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Year 3 – Another Super Half Term!

We have had another super half term in Year 3. The children have worked extremely hard and we are proud of all their efforts. We have loved unpicking the story ‘The Iron Man by Ted Hughes’ and used this within our English, bookclub, D&T and art lessons. The children wrote some fantastic next chapters of The Iron Man and his adventures. We also designed our own pets for the Iron Man and wrote an explanatory text linked to this. In science, we have been learning about magnets, completing many investigations. We then linked our science with Design and Technology where the children designed, made and played with their own mazes.

We have also enjoyed some winter and Christmas Art more recently. We also completed an act of kindness by making penguin cards for each other in class, we had to be a secret agent as we delivered these to each other! 

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Can we take this opportunity to say a huge thank you for your on-going support and your wonderful presents. 

We look forward to our new project and a new term with your children,
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, 

Year 3 Team

Year 4’s Creative Term

What a wonderful half term we have had learning about rivers and India as part of our project 'River of Life'. The children have worked hard and used their creativity within their Topic work, Art and DT. 

Our final website post for the Autumn term is written by our Year 4 pupils – Florence and Monica – who are going to explain their work:

Geography – Journal Pages
This term, we learned about India and the river in India called the river Ganges.The river Ganges is very important to people in India. People in India wash in the river because they believe that when they wash it washes away their sins but there also are negative impacts of the river on life. We made these journal pages after learning about different places along the Ganges. We used  creativity to present and decorate our page.
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DT – Making bread
In DT, we made bread and compared it to an Indian chapati and decided which one we preferred. We liked the bread because it had more texture and wasn't that salty but the chapati. The 4 ingredients we used were water, yeast, flour and salt.

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Art – Mehndi and Rangoli Patterns 
In art, we all looked at mehndi patterns and we had to create our own patterns. We looked at lots of designs and saw all of the beautiful patterns.
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Also in art we looked at some Indian fabrics in the hall and noticed some patterns. We designed some Rangoli patterns and after we did our practise, a few days later, we did our neat one and some of them went on display. Fun fact: some people in India put rangoli patterns on their floor to welcome people into their homes.  
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Thank you to Florence and Monica for writing our website post. We wish all the children, parents and carers a wonderful Christmas. See you in the new year!
Year 4 Team

17th December – Christmas Newsletter

A note from Mr Applegate

  • Thank you for your generosity towards our FOSM Christmas party today, and of course to Dave for putting the video together. The children LOVED the party!
  • Remember, you can still give online if you’d like to: click here:  .
  • We hope you enjoyed our Christmas carol events recently! Together we raised £374.72 for Foodbank!
  • Look out for a video link in your emails created by the children in their year group; it was sent out Thursday evening.
  • INSET day – Tuesday 4th Jan 2021! First day back is Weds 5th Jan.
  • On behalf of the staff and governors at St Mark’s, we wish you a restful, safe and wonderful Christmas break.

Covid Update

  • We’ve been very fortunate with our relatively low number of positive cases this term. Thank you for everyone’s efforts.
  • I can’t see the government agreeing to another lockdown depsite the rise of national case-rates, but we just don’t know what will happen; as before, we don’t get any advanced warning.
  • Please rest assured that we will always do all we can to keep everyone safe, and continue our cautious approach.

Tech and social media- how do we learn to help our children?

Can I encourage you to think carefully about how your children use technology and social media. It’s a minefield of potential harm, and often as parents we are sometimes one step behind our children depsite our best intentions and efforts. It’s really difficult to keep on top of it and to know how to do that! LondonGridForLearning are runing a short, live session on helping you know how to keep your children safe online. It’s on Monday evening, online of course! 

Monday 20th December at 7pm: www.facebook.com/LGfLDigiSafe/posts

Mrs Smith

I’m sorry to say that Vicky Smith will be finishing at St Mark’s in the middle of January. Mrs Smith has been part of our Office team since 2012 and will be much missed. I know it’s been an extremely hard decision for her, as she loves St Mark’s, but she has been able to find a role that suits her family more. Vicky has brought lots of laughter and fun to our school and office, and we shall miss her enthusiasm and dedication to our school. She brings great perspective to decisions we make about our school, too.  I know you will join me in wishing her well in her new role.
 

Changes in PE days for Spring Term

After Christmas, every year group will be changing their PE days. Below are the new PE days for each year group.
 
  • Monday – Year 6
  • Tuesday – Year 1 and Year 5
  • Wednesday – Year 4
  • Thursday – Year R
  • Friday – Year 2 and Year 3
 These will start on the first week back, so Year 4 will need to be in PE kit on the first Wednesday back (5th January)
 

Immanuel / St Mark’s Kempshot Services

Sunday 12th December
10.30am – Nativity Service (St Mark’s, Kempshott)
6.00pm –  Carols by Candlelight. (Immanuel)

Christmas Eve. (24th December
3.00pm –  Crib Service (Immanuel)
11.30pm – Midnight Service (Immanuel)

Christmas Day
9.30 – Christmas morning service (St Marks (Kempshott))

Road Safety Update

Further to our message last week… if you’d like to petition the council for a zebra crossing here, please contact Cllr Stephen Reid here (he knows about this!).

Upcoming Dates for your diary

  • INSET Day – Tuesday 4th Jan. First day back Weds 5th Jan

Vacancies at St Mark’s

We are looking for 2 friendly, reliable and enthusiastic people to join our amazing cleaning team.

Hours of work are 3.30pm to 6.30pm Monday to Friday with an hourly rate of £9.25 per hour.

If you would like to apply for the position please email the school office for an application form at adminoffice@st-markscofe.hants.sch.uk

Breakfast Club Vacancy – New post 

We are looking for someone to provide high quality care and supervision for children at our Breakfast Club
Hours of work are 7.45am to 8.45am Monday to Friday with an hourly rate of £9.62.
 
Please email adminoffice@st-markscofe.hants.sch.uk for further information and application form.
 

Second Hand Uniform from FOSM

If you need to order any school uniform, please contact FOSM direct at: uniform.fosm@stmarksce.org.uk

Immanuel Christingle Facebook Post
Cribservice
carols by candlelight
emotional cup
Christmas opening hours 2021-0000

Star Learners

Star Learner Awards:

  • Year R: Jake, Mia L, Orla
  • Year 1:  Isla, Reeva, Gabriel
  • Year 2:  Ben G, Olivia L, Sarah
  • Year 3:  Jack K, Oscar, Henry
  • Year 4: Ellie, Bethany, Millie
  • Year 5: Alastair, Mark, Iremide
  • Year 6:  Freya, Jack B, Poliana

Rock Stars 

Best effort of the week:
  • Year 3: Angelina, Lottie R, Elsa
  • Year 4:  Imogen, Olivia G, Florence, Seth, Charlotte
  • Year 5: Irebami, AJ, Leighton
  • Year 6:  Benjamin H, Sophia E, Nyle

Most active class players:

5SP & 4H Well Done!

Numbots best effort:
  • Year1: Max H, Milo, Mathea
  • Year 2:  Joey, Kayla, Mason

Star Reader Awards:

  • Year 1: Milo, Aiden
  • Year 2:  Olivia H, Elizabeth
  • Year 3: Rebecca, Annabelle
  • Year 4: Harry S, Jack Daw, Issac
  • Year 5: Chloe D-S, Isaac, James S
  • Year 6:  Dylan, Libby

FOSM – Support Our School!

About FOSM

The ‘Friends of St Mark’s’ (FOSM) was formed early in the life of the school. All parents are automatically members and our committee organises social events for children and adults and fund-raising events such as Key Stage discos, Easter Egg Hunts and Summer Fun days.

Over the last few years the ‘Friends’ have donated money that has contributed towards extra resources to benefit the children at St. Mark’s which has included playground equipment, books for the school library, and general school funds. We are now a registered charity, too. Charity number: 1188879

Join our Facebook group here.

Regular Notices

Latest Posts

What an exciting half term we’ve had in Year 2!

We started the half term by learning fantastic facts about the Great Fire of London. We now know when and where it started, why it spread and how London changed after the fire. You’ll be amazed by the details that your children will be able to tell you about what happened in London in 1666! We have carried out lots of arts and crafts linked with this topic and are really proud of our displays. In English, we have written some amazing diary entries in role as one of the many Londoners who took on the job of fire fighting. We thought about what it would have been like to be there and how challenging it would be to leave your home, fearing for your family, and then to stay and fight the fire without proper fire fighting equipment. 
 

 

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Here are some super examples of the writing that the children produced for our first unit of writing, based around surprising journeys ‘Coming home’, and then our diary writing based on the Great Fire of London. We are incredibly proud of their work. They thought carefully about the thoughts and feelings of the characters and used lots of exciting vocabulary and techniques from our writing rainbow.  
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In recent weeks, we have linked some of our art work to winter and have created some stunning pieces using different patterns, colours and techniques. We used both paints and pencils to create these pictures and enjoyed making them. 
 
 
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In our RE and art work, we have thought about the surprising journey that the nativity characters went on during the very first Christmas. We used paper and paste to make the 3D structure of our figure and then pasted the face and costumes using fabric and paper. We are really pleased with the results. We will be bringing these home tomorrow. 
 
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We hope you will agree that the children did a fantastic job with their efforts for our Christmas Nativity story ‘Hey Ewe’. They worked so hard and we hope you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed performing it for you! Thank you also for attending our Carol concert around the Christmas tree. We loved performing our Makaton carol ‘Away in a Manger’ and having a live audience, despite the wet weather. 
 
Thank you for all of your help and support this term. It has been a real pleasure to get to know you and your children. We wish you a wonderful Christmas and a happy, healthy New Year! Enjoy the break and we look forward to seeing you all in January 2022! 

Year 5 Learning Update – Autumn 2

What an amazing half term the children have had! It has been jampacked with our North America learning and some children have completely blown us away by learning the 50 states of the USA off by heart too! The children have fully immersed themselves in all aspects of their learning, from Maths to English, to PE, Science and DT. We are really proud of everything that they have achieved in the last seven weeks. 

Maths

We have covered multiple topics this half term in Maths but we have been especially proud of the children’s work on area and perimeter. Knowing the difference between the two is tricky enough but the children have mastered this! Then, from working with rectangles, to compound shapes and then from working with labelled shapes, to shapes with unlabelled sides, the children’s mathematical knowledge has improved tenfold and they have succeeded in cracking many challenges. Here are some examples of excellent Maths work on area and perimeter which is beautifully presented too. 

 

English 

The children have been absolutely exceptional in English too. We begun the half term with a poetry unit (unconnected to North America). We spent lots of time exploring The Highwayman poem in English and Book Club before reading the Highway Rat by Julia Donaldson. The children then used this book to inspire their own poem, applying all their lense work from the previous sentence stacking lessons. Here are two examples of superb poems!

After this poetry unit, the children then spent time looking at the structure and language in a travel brochure. We looked at how to persuade someone to visit England (with no mention of the rain, of course!) before writing our own travel brochure for Mexico! Here are some beautiful examples – we word processed the neat copies today!

 

Design Technology

The children have absolutely loved design technology this half term! They have spent time researching the different tribes of North America before designing a weaving pattern that could be used by a particular tribe. The tieing of knots and the tricky weaving was very fiddly at times but have a look at the stunning designs created! We are so impressed with the children’s creativity!

 

Art

The last piece of learning we would like to share with you is art! Although we haven’t quite finished the final independent piece (a map of their own country), we had to celebrate the children’s creativity in their naive artwork. The children have studied various artists this half term and then replicated these styles – using coloured pencils and fine liner – before drawing their own maps independently. Here a few sketchbook examples for you to see. 

 

All that leaves us to say is Merry Christmas from the Year 5 team! We have had a wonderful half term with your children and were particularly proud of their performance at our Carols Around the Tree service. Thank you also for all your donations to our Christmas secret mission – hopefully you will enjoy seeing our video very soon. See you in January 2022!

 

 

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