St Pius X Catholic Primary School

🎵Today Year 2 had a chance to use the glockenspiels to play along to a familiar piece of music - 'Count on me' by Bruno Mars. They learnt about the musical notes A-G and how the notes repeat. Then they took turns to practice playing the scale, and then the specific notes that would play along with the music (which were C-E-G-B-E-G).  They were quite accurate and kept the beat well, so it made a rather lovely sound when they played together!

Year 5 enjoyed celebrating David Attenborough on Friday - our school representative for the value of 'Service'.  Mrs Wiseman had planned a fun filled day for the whole school involving an animal workshop which they loved!  Along side this, each class completed their own pieces of work to commemorate his 100th birthday. Year 5 chose to complete some pencil sketches using shading to complete a half portrait.  The results were absolutely outstanding! The children took time to think carefully about the proportions of the face, to blend carefully and to choose different stengths of pencil to create their desired effect. They worked meticulously on the details and I am sure you will agree the results were phenomenal!  'You need to really concentrate to shade in the right places.' - Nicola  'Getting the symetry was hard, but, after you have an outline you can shade inside.' - Emil Nicola Emil Jashryl  Nathan Elsa  Janae  Harry  I will be posting som...

 This week in RE, we have continued learning the story of Pentecost. The children worked together to act out the story starting from when Jesus died on Good Friday.  We waved our arms above our heads to represent the wind, twinkly fingers to represent the fire and then practiced speaking in different languages.  The children then went around to each other to share the news of Jesus and his miracles.  'This is the Holy Spirit'- Nina  'It's a miracle'- Ethan  'Jesus is the God of life'- Valentina 'It was a miracle, he resurrected and then ascended'- Elijah 

  🌿 Celebrating David Attenborough in Year 1 (Marking his 100th Birthday!) Over the past two weeks, Year 1 have been completely immersed in the wonderful world of Sir David Attenborough as part of our English learning. Using Little People, Big Dreams: David Attenborough as our focus text, the children have explored his life, his love of nature, and the incredible work he has done to protect our planet. It has been a joy watching the children learn about someone who has inspired millions of people — young and old — to care for the natural world. 🌍 Learning All About David Attenborough Through pictures, discussions, and simple research, the children have discovered: Who David Attenborough is Why he is such an important figure How he has helped us understand animals and their habitats Why looking after our planet matters They have been practising their reading, writing, and speaking skills by creating fact files, writing sentences, and sharing what they have learned with their fri...

 Today we replicated the process of digestion. First we put food in the mouth (food into a zip lock bag), we broke it into pieces like our teeth break down food we eat. Then it was on to the stomach. The food we broken down by acid (water) and mushed up. It then went into the intestines (the tights). Nutrients and water was absorbed out of the intestines (through the tights and onto a paper towel). Then the end. What was left came out...the other side. 

In science, we have been learning all about materials and changes in  materials.  We have explored making a solution using salt and water and then attemptong to reverse this process using evaporation.  This week, we moved on to exploring irreversible changes. The children explored the different ways materials make irreversible changes for example: Mixing, heating, burning.  We took this opportunity to complete some cooking in class and explored how ingredients for pancakes changes when mixed and then heated.  We began by looking at all the ingredients in their original form - flour, milk and eggs. We then mixed them together and discovered we had already witnessed an irreversible change - we would not be able to separate the mixture now! Some of the class thought of our previous lesson on evaporation and whether this would work with our mixture. This was a key learning moment for us as we discovered that mixing doesn't ALWAYS result in an irreversible change!...

Year 2 have been enjoying reading all about Babe's adventures in our new class book - The Sheep Pig by Dick King-Smith.  They have completed lots of amazing, descriptive writing whilst trying to include specific punctuation (apostrophes for contractions and possession, commas in lists) and exciting vocabulary. After discussing how different characters felt in the book ‘The Sheep-Pig,’ they chose a character (Babe, Fly or Mrs Hoggett)  and gave Farmer Hogget advice about his dilemma… Should Farmer Hoggett let Babe copy Fly and be a sheep-pig? We role-played giving Farmer Hoggett advice so that he could  make a decision as he walked through the ‘conscience alley.’ This was a great opportunity for the children to proudly articulate their ideas as well as listen to their peers. By getting into role, children also had a chance to step into that character and consider what they might think and why! It meant they really had to think about the story and what we ...

🌏 COMPETITION 🌏  Wow - we certainly have some creative pupils here at St Pius! We wanted to celebrate Earth Day , thinking about why our world is precious and how we can be responsible citizens by looking after our environment.  We have been overwhelmed with entries and the quality, effort and important messages that have been included is just amazing. Thank you to everyone who participated in the competition.  It has been incredibly difficult to choose a winner from KS1 and KS2! Every entry has been awarded 20 house points and all posters are proudly displayed around the school. KS1 Winner - Joelle!   Her 3D Earth was decorated with beautiful watercolours and some reminders on how to look after the Earth! KS2 Winner - Austin!   His 3D save the earth poster had lots of important messages!  

  Year 1 R.E – Learning Focus 3: The Holy Spirit Helps Us Change This week in Year 1, we explored a very special question in our R.E. lessons: Why do Christians believe the Holy Spirit can help people change, like the apostles did? Across two thoughtful and creative sessions, the children learned about Jesus’ promise to His friends and how Catholics believe the Holy Spirit continues to guide, strengthen, and inspire people today. The week ended with a joyful celebration as the children made their own “God is Here” badges to remind them that God is always close. ✨ Lesson 1 – The Promise of the Holy Spirit We began with a fun retrieval game, “What am I?” , using props and images from earlier stories such as Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, and the Resurrection. This helped the children reconnect with the events leading up to Jesus’ final promise. 📖 Scripture Focus – Acts 1:1–5 We shared a child‑friendly version of the moment when Jesus told the apostles to wait in Jerusalem for the Ho...

 It's been so much fun exploring the forest school area as part of our learning!  The children are loving all of the activities provided by our forest school leaders: Karen and Caroline.  There has been lots of bug hunting, mud kitchen cooking and tree climbing. The children love being outdoors and the lovely weather we've been having has helped massively.  ‘My favourite part was everything!’ Clare ‘ I liked playing with my friends and climbing trees with Archie and Jeevan’ Da’Jean ‘I liked looking for bugs’ Jesse-Joy 'I've been cooking dinner for all my friends'- Kiana 

This afternoon Year 2 had a try at printing using foam sheets. The aim was to create a cityscape like the ones we have studied previously, but only using black paint. This made for a dramatic monochrome masterpiece! They watched a demonstration before trying to create a 'building' print. This involved lots of skills including: listening to instructions and watching the demo, fine motor skills - pressing into the foam hard enough to leave an imprint but not too hard that it went through the foam sheet, precision - placing the print on the paper carefully and peeling it off without it smudging, criticalal thinking - if something didn't work, how could they fix or improve it? Some of this involved trial and improvement, considering what hadn't worked so well and trying to improve it next time. This activity also gave the children an opportunity to share and collaborate by mixing and matching their prints with their peers. This meant their prints were used multiple times, s...

As part of our new science unit Year 5 have been investigating how materials can change when put together. We were exploring our original thoughts that some materials seem to 'disappear' when placed into water.  We put some salt into water and we noticed that we couldn't see it anymore. We knew from our life experiences that if we tasted the water it would taste salty so it wasn't that the salt had disappeared. This intruduced us to the scientific term 'dissolving'. We learned that when a substance such as salt or sugar is mixed into water it dissolves and creates a solution.  We decided to test this further with an experiment. The scientific question we posed was 'Does the temperature of the water change how quickly a substance dissolves in water?' The children used their enquiry skill of observation and stirred salt into water that was cold, warm and hot and then recored their results.  ' The hot water dissolved the salt the quickest.' - Janae ...

 As part of our human body unit in IPC, we've been looking at teeth. We found out about all the different types of teeth we have, what their characteristics are and what their purpose is. We looked at herbivores, carnivores and omnivores, examining their teeth and seeing which teeth are liked to which animals.  However, we also need to know how to keep our teeth healthy. So we've created an experiment to find out which liquids have the biggest impact on teeth. We've put eggshells in bags and put different liquids each bag (water, milk, cola, orange juice and vinegar) and observe them over the next couple of weeks. Many in the class think that cola or vinegar will have the biggest impact. Let's wait and see...

 This week, we have been learning all about different types of boats as part of our transport topic. This meant we spent lots of time outside playing in the water trays experimenting with different size boats.  The children became very interested in how the boats could float, especially cruise ships and ferries when they are carrying lots of people and cars.  We decided to carry out our own investigations to discover which objects would float and sink.  The children used the new vocabulary to guess if various items would float or sink. They learnt that 'sinked' isn't a word and we have to change it to 'sunk' but 'floated' is. How confusing we thought!  ‘Sink means it goes down low’ Macie ‘Float means when it stays on the top’ Amelia ‘I think the cube will sink because it doesn’t have water on it’ Archie We tested a plastic bear in the water too. ‘ I think it will sink because it has a small hole in it’ Jesse Joy A wooden duck was tested next. Most of the cla...