Prep Newsletter Michaelmas Term Week 3 | Rossall

This week’s newsletter for Rossall Nursery, Pre-Prep and Prep School.

Dear All,

Despite it being a shorter than usual week, the children across the Prep School have endeavoured to pack in a great deal! Our fixtures against AKS for both hockey and football proved to be an excellent start to our matches for the year. Well done to all involved! Both sets of games were played in beautiful sunshine. However, that was not the case on Thursday, as the heavens opened on Rossall for our first downpour of the year; a stark reminder that all pupils need to have a coat with them in School every day!

Our newly elected School Council have met for the first time and I can already see that they will be providing a valuable insight into how they see their School and what changes they would like to support. I was also encouraged to see the pupils back in Chapel today, as they attended their first singing assembly of the year. Visiting Chapel provides our youngest pupils with a fabulous opportunity to experience different environments and to understand the sheer size of the School to which they belong. Their singing will obviously improve too!

The clubs co curricular programme is now well underway; it has been lovely listening to the children discuss the myriad of opportunities that they have, both at lunchtime and after School. Speaking of listening, I met with some of our newer pupils earlier in the week to see how they have settled and what they were enjoying about life at Rossall. To say I was delighted by the responses could only be described as an understatement:

“Everyone – the teachers and the children – are so friendly.”

“We have so many opportunities to do sport and music – I love it!”

“The teachers really care about you and listen to you.”

“It feels like I have always been here!”

Have a wonderful weekend,

Mr M Turner

Headmaster of Preparatory School & Nursery

Rossall Footballers Start the Season in Style Versus AKS

We were delighted to welcome our good friends from AKS to play in a triangular fixture against the Rossall Rhinos and Rams.

The standard of football was scintillating from start to finish and there were some outstanding goals from
The crowd of parents were treated to a fine feast of football, but the highlight for everyone was the Rossall post match tea, where everyone enjoyed celebrating a perfect afternoon of sport together.
Well done, Rossall!

Hesketh Race to Victory in The House Cross Country

Congratulations to all the children in the Prep and Pre-Prep who ran so determinedly in the first House event of the year. The effort and commitment shown by runners of all ages was outstanding and it was wonderful to see all the children enjoying the team spirit and camaraderie of House competition.

Well done to Hesketh for winning this year’s trophy.

AKS U11 v Rossall U11

On Wednesday the Rossall Prep hockey squad travelled down the Fylde coast to play their first match of the year against AKS. Many of the team were making their hockey debuts. AKS were a strong team, but the Rossall team battled to the end, improving dramatically throughout the match. This positive performance bodes well for the forthcoming season. Well done to everyone that took part, and represented Rossall so admirably both on and off the pitch.

Year 6

As much as Year 6 relish the quality time they have with their class teachers, the opportunity to explore the Rossall campus with the Senior School specialists is a real treat each week.

They have been developing their acting skills in Drama with Mr Veitch; singing joyfully in Music class with Miss Silverton; expanding their linguistic skills in Spanish with Mrs Hoban; fine tuning their artistic talents with Mrs Cox in the Art Department; and discovering their dancing feet in the Performing Arts Centre with Mrs Harris.

It really is a pleasure to hear the positive comments from each of the teachers on their return, and these wonderful opportunities are perfect for preparing the children for a smooth transition into senior school next year.

The children have embraced their leadership roles and are working hard to set the best example for the children in the other year groups. Well done Year 6 for an excellent start to the year!

Year 5

Another fun, busy and productive week for Year 5!

In Science, we have continued to look at Sir David Attenborough along with researching lots of different types of animals. Year 5 have put their drama skills to the test by creating their very own nature documentary. They have given themselves different speaking parts and we are looking forward to watching their creations next week!

We have also loved creating information posters on the Indigenous Peoples of America, including how each tribe lived to how they made their very own clothing. Year 5 have also started creating Navajo inspired art relating to the Navajo Tribe (the largest tribe of the Indigenous Peoples). They created their art by including geometric shapes, diamonds, zig-zags, vivid and dark colours.

In English we have focused more on Annie Edson Taylor – making inferences about her and therefore creating a character profile. We continue to look at sentence structure within our writing and have focused on creating complex sentences this week.

Year 4

This week Year 4 have been making THE most of the extensive school grounds and in particular the arrival of a Roman Centurion. He quickly signed the children up for the Roman army and began their training. The sounds of marching feet and “sin, sin, sin, dex, sin”, or “left, left, left, right, left” filled the air before a quick guide to the intricacies of swordsmanship. We also attended a Roman dinner party where the children learned about the delicacies enjoyed by the Romans; including stuffed elephant trunk and roasted peacock, before finishing off with a guide to dental hygiene using the perfect kind of toothpaste – powdered mouse brains!

Having completed their time in the Roman Empire, the children moved on to the next era; the Anglo-Saxons. They were surprised to discover that Britain was in fact a very enticing destination to many Europeans – despite the typical English weather.

Our Topic lessons focused on Britain’s timeline and the various eras within. This provided the children with the opportunity to reflect upon Monday’s historic event. They looked back on the Elizabethan era as well as looked towards the new period that is about to begin under King Charles III rule.

In English, the children have been busy investigating our new book ‘Gorilla’. They have scrutinised illustrations from the story and used them to make deductions about the characters we will soon be reading about.

Our main character ‘Gorilla’ has also provided us with a seamless link into our Science lessons all about Animals and Humans. It did take some explaining to convince the children they share a very distant relative with the gorilla from our English story as well as other primates.

Year 3

This week may have been shorter but we filled it with as much learning as usual! Year 3 have approached the week with energy and enthusiasm.

In English, we have continued reading Seal Surfer, and we learnt about how to write in paragraphs by writing our own diary entries. In Maths, we have continued to learn about 3-digit place value, looking specifically at number lines going up in hundreds.

For our topic ‘Our Coasts’ we learnt about the water cycle to understand where all that water in the sea comes from!

We had a big Science focus this week, deepening our understanding of our ‘Keeping Healthy’ unit. We firstly learnt about healthy diets for animals as herbivores, carnivores and omnivores. We also used our Computing lesson to design our own healthy, balanced meal on a document.

But the highlight was certainly our fantastic Health and Fitness workshop run by professional Personal Trainer Mrs Shaw! She taught us all about the importance of exercise to keep our bodies fit, and the importance of a healthy diet. We got to design our very own workout routines – so parents, be prepared for these to be forced upon you!

We finished up the week with a coastal-themed Art lesson, creating sketches of the Great Wave off Kanagawa which we will turn into paintings next week. Well done for a fab week Year 3!

Year 2

It may have been a short week, but Year 2 has certainly managed to pack it full of learning and fun.

The children have been working incredibly hard in Mathematics, they have been learning lots of mathematical vocabulary when completing our various tasks comparing and ordering numbers.

Mr Rund and Mrs Lawton have been so impressed that we have now moved on to comparing number sentences. In English the class have been designing their own trolls and labelling them with noun phrases. This has led to some fabulous descriptive writing.

However, the highlight of the week has to have been the visit from Miss Thomas, the work done by the children in completing their Lowry inspired artwork is fantastic. Some may argue that the end product is even better than the original!

Year 1

This week has been shorter than usual but that didn’t stop Year 1 from learning as much as they could… in every single lesson! It’s been a great week for Literacy; we are working hard to use our best pencil grip to write our best-formed letters and spell words to the best of our ability. It’s fantastic to see Year 1 using interesting vocabulary in their speech and trying their hardest to write down what they say. Well done Year 1, keep it up! There was also a wonderful surprise in our class this week when our penguin egg hatched and now we have a lovely little penguin to take care of in our classroom. We do believe that our penguin has something to do with the story of Lost and Found and so we are doing our best to become storytellers, using story maps, and to learn the story by memory. We have also spent time looking in Non-Fiction books about penguins and learning all about them- what interesting facts there are too! We can’t wait to learn more about penguins and animals next week!

Reception

Over the last few weeks we have started our phonic lessons, which is the beginning of your child’s journey, when they train their ears to listen to sounds and to discriminate between different sounds. It focuses on sounds we hear in everyday life and lays the essential foundations on which to build the learning that follows. It is extremely important that your child can identify individual sounds in the everyday world e.g. a car horn, a boiling kettle, a dog barking and also tell the difference between them. This ability will help them begin hearing the separate sounds that make up words.

During our first lessons the children have also developed their speaking skills, talking about and describing the sounds they have heard, increasing their vocabulary and understanding of language. We have learnt about the syllables in our names, created our own alliterative characters and played lots of rhyming games. The children have also learnt about the 26 letters of the alphabet. This teaches the children that each letter has a name (as in the song), but that it also has a sound that we use to work out how to read and spell words.

Nursery

“Children cannot bounce off the walls if we take away the walls”
Erin Kenny

The Sanderlings have been engaged in a lot of sensory play this week. Miss Sumner set up an under the sea tuff tray with crushed cereal for sand and blue water paints for the sea with all of our favourite sea life animals. The babies were encouraged to fully immerse themselves in the tuff tray, it was fun (and messy) , there were lots of laughs for everyone involved. The babies have been on a walk around Rossall grounds to look for signs of Autumn such as leaves changing colour, trees without leaves or growing fruits and fallen leaves. Mrs Beddis has made play dough using autumnal leaves we collected on a walk around the Rossall grounds. We used language associated with the season of Autumn such as red, yellow, orange, brown, dark, crunchy and crackle. The babies also had a water play activity using plastic, autumnal leaves in the colours they have been learning about this week. The babies love to explore with their hands as it means that they can engage with an activity even when they aren’t quite using words yet, the practitioners encourage the use of new words and sounds.

The Sandpipers have been drawing feelings masks and engaging in discussions around feelings. The children have been given the opportunity to express themselves and discuss their own experiences, this enables them to develop and build upon their understanding of what can lead to us having the common feelings of being happy, sad, frustrated or scared. The Sandpipers have been singing ‘if you are happy and you know it’ and incorporated other feelings and actions to go with those feelings, such as, if you are if you’re scared and you know it say “oh no”. The Sandpipers have also started their own self registration using five frames, to begin with the children are working on identifying their own picture to sign in but eventually this will lead to a very natural maths skill called subitising. Through subitising the children are able to recognise quantity with having to count individual amounts starting with numbers 0-5. Finally, The Sandpipers went on a walk to look for the Rossall Dragon, next time you are dropping off your child see if you can spot him too.

The Preschool children have been on a visit to the farm with Miss Simms as some of our new children have not been to see the animals we have at Rossall, we discovered that we are currently looking after some eggs in an incubator so we are excited to see the chicks that hatch. The Preschool students have been practising their fine motor skills using pincer grip on tweezers to grip pegs on a peg board. The preschool had to follow the instructions given by Miss Ward in order to ensure they were collecting the correct colours. Teacher time has been taking place daily, phonics is in place to reinforce our listening skills with environmental sounds such as what we can hear when we go to the beach or the shopping centre. Teacher time also focuses on numbers 1 to 5, both recognising numerals and quantity. Miss Ward has also taken us on an orientation walk in the grounds looking out for well known Rossall landmarks such as the walkway and dining hall. Preschool have also been for a cooking class with Mrs James, this week they made delicious chocolate chip cookies to take home.

We have also had a ‘swap day’. Each of the Room leaders had the chance to observe and work in one of the other nursery rooms for the day. Miss Ward was with the Sanderlings, Mx Preston enjoyed the day in preschool whilst Miss Schofield joined the Sandpipers. ‘Swap day’ enables all of the staff to gain insight into how another room is run on a day to day basis as well as discuss ideas and strategies that are working well in a room that can be trialled across the setting. This also gave the staff the opportunity to share good practice and reflect upon this. The children really enjoyed seeing teachers from the other rooms and the day passed very quickly and most importantly – successfully.