Prep Newsletter Summer Term Week 11

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

Dear All,

It has been a truly wonderful week in our Preparatory School. The array of events and activities on offer has been nothing short of incredible and quite clearly shows why we are more than just a school, a fact that has been acknowledged by our recent shortlisting for the Independent Schools of the Year 2022, for both Pre-Prep and Prep Schools, alongside other nominations from across the School! What a week!

The Midsummer Gala, the first event organised by the Red Rose Society, was an absolutely wonderful evening where members of our School community were able to enjoy each other’s company as well as some fantastic food and entertainment. The event raised funds for Brian House, a very worthy charity. 

The Striking and Fielding Year 4 team enjoyed an awesome day out at Stanley Park on Tuesday for the Lancashire Youth Games, representing Wyre and Fylde. Here they are wearing their souvenir T-Shirts…

Many of our events can now be viewed in our Flickr accounts that have been set up. Please find some links below:

Link for Residential photos

Link for Sports Day photos
Link to House Challenge photos

Link to Beach Day photos

Last weekend saw Drama performances of Henry the Monster and Fred the Skunk from our Year 5/6 and Pre-Prep drama groups respectively. The well attended performances were absolutely lovely and I know that the children thoroughly enjoyed taking part.

Our now annual End of Year Beach Party was once again great fun for the children, as they enjoyed pebble painting, kite flying, beach football, limbo, ice lollies and much, much more! Once again, the good weather was in order and I was delighted to see the children enjoying the fact that they go to School next to a beach! All the hard work from this year surely deserves a treat! Once again, memories in the making!

The Year 6 Garden Party was a lovely end to the Year for our children transitioning through to Senior School. Bouncy castles, face painting and a BBQ were the order of the day as we bid a fond farewell to the class of 2022. I leave you with my favourite photo from the whole year – happy children: happy school! 

Have a truly wonderful summer.

Mr M Turner

Headmaster of Preparatory School & Nursery



Prep School Sports Awards

A huge congratulations to all of our Prep School sportspeople, their hard work and joy on and off the pitch, track, and field this year has been remarkable to behold.


Rossall Prep House Rounders

The Prep School enjoyed their final games afternoon on Wednesday, finishing on a real high! It was a fantastic opportunity for all the girls to represent their house and show many of the skills they have learnt this term. Well done to everyone that took part, and congratulations to Clifton who were the overall champions of 2022!


Year 4 Strike Again!

After winning the Wyre competition last week, our Year 4 Striking and Fielding squad travelled to Stanley Park in Blackpool to represent Wyre district in the Lancashire Youth Games. It was nothing short of a sporting festival, with music, dancers, opening and closing ceremonies, and of course a variety of sports! What a fabulous experience, and opportunity for our children to take part in such a celebration. Teams arrived from all districts across Lancashire to take part in their respective sporting competition. Rossall Prep represented the district admirably and were true ambassadors for Wyre. All the freebie merchandise went down a storm too! Thank you to everyone involved in organising such a momentous event, it truly was spectacular!


Year 6

Whoosh!!! Where has the year gone? They say time flies when you’re having fun and this year has definitely been full of entertainment for your class teachers! You have given us so much pleasure and fulfilment each and every day, both in the classroom and out. Although you have exciting times ahead of you, we really don’t want you to leave Prep School!

You will leave us having made so many fond memories: our class trips, House competitions, sporting fixtures, musical events and drama performances, seasonal festivities, residential trips, and of course The Condon Challenge and Rund’s Record Breakers! Not forgetting the close friendships we have made during our time in Prep School.

These are memories that will stay with us forever. We look forward to reminiscing with you in the years to come. The special bond that we share with you has gone from strength to strength and we will always be here to help and guide you if you need us in the future. There will always be a place for you in our hearts, and on the playground as a teaching assistant!

Enjoy the summer break and we wish you well as we watch you walk ‘Over the Archway by the Square’.

Good luck,

Mr Condon and Mr Rund


Year 5

What a final week for Year 5 – of course an incredibly busy one to say the least! Prize Day was a big hit seeing different performances from our Year 6 children to giving special recognition to individuals throughout the Pre-Prep and Prep school. It was a fantastic time to have the whole school together celebrating. 

We ended the week with the Rossall Beach Party – rotating around different activities. We all had so much fun playing hook a duck, tournaments of football, kite flying, pebble painting and the limbo. The list was never ending! 

Year 5 have had a super busy and fun final term of the year. We hope they have the best summer ever and look forward to welcoming them back in September as our oldest year group. 


Year 4

“It always seems impossible until it’s done!”

Nelson Mandela

We made it. Journeying back to the beginning of the year, the children have been reflected on the huge steps they have made both academically and socially. It is easy at this time of year to forget where you started and how much learning, growing and maturing the children have gone through. 

Miss Thomas and myself have worked with Year 4 to progress their learning while still keeping that love of learning. Let’s hope they never lose that silliness and laughter! 

Have an amazing and well earned Summer Year 4, and remember, nothing is impossible! 


Year 3

What a special final week of the year it has been. Year 3 have celebrated a lovely last week with many memorable activities. We have finished off a lot of our learning, including our English for which we wrote our final piece for the year – a persuasive leaflet advertising the Jardin Des Plantes in Paris, where Zeraffa Giraffa lived! We finished off our Topic by building our own pyramids and making ancient Egyptian pharaoh necklaces. In Science, we explored how shadows are created when light is blocked. We even did some fun Maths challenges to revise our learning from the year.

Of course we had a very special day on Wednesday for Prize Day. We thoroughly enjoyed the Year 6 Chapel Assembly, the Prize Day ceremony and delicious lunch. Well done to all the children who won prizes and also well done to every child in the class for everything they have achieved this year!
We even managed to squeeze in our final Rossall Rotation, and Year 3 went to the Rossall Kitchen to make chocolate chip cookies – yum!

Thursday was our super fun Beach Party organised by the Prep School Council. We all loved flying kites, building sand castles, playing games and of course the yummy lunch of burgers and ice lollies! The sun even shone for us! A great party to end the year.

It is amazing to think how far we have all come as a class this year. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the children in Year 3 for a wonderful year, it has been fabulous to teach and learn with you all. Have a fantastic summer and good luck for Year 4! Don’t forget… GO BANANAS!
Love, Mrs Payne.


Year 2

I cannot believe that the end of Year 2 is already here! 

The last week has been full of fun; sharing memories of the year and enjoying each others company. This year has been full of enthusiasm, laughter and learning. The children have progressed in every aspect and are now ready for the challenges the Prep School has to offer.

We celebrated our penultimate day on the beach, enjoying making sandcastles, flying kites, playing football and decorating pebbles! 

I hope you all have a lovely summer when it arrives and enjoy the sunshine!


Year 1

Well what a year it has been, and what a week to finish our time in Year 1.

It was fantastic to see so many of our friends in Prep and Pre-Prep awarded prizes on Prize Day. The Year 6 farewell Chapel Service was wonderful and we enjoyed listening to their memories of their time at Rossall Prep School, and singing our favourite hymns. This was followed on Thursday by the Rossall Beach Party organised by the School Council. We enjoyed taking part in football tournaments, kite flying, limbo, building sandcastles and hook a duck, just to mention a few. For our lunch we feasted on burgers at the beach, followed by ice lollies.

We also concluded our Language work with a toy’s party. We wrote invitations, made party hats, and played musical chairs and musical bumps. What a fantastic end to our year! Wishing you all a wonderful summer! Thank you Year 1, we have had a blast!


Reception

In Reception, children learn through play. The day is fairly unstructured and the children are given the option to choose their own activities, under the guidance of their teacher. They are encouraged to explore, both inside and outside, and are not asked to sit for adult-led teaching for longer than a few minutes at a time. When children move into year 1, their learning typically becomes more structured, and there are fewer opportunities for them to move around, choose their own activities or decide who they will spend their day with. 

We have done lots to support transition, introducing more formal learning this term in Reception and continuing to allow some play-based learning in year 1. However, the year 1 curriculum sets out clear requirements across all subjects, such as the learning of spellings and times tables. Inevitably, this means they need to be taught individual subjects, and their learning will be more adult-led.  

Moving on and moving up is an inevitable part of school life, and your child will learn the skills they need in the end – skills such as confidence, adaptability and determination, which will stand them in good stead throughout life. As ever, if you have any concerns, please feel free to email me or Mrs Loy.  

Reception year has been full of fun, 

Learning through play in rain, snow and sun. 

Our year has now come to an end,   

You’ve grown so much and made great friends. 

We’ve had lovely times along the way, 

Your smiles cheer me up, each and every day.

So, remember you’re fantastic, little shining stars, 

Keep being incredible and just perfect as you are.


Nursery

Only children believe they are capable of everything

Paulo Coelho

The Sanderlings have enjoyed a game of football on the field, playing football helps us to enhance our balance and hand-eye and foot-eye coordination. Miss Schofield, Miss Heatley and Miss Sumner have set up lots of interesting activities indoors for us such as water play with sea animals and mark making in flour with cars; we’ve had so much fun. The Sanderlings have also taken part in physical activities through music and movement where they further enhanced their balancing and coordination skills. Finally, to burn off all the extra energy we had built up after our afternoon sleeps we went for running races, we are so quick!

The Sandpipers have been using their imagination and artistic ability to paint self portraits. Miss Southern supported us with our portraits by providing us with mirrors as well as pictures of ourselves, we now know that each of us our unique in our own way but have similar characteristics such as eye or hair colour. As part of our physical development our teachers set up an obstacle course outside which helped us to practice our knowledge of prepositions such as over and under, in addition to building our gross motor skills. This week’s beach school with Mx Preston involved painting stones using small brushes which will help us with writing in the future by strengthening our fine motor skills. 

The Preschool children have had a busy week preparing for the older children to have their graduation. Miss Simms has been helping us to learn how to use scissors whilst using mathematical language of both size and shape, we have been cutting out our own shapes and challenging our friends to make their shapes bigger or smaller. Miss Simpson has been name writing with us; some of us have begun by shadow writing and others have been able to write their hand independently- early writing and mark making is vital in allowing us to decide which is our dominant hand. Finally, our week ended with both a happy and emotional occasion – preschool graduation. The children sang “you’ve got a friend in me”, received their own personalised scrolls and had a lovely time with their families celebrating the end of their time at Rossall Nursery. To all the children who graduated this week and who are leaving to enjoy a summer holiday, we wish you all the luck and happiness for the future and good luck in your adventures in your new schools.