This week’s newsletter for Rossall Nursery, Pre-Prep and Prep School.
Dear All
Sport has prominently featured in Prep School this week. On Wednesday, many of the Year 5 and 6 children were lucky enough to meet one of my sporting heroes, as Lord Ian ‘Beefy’ Botham visited Rossall for a Q & A session. There were some brilliant questions posed from the children and I know that they learnt a great deal from listening to a sporting giant talk about not only his feats on the pitch but also for charity and more latterly in the House of Lords. Rossall affords many great opportunities to our pupils but I am not sure they realise just how fortunate they are at times such as these.
Inspiration was clearly gleaned from the morning session during the cricket matches later in the day, as our Year 6 boys performed admirably against some strong Highfield Priory sides. This was the first outing for the children and I know they gained a great deal of valuable experience from it. The girls were also in action, as they played rounders against Highfield Priory away. Mrs Santamera said that it was the best opening performance of a season that she had ever seen – praise indeed!
On Thursday we gave the U18 girls a huge send off as they travelled to their final of the ISFA football competition for the second year running, looking to defend their title. Clearly the swell of well wishes played their part as they once again brought home the trophy – a fabulous team effort!
Rossall Rotation had its penultimate switch of the year for the pupils, as they engaged in lessons on the beach, in the forest, playing golf, in the astronomy centre, in the kitchen, and on the farm! The children absolutely love their RR lessons and throw themselves into all the exciting opportunities on offer to them. Learning beyond the confines of the classroom never felt so real!
Have a wonderful weekend.
Mr M Turner
Headmaster of Preparatory School & Nursery
Rossall Prep Rounders V Highfield Priory
Wednesday saw the term’s first rounders fixture in a friendly away match at Highfield Priory. Rounders is always a much anticipated sport in the summer term in Rossall Prep, and this year is no exception.
The two Rossall teams of Year 5 and 6 girls excelled, whether fielding or batting. This has provided us with a brilliant foundation for the forthcoming fixtures.
Attitudes, as always, were exemplary both on and off the rounders pitch.Well done girls!
Year 3 & 4 Multi Skills Festival
On Tuesday afternoon, a team of highly excited Prep school children travelled to Poolfoot Leisure Complex, to take part in a festival with fifteen other schools from across Wyre. The children had to move around a multitude of fun activities that involved; running,jumping,kicking,striking and throwing. All of their points we totted up at the end of the festival.
We were delighted when the scores were read out and we had finished in an extremely respectable fourth place. Well done team!
Botham Inspires Rossall Prep to Shine with the Bat and Ball!
What an absolute privilege it was to welcome the great Lord Botham to Rossall this week. The timing could not have been better with our first cricket match of the season against Highfield Priory.
The Rossall playing fields looked spectacular with three Year 6 matches taking place, and the children relished the opportunity to play cricket for the school team.
Lord Botham’s words obviously inspired the children to perform at their best, and there were plenty of wickets and big hits.
Well done Rossall Year 6 for representing the school so impressively; Lord Botham would have been proud!
Year 6
Year 6 have dived right into our new writing topic on underwater exploration and we have been fascinated by the book ‘Manfish’ about the life of the amazing Jacques Cousteau and his pioneering advancements in deep sea diving. They have enjoyed writing descriptively through the eyes of a scuba diver, and created some striking artwork on this theme using oil pastels.
The children have relished the opportunity to come together as a year group to discuss areas of interest for our Year 6 Exhibition, and they are looking forward to working together in small groups on our theme of ‘Sustainability’. This is a wonderful opportunity to develop their learning skills culminating in an exhibition for all year groups and Year 6 parents to enjoy.
On the theme of exploration, our Rossall Rotation is always an enjoyable afternoon every two weeks, and the class launched into space to develop their knowledge of Astronomy; this learning journey is going to be out of this world!
Year 5
In Year 5, we have started to look at our new topic ‘Enough for Everyone’. We have been thinking about the natural resources that we have in Britain. We have also discussed how does electricity get into our homes, where we have looked at the journey from the power station to our own homes. We have also thought about the national grid and its purpose.
In English, we have started our new class book ‘The Paperbag Prince’ where we have been nature detectives looking for nature still surviving in the rubbish dump, and used the pictures from the text to develop our vocabulary. As part of our English work we have also thought about plastic and the damage it can cause to our natural world, so, as our Rossall Rotation visit to the beach we decided to carry out a litter pick to do our little bit to help the environment. Every little helps!
On Wednesday some of the children had the opportunity to attend a talk with Lord Botham about his life, his career and about never giving up. This is such an important message. The children came back full of motivation and inspiration.
Year 4
It has been another busy week in Year 4. In English, the children have been writing an internal monologue based around the variety of animals in the rainforests. They imagined what life would be like living as a rainforest animal and the conversations they would have with each other. The children were very creative inventing some fascinating conversations – many of which contained food references, e.g. what they would like to eat or what steps they would take to avoid being eaten!
The animal theme also juxtaposed with our Science lesson where the children learnt how animals have adapted to living in their surroundings. The children were fascinated to discover a type of toad that can freeze and stop breathing to survive the winter, while meerkats have black around their eyes to reduce the glare of the sun.
In Art, we used oil pastels to focus on rainforest animals, particularly the eyes. Pastels enabled the children to use an array of intense colours commonly found in the vibrancy of rainforest animals to really appreciate the way animals have adapted their appearance to their environment.
Year 3
What a fab week for Year 3! We have loved the start of our book Journey with its wordless pages and beautiful illustrations. We have written a letter and some descriptive writing as part of our learning of this book, as well as recapping speech marks. For Maths we are still learning about measuring length, this week looking at equivalent measures (100cm = 1m, 10mm = 1cm) including measuring objects in the classroom.
In our topic about Modern Europe, we continued our journey through the continent learning about the major rivers and mountains ranges. It’s giving us itchy feet to travel and explore! In Science we are continuing our unit on Plant this term and this week we have learnt about pollination: how a bee takes pollen from one flower to another and this is how new seeds are formed. We played ‘Busy Bees’ as a game to demonstrate this and created pollination comic strips.
We also had our first Rossall Rotation of this half term, and enjoyed our first session with the Golf Academy! To finish off the week we made European flag collages in Art to put on our topic display.
Well done for a great week Year 3!
Year 2
The sun has been out and shining for our first full week back in school, and the children have been shining in the classroom. We are almost at the end of our Mathematics unit on fractions and there have been no half measures with regards to the hard work taking place in the classroom. I have been incredibly impressed with the understanding of such a tricky concept.
In English we have been really getting into our class book “The Last Wolf”, the children have already written “A Guide to Catching Wolves” for Little Red. This included a list of items she would require and how they would be useful. We have also written a set of rules for going into the woods, trying to incorporate contractions in our writing.
This week we started our new topic on “The Beach” children have been identifying items that are involved when going on a beach holiday. We have also begun to discuss the upcoming coronation. Part of this has involved some fabulous collage artwork. It has been an absolutely wonderful week in Year 2, it is quite unbelievable that there are only 9 weeks left.
Year 1
Year 1 are really enjoying their new topic this Summer term and so far we have learned so much about plants and growing. We have been trying to make beans grow in a bag and we are delighted to announce that it worked- we have lots of sprouts and shoots growing out of our beans on our windowsill! It’s so interesting to see how much a plant shoot can grow in such a short amount of time- much like the progress we make in Maths and English!
Everyone has been working really hard this week to measure objects in centimetres using a ruler, as well as comparing objects by their mass and their weight. We even went outside and searched for short and long items that we could measure and we were so accurate too. In Art we are making more pieces of abstract art and collages again and in doing so we are developing our skills to use and create detail.
For Rossall Rotation the children have started lessons in our Forest School and we worked on some team building skills whilst concentrating on our senses and the nature in our Secret Garden. We then created a collaborative piece of Land Art and it was so much fun! What a wonderful week, children!
Reception
One night, when it was dark, Mrs Loy thought she saw something in our playground. It was big, brown, and hairy. It had four legs, a tail, and a big, wet nose, and it was rummaging through our bins…
Straightaway the children started to guess what it may be? Was it a bear? Was it a dog? Was it a racoon? Was it a wolf? The children were very excited and quickly wanted to make posters describing the animal they thought it may be.
We then came in from playtime and found some objects on the carpet, a bear, a scarf, a woolly hat, a hair bow, wellies and a frisbee… whose were these objects?
We looked around the classroom for other clues and found a new storybook. The children quickly noticed the objects we found in the classroom were shown in the illustrations on the front cover of the book. After reading the first couple of pages, I had to stop as the children screamed ‘we know what was rummaging in the bin’…
I think I now have a class of budding detectives. What mysteries will they solve next?
Nursery
Physical activities advance a child’s physical, intellectual and emotional growth
Susan Chrisman
This week in the Nursery we have focused on Physical development.
The Sanderlings
The week The Sanderlings started with a lovely walk where the babies stopped off at the field for a run around with the football. It was hard to kick the ball but the babies soon got the hang of it. The Sanderling staff have been encouraging the babies to climb the Montessori slide using the steps, the babies are learning to do this independently and safely. Miss Qualter helped the babies make Union Jack flags in preparation for the King’s Coronation. This was a good opportunity to use the primary colours red and blue and to practice making marks using motor skills. Some of our babies have been building towers with different sized bricks and developing hand eye coordination.
The Sandpipers
The Sandpipers have been outside in the Nursery garden; balancing, running, jumping and practising kicking a football. Inside the Sandpipers room, the children have been active with daily Tumble Tots and yoga sessions, it has been lovely to see the children joining in with the actions to their favourite songs. The Sandpipers have used the weather as an opportunity to. explore the grounds whilst moving in different ways such as jumping and skipping. The children have been practising their gross and fine motor skills using scissors, different writing tools and play dough to strengthen their fingers. Finally, The Sandpipers have practised number songs whilst holding up their fingers to represent quantity – musical instruments were incorporated too.
Pre-School
This week Pre-School have started their transition to school with reception by taking part PE sessions at the Sports Hall. The children have enjoyed lots of fun in the sun in the Nursery garden and on the School grounds now that we have been lucky enough to have some lovely weather. Pre-School have played on the swing, helping push their friends and kicking their legs high to touch the sky which supports gross motor skills. The balancing beams have also been utilised with the children learning how to safely make their way down each beam before reaching the wooden climbing frame. In forest school, Miss Emsley took the children into the secret garden to make mud paint, the children then used natural items such as sticks to create marks on the ground, grass and trees.
Awards
Year 6
6S Awards:
Alexia – Outstanding positivity and contribution to School.
Kieran – Outstanding progress in all areas of School.
6R Awards:
Reuben – Respect and collaboration in all aspects of learning.
Joseph – Curiosity and collaboration in all aspects of learning.
Year 5
This week’s award winners in 5R are Nilanth, for being a great role model and sports leader in the Games lesson, and to Ahill, for a positive and reflective attitude to his work. In 5S to Eleanor, for excellent effort in Maths, and Archie, for outstanding effort and determination in Cricket.
Year 4
In Year 4 our certificates go to Billy for settling into Rossall brilliantly and Harry for excellent work in English.
Year 3
Our certificates this week go to Annaiya for fantastic sharing about Sikhism in RS, and to Hope for wonderful progress in her writing.
Year 2
Certificates this week got to Rocco: Outstanding effort and improvement in writing. Also to Sam: For making a fabulous start to his time at Rossall.
Year 1
This week in Year 1 our Certificates of Achievement go to:
Theo for working so hard and so enthusiastically in Maths all week!
Hugo for designing a creative piece of collage!
Reception
This week’s certificate of achievement go to Jasper and Kennedy.
Jasper for displaying excellent problem solving skills when creating addition stories.Kennedy for being helpful around the classroom and displaying excellent independence skills.
