St Pius X Catholic Primary School

This week we have been enjoying our theme of Pirates. The children have read stories about Pirates and enjoyed our small world play.  We have managed to link this theme to a range of areas of our curriculum. Here are some of the wonderful activities we have been doing: Treasure Maps:  The children have made some fantastic treasure maps. This involved many steps - tea staining their paper, drawing their map (drawing on their previous learning linked to maps) and using their writing skills to label the map and write a clue for the treasure! They're fantastic!  Pirate Stories:  The children have written their first stories! We used ideas from the books we have read and come up with our own story ideas. The children did well at linking ideas together and coming up with a 3 parts story! They demonstrated resilience with this task and we are so proud of how far the children have come with their writing this year!  Kiara's Pirate Story  Jorel's Pirate Story Catherine's Pirate

  Last Friday, the St Pius X community united for a day of sports and fun! 🌟 The entire school came together to partake in a morning carousel of activities, showcasing teamwork and determination. 🏅 The children worked together, earning points for their saint houses with enthusiasm and camaraderie. 🏠 The afternoon was filled with exciting class races and a thrilling tug of war, highlighting that lessons in sports and teamwork are just as valuable as those learned in the classroom. 📚  The children were absolutely delighted and their smiles lit up the entire school. 🌈 At St Pius, we hold values of integrity, kindness, and service in high regard, and seeing our students embody these values on Sports Day was truly heartwarming. ❤️ A huge thanks to our dedicated staff and supportive parents for creating such a memorable day for our students! 👏

This afternoon Year 2 had a fun time exploring how to use the 'Loti-Bots' in class as part of our Computing curriculum. Programming a device to follow a set of instructions using the app on the iPads required some trial and improvement as well as patience! This was also a great opportunity to implement resilience and reciprocity by sharing resources and overcoming challenges in a group. Michelle said, 'My robot can do amazing things!' Olive said, ' Our robots are having a race!' Grace said, ' You have to remember to use the green flag first which means Go!' There were different commands to choose from including moving forwards and backwards, turning, lights on/off and many more. We are excited to explore further in order to program our bots to move to a specific finish line!

Year 2 have been consolidating their understanding of unit-fractions by identifying a half, a quarter and a third. They have used concrete resources such as counters and cubes to share groups equally.  Some children noticed a link to their times tables, for example that 1/3 of 12 = 4 and 3 x 4 =12! Others went on to try applying this concept to larger numbers and word problems.

 Last week, Year One made some original artwork in our unit 'Universal Church - World'.  We first went outside and participated in a reflective activity. We closed our eyes and focused on what we could hear. Then, we opened our eyes and focused on what we could see. Finally, we looked around at all of the people we share the space with. We discussed how we are a neighbour to everyone, and that there is only one sun, one sky, and one world. We read the story of Kind David and then read a psalm wrote by him. We wrote this psalm on different sheets of blue paper and then designed a sky scene, using different coloured paper to make the sky and the clouds. Students were encouraged to think about who they could draw as neighbours on their picture. "We should always be nice to everyone, no matter where they're from" - My-An "This means that our neighbours can live in India too!" - Rapha "We share the same sky as Canada!" - Reuben We then held up our p

 We have enjoyed learning about Seaside Holidays in the past. We have compared clothing, activities and how people travelled to the seaside while exploring the past. The children have learned that children were entertained at the seaside with puppet shows.  'At the beach, the kids could watch puppet shows. They would all laugh at the stories.' - Uriah As part of our Expressive Arts and Design learning linked to DT we have been making moving puppets. The children used split pins to create moving parts on their puppets. We spoke about how they work and other things they can be used for. They are quite fiddly and some of the children showed their learning power of resilience as they persevered with the task.  'My puppet's arms and legs can move so I can pretend it is walking.' - Isla  The children then enjoyed playing with their puppets in our pretend puppet theatre.  Well done Reception! 

 Hello, We are the Pupil Ambassadors at our School.  This academic year we joined, along with many other local primary schools, the CTSA Forum whose project this year is ‘Safe and Well.’ First, we had to decide on our own project from 6 topics so we held an assembly explaining to the whole school what the project was all about,   they then voted to select, ‘Keeping Our Planet Safe’ as our project. That was earlier this year and since then many changes   have happened in the school which has made us more   aware that we need to do more to keep our planet safe as we are indeed ‘caretakers of our planet.’ We would like to share with you our achievements so far and the changes we have made. ·         We now have paper recycling sacks in each class for 2-sided paper only and 1-sided paper is reused as scrap paper. ·         All the taps in the whole school have been changed to automatic shut off taps ·         Lights are being turned off in class, especially when empty, and blinds

 

This term we are using the iPads in our computing lessons. The children will be learning about safety when using devices, how to use apps and navigating the iPad.  Today the children began by learning how to use the buttons and the Home Screen, the children learned that the boxes on the Home Screen were apps and that each app has a different function.  ‘ We are learning about apps. We used the camera app today.’ - Leona  ‘ I have learned to take pictures. I also know how to delete them now too.’ - Gianni  We explored using the camera app today. The children experimented with taking photos, turning the camera,  checking the photos they have taken and deleting photos.  They did a brilliant job! 

 

Year 6 have had an amazing few days away on their residential trip and are on their way back to school now. They have certainly developed all four of their learning powers: reciprocity, resourcefulness, reflectiveness and resilience through the range of activities they have participated in at Bawdsey Manor.  They should be especially proud of how well they have represented St Pius X, demonstrating our school values throughout. Well done, Year 6!