characters, as we continue to uncover their powerful story. To bring the book to life, we gathered suspenseful vocabulary and then wrote diary entries from the characters’ perspectives. This gave us a chance to show off our writing skills by creating tension and emotion in our work. We also used expanded noun phrases and dialogue to describe scenes from the book, making them as vivid as possible. Every day we’re excited to read more!
In Maths, we’ve been hard at work mastering place value. We’ve pushed our understanding to new heights by working with numbers all the way up to 10 million! Our lessons have focused on identifying numbers that are 10 or 100 times bigger than others and using this knowledge to compare and order large numbers. This early term work is so important as it builds the foundation for everything we will tackle in Maths later on. Both Mrs. Kenmare and I (Mrs. Scott) have been incredibly impressed by the children’s focus and effort in class!
Over in Humanities, our topic this week has been The Blitz. We started by using maps and atlases to pinpoint the cities most affected by The Blitz during World War II. Then, we examined photographs from the time to gather evidence and learn about how London and other cities were impacted. We’ve also been fortunate enough to hear some fascinating stories from children who have family members that lived through World War II and even seen some artefacts they’ve brought in. If your family has any links to World War II, we’d love to hear from you!
Finally, we wrapped up the week with our first Rossall Rotation—and what a treat it was! We spent time in the kitchen baking chocolate chip cookies, which made for a perfect (and delicious!) way to end a busy week.
What a fantastic week of learning, we are all looking forward to what’s coming next!
Year 5
The Year 5 classroom was the scene of a most despicable crime this week, and the class had to use their CSI scientific skills to investigate who ‘stole’ Mr C’s chocolates! Fortunately for Year 5, the guilty person left a perfect chocolate fingerprint on the box, which was all the children needed to begin their investigation and further their knowledge on the Science of dactyloscopy! (fingerprint identification). By the time you read this, we hope the culprit will have been unmasked, Scooby-Doo style!
Our Humanities work has captivated the imagination of the class, and we have enjoyed learning about what happened to the New World after Colombus’ voyage with the European explorers that followed.
We have begun a new Art project with our specialist teacher Mrs Cox, making three-dimensional Totem poles, which have linked perfectly with our History lessons, as well as our English writing on the fascinating book ‘Queen of the Falls’ set in North America. This story is taking us on a rollercoaster ride of excitement over Niagara Falls and has already inspired the class with their creative writing.
It has been extremely rewarding to see the children bounding into School each morning since our return, and there is a buzz of excitement as the children dive into their learning each day and relish the various class activities that benefit them in all aspects of their education. What a wonderful week!
Year 4
This week, Year 4 have truly been non-stop and made the most of every opportunity. Whether it is in class with new topics, or out and about round school with clubs and activities – we have done it all!
In humanities, we made a start on our new topic of the Anglo-Saxons and looked at the reasons for their settlement in Britain after the Romans left. We questioned why they would leave their homes and discussed what life must have been like for them to relocate and resettle in Britain.
In English, we’ve tackled more of the Gorilla book by Anthony Browne, looking at the story of the main character Hannah and inferring what has happened to her to lead her to the point in the story. Brilliant questioning and predicting skills all around this week!
In STEM club, our Y4 children started to work on building their earthquake shelters with paper straws. Taking inspiration from current designs and using their own initiatives, we have made great progress and can’t wait to report back the results of the earthquake test in the coming weeks.
Finally, we have had some super submissions for the half-term project work set in Week 1 Prep. As you can see from the image, we have really embraced the challenges and demonstrated super learning in and out of the classroom.
Well done to everyone for another fantastic week – you should all be very proud of yourselves and the incredible start you’ve made to the new year.
Mr Drake
Year 3
Week 2 for Year 3 has been full of energy and enthusiasm, as we have been busy learning both inside and outside the classroom.
In Maths we are continuing our journey through 3-digit place value. This week we focussed on partitioning and part-whole model, particularly looking at partitioning hundreds, tens and ones but also flexible partitioning.
In English, we have been having lots of fun with active spelling strategies and delved further into our focus text Seal Surfer. We explored prepositions, using them to describe a setting.
For Science this week, we considered what animals need to eat. Investigating herbivores, carnivores and omnivores.
We loved our first go at Rossall Rotation, this half term we are doing Beach School! This was a wonderful way to consolidate our learning about coastal features by being able to spot some in person!
What a wonderful week!
Year 2
Another fantastic week in Year 2. It was lovely to see the children looking so smart for their individual photographs and enjoying the first Rossall Rotation of the year!
During our lessons, we continued to explore the topic of Nurturing Nurses. The children learnt about the life of Mary Seacole whilst in science we investigated the offspring of different animals. In art, the children painted seascapes in the colours and style of LS Lowry, mixing and experimenting with different shades.
The highlight of the week was Rossall Rotation in which the children took part in astronomy. The children thoroughly enjoyed their time with Mrs Scott.
Finally, the week ended with Year 2 taking part in the Pre Prep Fun Run as part of our house events. It was great to see everyone giving it their best and completing the course!
Year 1
This week, in Year 1, we were really excited to start our swimming lessons again and enjoyed our first golf lesson in our Rossall Rotation too.
In English, we have started to think about our new class book ‘Lost and Found’. We have looked at some objects and had some interesting discussions to predict what and who the story is about. We have used our phonics to write sentences about what we can see and hear at the beach, linking to our work in Science about the senses.
We have been working really hard on our Maths. We have been learning about place value, representing numbers with objects and using number names.
We have also started to think about our new topic ‘Near and Far’ and have been using Google Earth to find where we live. In Science, we have been learning about parts of the body and labelling them.
We also held our School Council elections where Rafferty shared his experiences from his time in School Council from last year. I am really excited to announce that George and Dotty have been elected as the Year 1 School Council representatives.
Reception
This week in assembly we read the story ‘The Colour Monster’ which teaches children about feelings, as each beautiful colour leads to an emotion. It also helps children build understanding and empathy towards others, as in the story the emotions are attached to deep descriptions of how the little furry Monster feels inside.
The story is about a monster who finds that all his emotions are mixed together. He is so confused. A little girl called Nuna takes him by the hand and gives him simple and very understandable ideas on how to cope with his emotions. He must analyse, separate, and place each emotion into a jar in order to feel better. Six core emotions are covered.
The children enjoyed sorting the different emotions using lots of coloured wool and even acted out the emotions in their first drama lesson. This led to engaging conversations with the children, sharing different emotions that they had felt and when. The children also explained the emotions they had felt when starting school, including excitement and nervousness, which are all completely natural emotions for children to feel about school transitions. Recognising and naming emotions helps children understand these feelings and is important for the development and well-being of children. Afterwards, there was great excitement as the children got to paint the colour monster and get messy! Some also painted a picture of what his best friend looked like too! Maybe you could paint or draw another picture this weekend and bring it into school to show me?
Nursery
This week we have welcomed our new manager Joshua Himsworth, who is an amazing asset to our nursery family. Our focus of the week within the nursery is literacy and this has been highlighted throughout the week.
In our sanderlings room, we have enjoyed lots of story times which enhances our communication and language. The children have shown us their love for books throughout the week. During story times the practitioners have spent time pointing out the illustrations throughout the book and used a wide range of vocabulary and these were repeated several times to encourage the children to repeat the phrases. Our recent interests have included exploring sounds by using a wide range of musical instruments that varied between bells, tambourines and a piano. It has been another lovely week.
This week in Sandpipers we have been focusing on literacy. We have introduced a new book of the week called Jack and the Beanstalk. The children have loved listening to this story and using their imaginations to retell the story, using lots of language we have read within the book. We have also enjoyed engaging in activities which explore sounds using our very own instruments using bottles. We put lots of natural resources inside such as twigs, stones and buttons. After they were created we shook them to hear lots of different sounds. Our lovely sandpipers have also explored lots of different textures such as bubble wrap, tinfoil, paper and much more! We have loved mark-making on these different textures, It has been a fun sensory experience. We went on a listening walk around our grounds. We heard birds, trams, cars and even planes. To end the week off we also took a trip to the library to focus on our technical skills. We used the smart board to draw our very own beanstalks.
In preschool this week, we have had so much fun participating in lots of different learning walks. We have been looking at cause and effect, within this, we looked at the weather to see what impact it has on the outdoors. We discussed the rain causing the puddles, rain and sun creating rainbows. This has been an excellent learning opportunity for the children, and we have enjoyed this thoroughly. As the week went on we explored lots of different traditional tales, our favourite was Goldilocks and the Three Bears. We have acted out each traditional tale, this has been lovely. We have completed listening walks around the grounds and indoors to introduce the children to sounds in the environment, as this is an important element of our Rossall phonics journey. The children’s interests have been dinosaurs, jigsaws and construction. We are loving our new Preschool Family.
Awards
Year 6
6S – Archer for his enthusiasm in our Humanities lesson, sharing his passion, questions and curiosity and Lara for embracing challenges and pushing herself out of her comfort zone in her learning.
6R – Rocco and Jude for excellent curiosity, collaboration and courage during lessons.
Year 5
Isla: Outstanding enthusiasm and interest in our learning
Ryan: Outstanding effort and perseverance to make progress in English
Year 4
Jay: For making a fantastic start to year 4 at Rossall and always showing great friendship and support to those around you
Nancy: For always sharing super ideas and asking brilliant questions showing curiosity and interest in all your lessons
Year 3
Dylan: For his perseverance in sport even when he felt unsure
Lena: For showing fantastic focus across all her learning this week
Year 2
Clark – for a fantastic attitude in all of his work
Ares – for giving 100% and striving to improve his writing
Year 1
This week’s awards are for Eliza and Celia for having an excellent attitude to learning and trying their best.
Reception
This week’s certificates of achievement go to Ava-Rose and Alvyn. Both children have been extremely helpful in class. Ava-Rose has been helping her friends when changing for PE and Alvyn has been an excellent help tidying the classroom at the end of every day. Well done!
September Tennis Programs with Top Tennis Coaching
We have a range of tennis programs on offer for players aged 6+ happening at Rossall School this term.
Our popular Before School Programs return from Wednesday 4th September (Year 3 & 4 – Wednesdays, Year 5 & 6 – Fridays) as well as a range of after-school programs to suit all abilities.
Contact Nick Arnold for more information:
07789 956147
*Bookings are essential prior to attendance of your first session. Visit our Bookings Page for more info