Another Excellent Week at the Prep

February 5th 2021

Another excellent week of home learning.

We have been looking at collaboration this week at the Prep and the qualities that help being part of a team. We have considered how important it always is to listen, compromise, negotiate, encourage, be fair, be positive and resilient to be part of a team. This isn’t always easy - now so more than ever. So Year 5 and 6 (along with their teachers) have created these jamboards to express their gratitude to people and pets for supporting them at the moment.

The 'Thank You' JamBoard from Year 5

The 'Thank You' JamBoard from Year 6

During our assemblies we have finished talking about the Plymouth College Principle of ‘integrity’ and several more awards have been presented.

Our Year 1 and 2 award recipients are shown below. These have been for a variety of reasons from performing magic tricks and singing Frozen songs to working hard with handwriting and always having a smile on their faces.

Year 1

Flossy Meech

Fiona Ho

Dwhani Asopa

Edward Davis

Chester Fish

James Buckhurst

Year 2

Amelia Davis

Ruby Westlake

Isla McGlinchey

Wilf King

I really enjoyed giving these out at our first virtual Year 1 and 2 assembly. I learnt a lot - all about James’ pet snails, William’s caterpillar being fed lettuce leaves and Reid and Reeva’s wonderful indoors lockdown camping trip. The children are certainly keeping themselves entertained at home. I felt quite emotional speaking to them and listening to them share so much with me. These children did wonders for my personal well-being this week.

Mrs Soper took a photo of my Year 3 and 4 assembly this morning and said how children have been enjoying their weekly assemblies. It’s a great opportunity to get together and appreciate all of the hard work that the children and teachers are putting into their online learning. We have the opportunity to congratulate children who have received awards with a big online applause.

Year 3 and 4 were certainly very enthusiastic about their creative writing this week and were keen to share with me what they had been doing. Year 3 have been writing epic adventures for Perseus. A special mention to Freya Wynne for writing such an outstanding story in the style of a myth. Year 4 had taken inspiration from Robert Burn’s poem My Heart’s in the Highlands and adapted this to make their own poems ‘My heart’s in Plymouth’. Ms Brodie says some of these are very amusing and I am looking forward to hearing them in assembly next week.

Year 3 recipients of Home learning awards for 5 house points are;

Charlie Harris

Alexander Goronov

Isabel Harris

Ned King

In Year 4,

William Gregory

Isla Roberts

Tristan Ferguson

Maki Paice

Britta Hunt-Batchelor

William Davis

Rocco Conyers

Miller Byrne

Freddie Lown

Kieran Aala.

The highlights for Years 5 and 6 this week include using ‘breakout rooms’ for some of our Maths lessons. These smaller ‘Maths rooms’ allow the children to work in small groups to collaboratively work on problem solving skills, Despite being remote there was such excellent teamwork and such great communication. This type of group work has also been particularly successful in Science lessons

To have the children participate in assemblies is always a joy and it's so lovely that they can continue to do this even though we are apart. This week we heard some lovely poems; they were read superbly by each of the authors. Congratulations to Joe, Isla and Ewan

In Year 5, home learning awards for 5 house points were presented to:

Seb Bennett

Oak Conway

Neve Ratumaiwai

Nikita Sangaraju

Carly Tsui

Harvey Irish

In Year 6, recipients were.

George Toms

Harry Timson

Megan Tinney

Ewan Paice

Victoria Smith

Zach Muquit

And for an amazing 15(!) house points

William Selwyn

Joe Roberts

The children that have been learning from home certainly have been amazing but so too have those children that come into school as their parents are busy working in key occupations during this difficult time. It has been lovely to see how they all still collaborate whether at home or at school. This week the children in school made the most of the one day of sunshine we had and made some hedgehog houses around the school field.