Over the last few days in Year 2 we have been continuing to enjoy our amazing topic ‘The Scented Garden’.  We have been looking at plants, seeds, bulbs and using our senses to smell and feel different herbs.

We have been on a nature walk, planted some sweet peas which will be some wonderfully scented flowers when they grow. We are learning that we need to be patient while we wait for our seeds to germinate and grow. It has been wonderful watching the children explore all the different herbs and plants. We will be planting some sunflowers, growing our pizza garden, and learning how to look after plants as they grow in our school garden.

Here at the academy  we will be providing a broad and balanced curriculum based around the Cornerstones Curriculum, a nationally recognised approach for delivering outstanding learning opportunities for children.

What is the Cornerstones Curriculum?

The Cornerstones Curriculum is a creative and thematic approach to learning that is mapped to the 2014 primary national curriculum to ensure comprehensive coverage of national expectations. It is based on a child-centred pedagogy called The Four Cornerstones and is delivered through Imaginative Learning Projects (ILPs) and Knowledge Rich Projects (KRPs), which provide a rich menu of exciting and motivating learning activities that make creative links between all aspects of children’s learning. We believe children learn better when they are encouraged to use their imagination and apply their learning to engaging contexts. Our curriculum provides many learning challenges throughout the academic year that require children to solve problems, apply themselves creatively and express their knowledge and understanding effectively. Cornerstones also provide a rigorous skills and knowledge framework that outlines the end of year expectations in all subjects. These skills and knowledge are tied to activities and are age-related so that staff can track children’s progress and identify their individual learning needs.

These are the following ILPs/KLPs that each Year group will be covering, each one will start with a ‘memorable experience’.

Summer Term:

Nursery: Can I have a dog?

Children will begin to gain knowledge of how to care for animals

Reception: Do cows drink milk?

This topic will be an opportunity for children to learn about farm animals

Year 1: Childhood Experiences & Family Life

Children will spend the term exploring childhood experiences, and compare their own to those of children from the 1950’s.

Year 2: The Scented Garden

For this topic, we have planned some amazing activities linked to gardening, and will be creating a herb garden for everyone to enjoy.

Year 3: Rocks, Relics and Rumbles

Children will be learning about different types of rocks, volcanoes and earthquakes, and we will be looking at world maps, locating where volcanoes are around the world.

Year 4: Traders and Raiders

Year 4 will be looking at the collapse of the Roman Empire in Britain, and how the Anglo-Saxons stood up against the Vikings. Children will also be using their geographical knowledge to help them with locating famous Saxon sites around the UK.

Year 5: Sow, Grow & Farm

During the term, children will become gardeners with a passion for growing and encouraging the environment, and will learn about sustainability and the way in which all different manner of food is grown and harvested.

Year 6: Victorians & The Revolution

Pupils will explore and sample life in the Victorian times and much more!

This week, our new topic is all about the life and workings of a farm. We have been learning about all the animals that live on the farm and the important jobs that farmers have to do.

Our new story, Farmer Duck, is about a duck that does all the work for a lazy farmer! We have spent this week learning the story and making our own story maps to help us retell it. We have also been engaged in lots of farm themed enhancements including making animal masks and using our new farm shop role play.

We received a special delivery of eggs that we are hoping will hatch into adorable chicks for us to care for. The chicks will then return to the farm to do their job and lay lots of delicious eggs. 

In Maths, we have been practising subtraction. Now we have become more confident, we have been using Numicon and Numicon covers to help us write our own number sentences and check our working out. We have been working hard at number formation to demonstrate our knowledge. 

Meet Ollee

Parent Zone have developed the app ‘Meet Ollee’ who is a virtual friend that helps your child think about how they’re feeling.

Meet Ollee is aimed at 8–11-year-olds and their parents. https://parentzone.org.uk/Ollee

PlayStation

We’ve put together a few pointers to help keep your child safe whilst online. We would always recommend that you check the age ratings of any games your child is playing/wishes to play to ensure they are appropriate and also spend time with your child playing on their games console so you can monitor what they are doing and who, if anybody they are interacting with.

This will also lead to more open conversations.

PlayStation Network Rules

Playstation have created the PSN Rules for children to read specifying what players aged 7-17 need to know before going online with friends.

PlayStation: https://bit.ly/2M5jMMP

Block Players

Show your child how to block players should they need to: https://bit.ly/3aiocYu

Report Inappropriate Behaviour

Show your child how to report any inappropriate content/ conversations. https://bit.ly/3cj3RoI

Parental Controls

Make sure you set up appropriate parental controls (as well as any additional settings that are offered within any games your child is playing). Parental settings on a PS include features such as restrict communication with other players and setting spending limits.

PS4: https://bit.ly/39ptQce

PS5: https://bit.ly/2KXO3fJ

Further information https://bit.ly/2YnW6FE

Accessing Microsoft Teams Via a Games Console

Below is a link to a guide on how to access websites and Microsoft Teams via a games console, which you may find useful. Modern day consoles, such as the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, come with internet browsers pre-installed. These browsers enable you to access remote learning sites and Microsoft Teams. www.sway.office.com/

To kickstart the Summer term, the students at Bloxwich Academy had a memorable experience day on Monday. Throughout the day, we took part in many activities and had a lot of fun doing so. You might have seen some of the different activities Year 1, Year 3 and Year 5 were doing in the newsletter. Below is a summary of what Year 2, Year 4 and Year 6 were doing during the day.

Year 2

What an amazing start to the beginning of the summer term!

Year 2 had the most amazing day learning to be florists, gardeners and woodland explorers! The children had a fantastic time. Everyone had the opportunity to make a flower posy using the most beautiful roses, spray carnations and chrysanthemums! Lots of the children are natural florists and gardeners.

We are just beginning our adventure and will be planting sweet peas, herbs and many other wonderful flowers and vegetables to use on our pizzas at the end of the term.  We have even designed and are planning to build a couple of amazing scarecrows to keep the wonderful plants we are growing safe. Watch this space for more exciting gardening adventures. 

Year 4

For our memorable experience day, Year 4 spent some time learning about who the Vikings were and what they are famous for. We started the day creating some fantastic Viking silhouette pictures. We used watercolour paints for our sunsets and then cut out longboats to place on top. We think they look absolutely amazing.

In the afternoon, the children were tasked with a challenge of making boats that could float on water. They had access to a range of materials: plastic, paper, wood and foam. The children were really inventive and came up with some brilliant ideas. We then tested our boats on water to see if they would float or sink.

Year 6

On the first day back after the Easter holidays, Year 6 completed an amazing Victorian day. The children roleplayed what it would like to be at school during the Victorian era and how different this would be do their normal day to day lives. They started by learning how to bow and curtesy and used this to respond to the register before completing the three Rs of Victorian teaching, reading, writing and arithmetic. In the afternoon, the boys completed some technical drawing whilst the girls completed some weaving using paper. 

The children really enjoyed the entire day, and this will lead perfectly into the rest of their topic.

Since returning, Bloxwich Academy have celebrated the love of reading in many ways.

Firstly, we have introduced a new reading scheme called ‘Accelerated Reading’. Your child brings home a reading book every day and they take a test after every book, which checks your child’s understanding of different vocabulary and their book. This has been a fantastic success. The children have loved to celebrate changing their books, they have loved choosing a new book and they have loved reading at home with their parent/guardian.

Secondly, we have celebrated ‘World Book Day’. This was a fantastic day, both online and at in the academy, for all of our Bloxwich children. Some were asked to complete a variety of reading activities: designing their own book character, writing part of a new book, creating and designing their own character and others were encouraged to dress up as their favourite book character. This was an enjoyable day, which was celebrated by all.

Finally, we are so pleased that our parents/ guardians have supported their children to develop their love of reading. You have listened to your children read, you have offered encouragement and positivity when your child has read well and you have challenged your child and checked their understanding of certain vocabulary throughout their book.

Thank you to all our pupils for their amazing reading this term.

In Nursery, we have had an ‘eggcelent’ week celebrating Easter. The children have enjoyed many Easter themed activities ranging from counting eggs and comparing numbers to going on egg hunt. The children really enjoyed the experience of hunting for eggs and using some fantastic positional language to describe the location of the clues. We have made Easter cards and Easter boxes using a range of bright colours.

Nursery staff would like to say a big well done to all Nursery children this week. It is fantastic to see children walking into Nursery and waving goodbye to their grown-up with such confidence. We have missed you all!

In the Nursery setting, we have been focusing on settling back in and getting into a good routine. We have been really impressed with the work children have produced at home. It is evident that many children have been practising writing their name. Keep up the good work everyone. 

In class this week, we have enjoyed exploring our environment and listened to a range of stories including: ‘The Very Ugly Duckling’ and ‘The Enormous Turnip.’ The children are really enjoying accessing our Farm Shop role play area. We will be planting some seeds soon and making observations on what plants need to grow. Watch this space… 

We have really enjoyed welcoming all the children back to reception. It is wonderful to see how they have become much more confident learners whilst working from home. All the children have settled back into the classroom setting with ease and we are so proud of them all.  

During the first week back at school, we have focused on well-being activities and have been allowing the children lots of time to play together. Miss Thomas and Miss Harper have enjoyed watching the children continue to develop their strong friendships in class. The children have enjoyed talking about what they would like to learn now they are back in school and their aspirations for the future. Following our return to school, we have started to take part in the daily mile to keep ourselves fit and healthy. We have challenged ourselves to see how many laps of the playground we can walk, jog or run every day. 

In class this week, we have continued to learn about topics that we covered during home learning. In literacy lessons, we have continued to learn about Jack and the Beanstalk. The children have really enjoyed accessing our giant’s castle role play, retelling the story with confidence. During our child-initiated learning session, the children have enjoyed drawing their own story maps. In class, the children have been getting sticky, making their own collage of the beanstalk to display in our classroom. 

During our maths lessons, we have been recapping all our skills through daily maths meeting sessions. We have practised counting, number recognition, positional language, pattern, 2D and 3D shapes and much more. The children have been applying all the learning they completed at home during their play. 

We look forward to seeing how much the children progress through the rest of the Spring and Summer term. Once again Miss Thomas and Miss Harper would like to thank parents/guardians for all their hard work during the period of home learning, it is clear that this has had an impact on all of the children. 

We are approaching the full-time return to school…hooray!

This week, Year 5 have continued with their learning in Maths based on properties of shape (angles). The children have used their knowledge of types of angles and developed their skills further to find missing angles on a straight line and in a full turn. The children working online have used the digital whiteboard to complete their calculations and have applied this within their independent work.

Following lots of discussion about animals in captivity, in both reading and writing, the children have used an example text to explore their opinions further within a discussion text.  We have worked together to write a shared example each lesson using various grammatical features, and then the children have used their own ideas, alongside shared examples, to begin building their own discussion text.

When animals are put into captivity, they are given the right habitat so that they can survive in the right temperature and not die in the wrong habitat. They are also fed whenever possible, so they won’t die or be too full because they were overfed. The zookeepers also train the animals, so they won’t attack, kill or hurt humans when walking past them. Although the animals might not be happy, they will still be looked after with good care and medicine when it is necessary otherwise, they will die.

Throughout this term learning at home, Year 5 have worked hard to improve their comprehension skills whilst reading a range of texts. This week, the children have used the new vocabulary linked to animals in captivity, alongside our discussions to answer a range of comprehension questions, and it is clear that they are becoming more confident to answer long response questions.

Based on our whole school project, the children in school have worked extremely hard to create some posters about deforestation, highlighting the key problems that come from this global issue. They have been learning how to draw rainforest animals, which have looked amazing on their posters!

Both Miss Hughes and Miss Jones would like to say a massive well done and thank you to all of Year 5 for their hard work and resilience during this term so far. We can’t wait to see you all on Monday 8th March to continue this fantastic work!