Newsletters

Eco Committee
Eco committee are proud to announce they have for a third time retained their platinum status. This is a fantastic achievement. Julie Giles from Keep Wales Tidy congratulated us on our hard work in the past 12 months despite all the challenges. Julie also commented that she enjoyed our case study about the Iron Man survival projects. A big well done on continuing our other projects, and working hard to have achieved our Platinum Award again.

Nursery
Last week, Nursery enjoyed exploring Woodland Wonders, and finding different homes for creatures that live in the woods!

With half term approaching, don’t forget to do the Welsh themed home/school task: Have a go at making a picture, model or collage of a building in Wales... this could be your home, a castle, stadium etc it’s your choice! This is due in by Friday 4th March.
Please note, although the main school has Welsh competitions, Nursery home/school tasks are not judged. On St David’s Day (Tuesday March 1st) children can wear National Costume if they wish, and we will be having a Welsh themed activity day.

Reception
Reception have continued their exploring of the village. This week we looked at people who serve us in the community of St Athan. We wrote questions on what we would like to find out about these people using Purple Mash.

Year 1
This week we have been busy putting all of our knowledge into practice. We have started to build our own castles, working collaboratively in our groups. We have discussed the features we would like to include and how they would be used to protect our castle from attacks.
We have also been improving our balancing skills in real PE, as we have been practising tightrope walking! It has been really fun and we learnt that it’s not as easy as we thought!
We have also been continuing our hard work with phonics - we now so so many digraphs and trigraphs! This week our sound is ‘ou’ for shout it out. Ask us if we can remember any of the silly sentences we have been writing!

Year 2

This week in Year 2 we have been learning our 2 times table. We started by counting in 2’s and then learnt our multiplication facts. We have done lots of fun practise on Purple Mash and challenged ourselves by playing HIT THE BUTTON, we all beat our scores!
We have also been practising our super writing skills by writing lots of silly sentences about the different animals we would find on a farm.
We are all very excited for PE tomorrow so we can practise our amazing balancing skills whilst walking along a bench. Some of us could even walk backwards!

Year 3
Year 3 have been designing and creating a leaflet highlighting the best St Athan and its community has to offer.

Year 4

Year 4 are preparing for our Victorian school day, which is next Tuesday. We’ve watched the BBC Live Lesson and discovered even more interesting facts about school life in the Victorian era. Special thanks to Year 4 family members, who helped them to complete their class survey about their experiences of their own school life! We discovered that many of our relations had the cane for small incidents!

Year 5

Year 5 had a really fun week, especially in maths. As well as continuing our work on fractions, to help us with our ratio work Mrs Harris brought in some smarties and, if we worked out the ratio correctly, we were able to eat the smarties as a treat! Lucky for us, everyone was able to correctly identify the ratio of each coloured sweet and worked out the ratio of smarties to children in their group! We also found out that no two tubes of smarties are the same.
In literacy we continued the first draft of our senses poems, edited them and completed them ready to publish. Mrs Harris was really impressed and we are hoping to share these with you on our Year 5 website page...more to follow!
Continuing our topic of where we belong, we've been researching what life was like in Victorian St Athan, including what jobs us as children would have to do. We've all realised how lucky we are not to be born in those times!

Year 6

On Wednesday 2nd February four Year 6 children who are involved in the ‘Schoogle’ group ‘The Bike Shop Wales’ in Penarth with Mrs Broomfield to collect four brand new Frog bikes which ‘Active Travel’ have kindly donated to the school. The children were treated to a comprehensive talk about how to look after the bikes and some tips for riding safely.

Last week we worked really hard at producing some persuasive writing which aimed to persuade people to visit our Welsh Coastline by explaining many of its benefits. Many of us thought that we produced our best writing so far this year in Year 6. Three of us even received a headteacher’s sticker for our excellent writing.

We are really enjoying our weekly yoga sessions with Leanne and we are taking the opportunity to slow down, relax and focus more on our breathing. We also think our balance is improving each week. Look at the ‘tree’ and ‘lotus’ balance moves!