Aston and Cote Church of England

Primary School “Learning together through courage, love and respect”

Tel: 01993 850435 Fax: 01993 851915 Email: office.3120@aston-and-cote.oxon.sch.uk Website: www.aston-and-cote.oxon.sch.uk Headteacher: Mrs Fiona Taylor

Newsletter 9 – Summer Term 30th April 2020

Dear parents and carers

The month of April has certainly been a very strange one. We are now in our 6th week of lockdown and the

school has been closed to most pupils for 4 weeks. This has presented a lot of challenges for our children, their

families and the school staff but undeterred, everyone has risen to the challenge and remote learning has

become part of our daily routines.

As a school staff, we continue to be grateful to all parents for the support you are giving your children at home

– this will hopefully minimise the disruption to the children’s learning and enable them to resume learning in

school much more easily when we are able to open again. We continue to be amazed at the brilliant ideas you are

coming up with, particularly related to our whole school space topic - it really is lovely to see the children so

engaged in their learning.

The school has been open for a small number of children whose parents are key workers throughout the

lockdown period. Each day the children complete their remote learning tasks in school although social

distancing, very frequent handwashing and a lack of friends mean it definitely isn’t as much fun as usual. The

school is manned by members of staff on a rota basis, including during the school holidays, so I would like to say

a huge thank you to everyone who has been able to help with this. I know that our key worker families are also

extremely grateful.

Hopefully by our next newsletter we will have a better idea of when and how the school will reopen – until then,

take care and stay safe,

Kind regards,

Fiona Taylor

Value of the Month

Our value for this half term is “Service”. I am hoping to upload a weekly act of collective worship onto Class

Dojo during which we will explore the idea that we all have talents that we can use to serve others and to

brighten up their lives. This is such an appropriate value at this difficult time for all families.

“Serve on another in love.” Galatians 5:13

Oatlands class

I have been so impressed with all the home learning that Oatlands class have

been doing over the last few weeks. The children created some beautiful Easter

Egg designs and have been thinking about using Zones of Regulation strategies at

home. In Maths, Oatlands class have been learning to identify and count in

fractions and are now learning about measuring and comparing lengths. Last term,

Oatlands class were researching different famous women, including Katherine

Johnson and Amelia Earhart. I have loved seeing all the

space topic work the children have been doing so far

this term and look forward to seeing even more. In

reading, we finished the Twits by Roald Dahl and are

now reading the Three Little

Wolves and the Big Bad Pig. In our writing lessons, we have

started looking at the story 'The Tunnel' by Anthony Browne.

Oatlands have been looking at using inverted commas when

writing speech and how to write in the past tense. We are

working towards writing our own adventure story. Oatlands

class have also been doing a weekly reading check-in and have

been showing off their home learning spaces.

Windmill Class

We have continued with our daily Read Write Inc lessons via videos. The children have been uploading their

wonderful reading and writing, for me to have a look at and support them in moving their learning on. We have

had daily Mathletics and are using White Rose maths lessons to support our mathematical development. For

English we have listened to a range of stories, story mapped, written the beginning of a story, drawn our

gardens and labeled them, matched uppercase and lowercase letters, and this week we have begun learning

about captions. I have seen some amazing ‘Space’ learning and a whole range of different activities have been

completed, including a food solar system and pencil pot rockets. In PSHCE we have been learning about ‘special

people’ and ‘keeping safe’ we have discussed what is safe and not safe to put on our bodies and how to recognise

different feelings and how we can help others. In R.E we decorated leaves like Easter eggs, we made repeating

patterns on card eggs and wrote a prayer about what we are thankful for. In R.E this term we will be listening

to a range of religious stories from different religions, thinking about what we can learn from each story.

Seren's space passport Max and Toby in their space station Elijah's caption

KINGSWAY

Kingsway Home Learning

Kingsway have done lots of excellent work at

home. We are getting brilliant at our daily

sounds and spellings. In English we have written

postcards, a diary to Bob, the Man on the Moon

and even done a puppet show! We are currently

writing a story about a boy and a Martian from

the book, ‘The Way Back Home’. Maths is

everywhere so after our challenge sheets we

explore and discover real maths by baking,

measuring, sharing and lots of counting. We all

read to Mrs Weston in the week, she loves to

hear how well we are progressing. We have been

incredibly creative and inventive with our SPACE

topic as you can see from our photos. We have

even had an actual BBC television news report!

Most of us are enjoying our home learning but we

would also like to get back to school.

Kingsway you have been amazing with your home

learning and I’m incredibly proud of all the work

you and your parents are doing to enable it to

happen.

Thank you!

Holywell Class

The children in Holywell Class have been incredibly busy since our return

from the Easter holidays.

Our new class book is “How to train your Dragon” - we have been

demonstrating our excellent comprehension skills each day and then this

has been followed by an English task which is also based on the book. Mrs

Taylor has been particularly impressed with our diary writing – we wrote

in role as Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third. After planning and

writing our diaries we then edited them and wrote them out neatly so

that we could display them proudly in our homes.

We have particularly enjoyed using Mathletics and Times Table Rockstars

for our Maths lessons. We love the competitive element of these

programs and are working hard

to improve our scores.

We have produced some

excellent work as part of the

whole school Space topic and

have come up with wonderfully creative ways of exploring this

fascinating subject. Many of us have completed joint projects with our

brothers and sisters and have had great fun thinking of imaginative

ways to do our work. These have included drama, art, baking, ICT and

English.

We are all missing our friends hugely and are hoping that we will be able to get back to school soon but, in the

meantime, we are making the most of home learning.

Reedy Class

Reedy Class have been working hard and uploading some amazing work to Class Dojo. Everyone seems to be

enjoying our whole school Space Topic and a wide variety of work has been shared. We have had videos of Lego

spaceships launching a satellite and astronauts sending reports back from space about what they can find out

about Earth. Some children have designed their own planets and have even

discovered some aliens!

Our new class novel for this term is 'Beetle

Boy' by M.G. Leonard. After his father

mysteriously disappears, Darkus is befriended

by a giant beetle but how can a boy be friends

with a beetle? And what does the beetle have

to do with the disappearance of his Dad? This is an engaging mystery story

which has already sparked some engaging diaries from the children written in

role as Darkus.

The children have also been uploading videos of themselves telling me about their current book and reading

some of it to me. It is lovely to see their smiling faces and to hear them talk about their books so confidently.

I can't wait for us all to be back together in school but until then Reedy Class are rising to the challenge and

learning in a new way. Well done Reedy Class!

Westerleigh Class

In Westerleigh class we are enjoying our remote learning very much and, since the Easter break, we have been

making use of Microsoft Teams so that we can interact with each other

and have real lessons live together. The children are not too sure about

seeing themselves on screen so have all become remarkably quiet - much

quieter than usual!

We are concentrating on different skills in

our English lessons each week - last week we

focused on writing and this week we have

focused on reading and handwriting skills.

Next week we'll focus on SPaG but don't tell the children!

We've read 'Evie in The Jungle' by Matt Haig and now we are reading 'Hello? Is

Anybody There?' by Jostein Gaarder.

This is a brilliant book because it

features Mika who has landed on Earth from another planet and asks

many philosophical questions about life on Earth and in space.

We are enjoying all of our lessons, and Mrs Luckett is particularly

loving our daily reading videos, French and Music - getting to see all

sorts of hidden talents shining. We have also enjoyed creating artwork

inspired by Peter Thorpe - we have some amazing artists in our class.

VE Day Celebrations

Next Friday, the whole country will be celebrating VE

Day. Obviously, these celebrations will be very different to

what we would have planned in normal circumstances, but it will still

be important to mark this important occasion in our nation’s history.

Next week, each class will complete work related to VE Day and we would also

like the children to create some homemade bunting to display inside or outside their

house depending on the weather. We have attached a template for you to use although you may

wish to do it in a different way which is, of course, absolutely fine. ( Next Page)

I am always happy to meet with parents by appointment and welcome feedback either verbally, through emails

or through our “Feedback and Suggestions” box in the front entrance.

Kind regards,

Fiona Taylor

Headteacher