UNICEF Rights of the Child

Today Mr Farrington worked with Year 4 and showed photos and videos of children who have to work making bricks with their families in one of the richest parts of India. We talked about the fact that these children are denied their rights to an education, a decent home, medical care, clean water. We compared their lives with the children's and their rich opportunities to participate in school, community and family life.

POWSA AGM

Just a quick reminder that the POWSA AGM is happening this Thursday 23rd October 19.45 in the school staffroom.
This is a great opportunity to meet the current POWSA Committee, find out what we do for the school and enjoy home made goodies! We are a committed, friendly but small band of parents and we are always looking for new members. the level of your involvement in planning, implementing and running POWSA events is entirely up to you. We don't expect you to be at every meeting and at every event from start to finish but with more members and if we all do a little bit then there is plenty of time for us all to enjoy each event with our families as well as helping out.
It is a lot of fun and in return you receive a huge amount of satisfaction and feeling of pride that you have raised funds which are used to help all our children and our fantastic school.
Please consider coming along and finding out a bit more. Hope to see you there, POWSA.

This week so far........

Evening Everyone!!!!!

The endless talent just keeps pouring out of Year 4........Shannon gave us a demonstration of her gymnastics.....it was great for her class mates to see how much progress she has made - truly amazing!!!!! Rocco goes on to win MORE medals in another Biathlon this week end where he came 4th out of about 25 others across the South West and gained a silver team medal for The Dorst Pentathletes!!!! Wow!!!!!!! It also emerged today that Ben W is a self taught guitarist - he played for us and, literally, blew us all away!!!!!
Well done all of you!!!!!!

We began our Rights Respecting Schools week by exploring what gives us our identity, we then discussed and debated Wants and Needs to secure our understanding of what Rights are. We then started looking at a Unicef powerpoint linking several rights based around refugees from Syria, what a refugee is and why from Syria - extremely emotional and thought provoking - the children were superb showing great empathy, questioning skills and maturity. We will be continuing to work on these particular rights throughout the week, producing some powerful writing and art work!!!!

I will update you on the work during the week!

Mrs. Johnson

The Great PoW Poetry Competition!!!! Get Writing!!!!!!!

What a wonderful, exciting and inspiring time of year we are immersed in - beautiful autumnal colours, leaves floating to the ground and flooding the pavements, conkers peppering the streets, crackling fires, Diwali, Halloween, Bonfire Night, moving towards winter and all the excitement of Christmas............so let's fire up our creativity and use it to compose a poem!

I am thrilled to announce The Great PoW Poetry Competition!

The theme is Autumn/Winter.

BE AS CREATIVE AS YOU LIKE! Your poem can be as long or as short as you like, it can rhyme or not, you can use any particular style (Acrostic, Haiku, Tanka, rhyming couplets........) However you choose to construct your poem make sure it conveys the theme, remember the presentation of you poem is important too and why not illustrate it as well!!!!!

For Reception ONLY: if writing your own poem is a bit tricky, why not find a favourite poem about this theme and try to copy it, get an adult to help you write one, use a computer or even record yourself reciting one!

There will be one winner per class so, PUT YOUR NAME AND CLASS ON YOUR ENTRY AND HAND IT IN TO YOUR CLASS TEACHER BY FRIDAY 7th NOVEMBER.

The winners will also be displayed on the New Golden Writing Wall!!!!!

We are a very creative school with a bubbling and overflowing imagination so I would love to see as many of you as possible having a go...........then we can have more competitions like this!!!!!

Get writing!!!!!!!

Good Luck - Mrs. Johnson (Literacy Coordinator)

What have we been up to.........?

I think you'll all agree that Year 4 were excellent ambassadors for the school last Friday when they served at the Harvest Cafe - I thought you were all courteous, helpful and charming! Well done!

A huge "Thank You" to Mrs. Mystery-Dyer who came into our class last week and taught us all about the Hindu celebrations of Puja, home shrines and Thallis........it was fascinating seeing her home shrine and we all got to make our own group Thallis and learned how to worship - very magical!

The clarinet playing is going from strength to strength - it is very evident that you have all been practising and you are all showing an astonishing ability to read music. Today we learned some new songs - reading the music brilliantly, knowing the notes in a scale, playing a scale and learning note "A". Super work - keep it up!

A reminder that our class assembly is this Friday morning at 9:20 - I have asked the children to bring int heir costumes tomorrow so that we can see if anyone needs some help organising theirs.
You might be interested to know that the Scholastic Book Fair is in school at the moment - it will be open that morning so do have a browse if you haven't already had a chance to - the children did look round it today and some of them have large shopping lists!!!!!!!!! (Great for Christmas presents!)
FYI - during our assembly we will be showing pictures of our trip to Bovington, as a pre-warning some of the pictures show the children wearing gas masks - these masks are MODERN and TOTALLY SAFE - this was also made aware to us and all the children on our visit and we knew this from our visit last year!

Anyone that swam in the Swimarathon - if you have any sponsorship money please could you bring it in by the end of NEXT week - thank you!

We are looking forward to our themed Rights Respecting week next week!

There are still a few slots for parents evening in our cloakroom if you have not already signed up!

Let's hope we don't all have to practise being ducks in the morning on our way in...........

Year 4 Team

Stunning!

I agree Mr. Farrington!!!!!!
I have been well and truly bowled over by the home learning!!!!! I particularly like all the different ways you have approached the project showing us how you have been inspired and in what way you like to learn best! Very creative - the only thing that you wont be able to see is the food that some children cooked, inspired by WW2 rationing - yummy flap jacks, vegetable pie and rabbit stew!!!!! You are all amazing and should be very proud of your efforts - I hope you will use these skills in all your future learning (not just at The Prince of Wales!!!!)

Talking of food..........this week is our themed week "From Farm to Fork" - in our class we are learning about fish!!!!! We began by thinking about the health benefits of fish, and in particular oily fish. The children sampled 6 different types of fish, and were brilliant at trying them even if they weren't keen - super impressed - well done!!!! We spent time thinking about types of fish we eat, what they look like and how big they are!!! We will be exploring fishing around the uk and what fish you can catch where, as well as discussing sustainability. A great website you may like to explore at home =
www.school-of-fish.co.uk have a listen to the codcasts, learn facts, play games and lots more!
We have also been inspired by our fishy themed week to produce some watery/fishy art work and some fish themed poetry - these will all be on display on Friday for you to enjoy at the Harvest Assembly or Cafe. The KS2 assembly will be at 10 o'clock in the school hall, the cafe will also be in the hall from 2:30pm. Year 4 will be helping to serve at the cafe with Year 2.

A reminder that next Friday 17th is our class assembly - 9:20 as usual! I will send a slip home tomorrow just reminding everyone that the children will need an evacuee outfit for the assembly and that the home learning is to make a gas mask box.
4 week countdown to our clarinet assembly - the children really impressed all of us today by composing a 2 bar piece of music including notes, crotchets, quavers, semi-quavers with a 4 beat.........then we put each groups together to make a whole song - they read it and played it with great talent!!!!! It is called the "King of Clarinets".

Great achievements this week - Shannon did very well in her gymnastics competition last week-end, Stan was selected as Cub of the Week and had to do all sorts of tricky swimming challenges, and I believe 3 children succeeded in swimming in the deep end of the pool today which was a big achievement for them!

See you all tomorrow!

Mrs. Johnson, Mrs. Thomas, Mrs. Scott and Mrs. Long

Sensational home learning about the Second World War

If you haven't already done so, please take a moment to have a good look at the way that Year 4 children have responded to their home learning project about WW2! It is great to see the creativity and enjoyment that this challenge has stimulated. There is some fantastic work n display in Duchy Base and in the entrance foyer. Take a look!

Can anybody help?

On the 20th of October we will be having a Rights Respecting Week to celebrate 25 years of the UNCRC. 

The Children's Voice have decided that they would like to see some of the UNICEF articles of the Rights of the Child displayed in our school entrance. Each year group will be designing and making a flag portraying one of the articles. 

This is where we need your help! We are looking for some plain white flat sheets usually used for bedding that we could have please. As an Eco School we encourage recycling old unwanted items so was wondering if anyone has any old sheets that we could have for our project please. If so please can you either give them to your child's class teacher or pass them on to Mrs Thorpe in Year 1. 

Many thanks 

Evacuees!

Happy Thursday Evening Everyone!!!!!

We had a fantastic time at the farm today experiencing what it would have been like to be an evacuee on the farm..........fascinating stuff - thanks Hazel! The children loved it and learned lots!

I was so impressed in our clarinet lesson yesterday - the progress that has been made in 3 weeks!!!!!! All children are able to play notes E D C G and F as well as reading them. We played London's Burning in 3 layers!!!! Watch this space for our finale concert in November.

Thank you sooooo much to those of you who have come forward keen to take part in the swimarathon this weekend - even if you were not able to. I have been so impressed at your enthusiasm and your considerate attitude wanting to raise money for the chosen charities - well done, I am proud of each and every one of you!!! I am really looking forward to taking part with you on Saturday!!!!!!!

Have a good think of questions you would like to ask tomorrow on our trip to Bovington!

See you tomorrow!

Mrs. Johnson and the Year 4 Team

Whole school home learning

This week all children will be bringing home a whole school home learning project. We are really proud to be a Rights Respecting School and will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the UNCRC in the week beginning 20th October (more information to follow soon).

Article 8 of the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child:

‘We have a right to an identity’

We are going to be designing a school flag to be displayed at The Thomas Hardye School as part of our DASP Rights Week Project (starting on the 20^th October). We would like the children to design something we can add on our flag linked to our theme. One design from each class will be chosen by the Children’s Voice. It could be a picture they draw or suitable quote/words. Why are the children proud to be them? What makes them special? All entries to be given to class teachers by the 10^th of October.