Moulton CEVC Primary School Parent Portal

A Message from Mrs. Shipp

What a busy and exciting time it is in school! This week, we welcomed prospective families for our final Open Morning; rehearsals for the Christmas plays are in full swing; the PTA is working tirelessly to create a wonderful Christmas Fair, and—of course—the children are continuing to immerse themselves in their learning.

On Monday, Reverend Raúl led Collective Worship. It was lovely to see how warmly the children greeted him, remembering his name from previous visits. He spoke about Advent. Later in the week, our Collective Worship Committee impressed us all by leading an assembly about Christmas traditions around the world—what a fantastic job they did! Today, our Well-being Team announced the winners of their 'Design An Emoji' competition'.

To help our children navigate this busy season, we’ve created a child-friendly calendar, which is now on display in school (see photo below). If you’d like a printed copy, let us know. All events are on the calendar on the website for you too.

As is our tradition, staff members are donating to Crisis at Christmas in lieu of sending cards to one another, organised by Mrs. Offley. Last year, we provided several nights’ shelter for homeless people. If you’d like to contribute, donations can be dropped off at the office and will be added to our collection.

On Monday, we are excited to welcome our Pre-School friends, along with members of the church and village community, to the Reception dress rehearsal. A big thank-you to some of our Reception families for kindly donating cakes for this special occasion.

This week, our Year 4 pupils have been busy creating Christingles as part of their RE lesson. We hope to see many of you at the Christingle Service on Sunday at 4 p.m.—a lovely event in our festive calendar.

I'd like to kindly remind families of the importance of reading at home. Our expectation is that children read at least five times a week as part of our homework policy. We know how busy this season can be, but even just five minutes a day can make a significant difference to your child’s progress, helping them maintain good habits that will benefit them in the long term. Our homework focusses primarily on reading, spelling, and timetables, as these are fundamental skills that underpin so much of their learning. Thank you for your continued support in fostering these essential habits—it truly makes a world of difference! If you click here, you’ll find Red, Yellow, and Blue level paper-based times tables resources and instructions now available on the website - these can supplement the Times Table Rockstars app. The materials are designed to help your child practice when they progress to a new level. I plan to add higher-level resources over the next few weeks.

Special Mentions

Florence (R): For showing impeccable manners when she needed help in the corridor—well done!
Ava J (R), William Mc (Y3), Ayrton (Y4), and Norah (Y3): For their beautiful manners in the lunch hall—great job!
Rupert (Y1), Abdelrahman (R), Oscar (R), Fynn (R) and Edith (R): For eating so well and independently this week—brilliant!
Maddie (Y5) for helping the breakfast club staff this morning.
A special thank-you to our Year 6 Open Morning tour guides—Jude, Maisie, Edward, Filip, Riley, Hugo, Everleigh, Amber, Eleanor, and Spencer. You were all absolutely amazing and represented our school beautifully!
Daisy (Y1) for independence and politeness.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this week’s activities—it truly is a team effort, and the festive spirit is shining brightly throughout our school community.

Have a lovely weekend - see you on Monday!

Year 3

Year 3 has had a super week. We are delighted to see how much progress they are making in times tables, maths targets and reading in particular, supported at home. In fact, we won Bookster the Bear this week for being top star readers – well done year 3!

There is no handwriting or extra home learning activity this week. I am aware we need to reduce the cognitive load a little by reducing the number of tasks, as we still have some sustained writing and new learning to do in class.

Thank you for your contributions to the Christmas fair raffle prizes – we look forward to seeing you there next Friday!

Our learning in English this week has been to plan and write a non-chronological report about a prehistoric animal. The children are using the texts we have learned and written already to invent their own. In maths, we completed an assessment on multiplication and division. The next day, we reviewed the answers and made corrections as a class. The children were then very enthusiastic in learning Roman numerals to 12, and we are now focussing on time.

In history, we wrote up our research into hunting, gathering and the beginnings of farming in the Stone Age. The children have also produced some beautiful cave art, drawing native British animals in the prehistoric style. Their final pieces are in pastel and charcoal and will be on display outside our classroom soon – they must be shared!

Apologies, you may be treated to a rendition of the ‘Funny Bear’ song, which featured in our French lesson on greetings today. It is totally silly and I always save it to the end of the lesson to play! In RE, Mrs Chittock lead a session on religious-based sayings.

Have a lovely weekend!

The Year 3 team.

Year 4

What a relief, I can now say CHRISTMAS without worrying. Now the school is decorated and we have started some Christmas Crafts we are starting to feel really festive. Working hard still but being festive too. The children go to choose what Christmas songs we sang in our singing assembly.

Our learning this week;-

English - We wrote up our focus text and have now started to think about changing it. The children have got some really great ideas. The children also had a reading comprehension which was a news report about an Anglo-Saxon tomb.

Maths - This week we started with the last part of our recap and have then been looking at what a 'factor' and 'product' is. This has really demonstrated how important our times table knowledge needs to be. The children also learnt about the perimeter of rectilinear shapes.

Computing - The children were using SketchUp again to continue drawing their Anglo-Saxon houses.

Topic - We looked at how the Witan decides who should be King.

DT - the children prepared for their applique, sewing will happen the last week of term, all volunteers welcome, I have had one parent offer so far.

Christmas Crafts, and making Christingles for the service at St Peters, Moulton on Sunday 8^th at 4pm.

Have a good weekend

Mrs Chittock

Year 5

We finally reached the Battle of Hastings in history - would you believe William won! Winning the battle doesn't make him king though so we will look to see how he manages to establish himself as King of England in our final few lessons this half term.

In Maths, we have continued to develop our understanding of short division. We've gone up to 4 digits and had a go at leaving remainders. Today, we completed some questions where we had to decide to either round our answer up or down to answer a question fully. In English, we have begun to learn about argument texts. We have read and analysed an argument text I wrote entitled 'Edward the Confessor is not to blame for the crisis in 1066'. Next week, we will use this as a guide to help us write the opposite argument.

The children's pop-up books should have come home on Thursday. This has been our DT project for the term and the children have worked really hard on making them. It was lovely to see them being inspired by each other, working collaboratively to help each other achieve a goal. They were very proud of their books and rightly so.

We had a really interesting discussion in RE about the Islamic 'Sin of Shirk'. We compared our understanding of the Holy Trinity and how Christians have multiple pictorial representations of God to this. The children had so many questions about how they could learn and ask questions about other faiths and beliefs without causing offense.

We were second again in the star reader charts. It was lovely for Y3 to win but Skelly is beginning to miss his best mate Bookster. Let's get those reads recorded!

Have a super weekend,

Miss Rutter, Mrs Marsh and Mrs Nichols

Year 6

It's been another busy week in Year 6

In English, we have been preparing to write our next narrative, based on the short video, 'Germans in the Woods'. We have been doing a lot of preparatory work in terms of practising the different types of sentences we plan to use and thinking about each small stage of writing.

In maths, we have been learning to divide fractions by an integer. Lots of our work has been based on having a secure recall of times tables, so if you know that your child is not yet secure, we urge you to get them on TTR, please.

In history, the children were learning about the design and use of Anderson Shelters.

Science was VERY exciting this week: the children loved applying their circuitry learning to make some fabulous buzzer games.

It was double art this week, so they children have been immersed in all things Japanese! They created daruma dolls which they will paint next week.

Home learning this week:

-An arithmetic task

-A task on spag.com

Have a super weekend

Nuala Gilmore

Deputy Head