Term 3 Newsletter – February 2024
This Term has given us lots to celebrate! Our netball and football teams continue to excel and grow in skill and confidence, Chinese New Year prompted activities and celebrations and our school choir performances, whether in school or at the O2 have been nothing short of sensational!
Our Year 5 Pupils have been studying Chinese art forms. In the photos below, pupils are practising Chinese brush painting, which uses simple strokes to capture natural subjects, in this case blossom branches. Additionally, pupils have been exploring the significance and history of dragons in Chinese art and culture and, as you can see from the photo, have created a wonderful range of their own drawings and models to illustrate their findings.
Happy Chinese New Year!… this year is the year of the (you guessed it), Dragon! The Year of the Dragon 2024 is expected to be a year of transformation, innovation and prosperity!
Year 6 pupils have been learning about electricity, and how components make circuits. In the below practical lesson pupils investigated how the brightness of a bulb or speed of a motor could be changed. Really great independent work resulting in accurate scientific findings!
Pupils and teachers regularly use white boards during lessons as a fun and interactive way for all pupils to play an active part in the lesson. Crucially, this allows their teachers an immediate view of class knowledge of a subject, so the lesson can be tailored to ensure that everyone has grasped new topics and can demonstrate understanding before moving on. In the below Year 4 Maths lesson, students are facing increasingly trickier multiplication and division problems to solve!
Our Year 1 pupils have been learning about ‘explorers’ and ‘adventurers’ as their history topic this term .. and what an adventure it has been! We learned lots of interesting facts about Christopher Colombus and Neil Armstrong and had great fun creating artworks, quizzing and completing a class scrapbook album to showcase everything we discovered about these amazing people!
The Young Voices experience is not simply a children’s choir concert, these are the largest children’s choir concerts in the world. This term our spectacular school choir joined with a host of other primary children for an uplifting Young Voices Concert at the Greenwich O2 … I hope they enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed listening to them!!
Year 2 pupils have been developing their creative writing skills, specifically, writing factual reports using the past tense. Our budding journalists all filed excellent newspaper articles recounting the Great Fire of London! Great work everyone.
This term our reception are enjoying moving to music through taught dance lessons in the hall. We begin our lesson with some warm-up music, and in the photos below … a round of ‘Simon Says’. Pupils were encouraged to move to the beat and dance in a ‘freestyle’ manner. Then they listened to the music of a well-known action song, ‘head, shoulders, knees and toes.’ Pupils independently danced along to the music following the actions that Miss Ullah modelled, then worked in pairs and had to face each other, trying to mirror the actions. Finally, they played a game where they had to dance from one side of the hall to the other whilst doing the actions from the song. When Miss Ullah paused the music pupils had to freeze! It was great fun!
Sporting update. Our netball team were in action on 1st February winning 9-5, congratulations on an excellent result! The pupils provided the following match report;
“In the first quarter, Joydens Wood scored one goal while Wilmington scored none. In the second quarter, we had a comeback and scored two brilliant goals, whilst Joydens still only had one. In the third quarter, we scored an amazing five goals with Joydens Wood scoring two. In the fourth quarter, both teams scored two goals each. In the end we won 9-5. The goal scorers were Harry S, Kai W, and Isla P (Y6).”
The football team were in action on Monday coming 2nd overall – well done everyone! Pupils provided a match report;
“We went to Thamesmead and played a National Tournament. In the first game it was even, and both teams were having good chances but couldn’t score, so, it ended 0-0. In the second game, we played a team in black and red. In all the games we had all the chances but none of them went into the net, so, it ended 0-0 again. In the third match we won because Bobby C (Y6) scored a goal, which went under the goalkeeper with a win to us making it 1-0. Fourth game, we drew, and it was a good game. The other team could have scored but Louis D (Y6) made a brilliant save and the game finished 0-0.”
Forthcoming Dates;
First Day of Term 4 – 19th February
Parent Consultations – 3.30 – 6.00pm (Parents to attend) – 21st & 22nd February
Parents’ Association AGM (All Welcome!) – 6th March
World Book Day – 8th March
Red Nose Day – 15th March
Spring Concert – 2.15pm 26th March
Last Day of Term – 28th March
Best wishes,
Charlotte Scott
Head Teacher
