Dear parents and carers,
Welcome back. We hope you all had a wonderful half term break and are ready for this half term and the countdown to Christmas!
Last half term, we enjoyed our first trip of the year to St Peter’s for our harvest celebration. Thank you to the St Peter’s team for hosting us and a big thank you to you all. It was wonderful to see so many of you joining us to celebrate. We also had lots of visitors. It was particularly lovely to see Rosie from Edukid who came in to share Patricia’s progress and meet with our newly elected school council to discuss fundraising ideas for this year. After Christmas, we have a virtual meeting planned for the children to meet Patricia and friends and ask questions which will be very exciting for the children. For more information about the fantastic work we support Edukid to do please follow the link below.
Ks2 took part in drama workshops with the team behind ‘Stories in the Dust’ and visited the theatre to watch their performance. You can hear the art installation our children helped to create by following the link below.
It’s always nice to receive feedback from visitors to our school too. "We can't thank you enough for welcoming us into your school today. Your staff and young people were all wonderfully welcoming and enthusiastic about working with us. We had lovely day"
Last half term, our focus character virtue was Self-Regulation. See below our Self-Regulation parent update to remind you of this. We will continue to explore this virtue along with the key virtue of Respect, through our PSHE topic, Valuing difference, during dedicated class time and assemblies. We’ll also be moving on to the third concept in our zones of regulation curriculum, ‘All feelings are okay.’ You’ll find a bridge document for families below which contains more details.
It was lovely to see you all for your parent consultation meetings. If you were unable to attend, please get in touch with your child’s teacher to reschedule. As always, it’s a wonderful opportunity for us to inform you of your child’s progress and work together to ensure your child gets the very best out of their time with us. If you have any questions or require support at any time throughout your child’s journey with us, please do not hesitate to contact your class teacher in the first instance who will be able to support you or signpost you to a member of staff or organisation who may be able to help.
Site Update
I’m pleased to share that work is continuing on our roof to ensure full use of our main building. During half term, a new fire door has been added to one of our classrooms which is currently out of use. There is a little more work to be completed but this means that soon, we’ll have another space to use with the children and we’re on track to be able to use the hall at full capacity again for our Christmas events this year which is great news.
Don’t forget to check the calendar on our website for upcoming events including our PTFA Bingo, lower school Christmas plays and nativities, our Christmas Children’s market, Church service and songs on the playground.
Please continue to ensure that your child wears the correct, full school uniform at all times including a school jumper or cardigan with logo every day. Also, don’t forget a warm, waterproof coat, hat and gloves now the weather is getting colder as we always try to get outside each day even in light rain.
We hope you all have a brilliant start to this half term.
| Whole School Attendance (This academic year) | 94.97% |
| Whole School Attendance (Last week) | 91.78% |
| Starfish Class87.5 | 87.05% |
| Jellyfish Class | 94.27% |
| Dolphins Class | 87.09% |
| Puffins Class | 99.04% |
| Seals Class | 94.05% |
Monday |
No Clubs |
Tuesday |
Football Club - Run by Exeter community trust - £5 per session bookable on SchoolmoneyMax 18 childrenCollection at 4:15pmLibrary Club - Run by Mrs Muir, Mrs Rumson & Mrs Bayes - FREE club bookable on schoolmoneyMax 14 children Year 1 & 2Collection at 4pm |
Wednesday |
No Clubs |
Thursday |
Clubs Begin 14th November |
Friday |
No Clubs |
OTHER CLUBS
Monday lunchtime - Choir club - Run by Mrs Mortlock - No booking required
Thursday morning 8am - 8.45 - Tennis Club - Run by Devonshire Tennis Academy - £38.50 for the half term bookable at bookings@devonshiretennisacademy.com
Friday 15th November - Children in Need Day - Wear Yellow or spotty - Suggested donation £1
Wednesday 20th November - Vision Screening (Reception children only)
Wednesday 27th November - PTFA Xmas Bingo - Combe Martin Village Hall - Eyes Down 7pm
All dates can be found on our website at https://combemartin-sch.org/calendar/
Hot Chocolate Friday Children : For always going above & Beyond
Class Updates
Character Recognition Awards this week:
Starfish
- Bodhi - Resilience
Jellyfish
- Emilia-Grace - Determination
- Caellan-Roy - Curiosity
Fantastic Walking Awards this week:
Starfish
- Emelia-Grace
Jellyfish
- Lewis
Handwriting Awards this week
Starfish
- Hamza & Connor
Jellyfish
- Chloe
Tiddlers
This week the Tiddlers did a sound nature walk talking about different sounds we could hear. We collected leaves and painted with them and other natural resources.
We read the Gruffalo together and explored a gruffalo themed tuff spot.
Starfish
Last week we moved onto Julia Donaldson's 'Room on the Broom' in drawing club, the children are always really excited by drawing club and it is really helping to develop confidence in fine motor skills, vocabulary (whoosh, swoop, fiery, horrible, passenger) and story telling. We have been using the story in provision to create potions and construct things we can carry a passenger on. The year 1's have also continued with writing setting descriptions using their senses.
In Maths the Reception children have been working on recognising and creating patterns and the Year 1 children have begun their addition and subtraction unit to 10.
This week in History we will be drawing simple maps of Combe Martin and talking about how the shops in the town have changed over the years,
Jellyfish
Maths - We have started our addition and subtraction to 20 unit. We started by using paper plates and counters to represent wholes and parts.
English - Reading- We have continued our learning around where the wild things are - we have done some performance poetry, each table taking a verse of a poem linked to the story and have continued our retrieval and summary skills throughout.
English - Writing - We have started our setting writing unit. We have looked at an Autumnal picture and thought about what we could see, smell and hear in the picture. We have then used these ideas to write some sentences - making sure we remember full stops, capital letters and finger spaces.
RE - The children really enjoyed the visit from Neomi - she is a practising Muslim. She told us about her day to day life, demonstrated how she might pray and talked us through her son’s wedding. She also had some wonderful artefacts for the children to handle and ask questions about.
Computing - This week we continued to learn how to use our chromebooks - we are still practising our keyboards and our mouse pads. This week we used a drawing app to help us learn how to use the mouse by double clicking and selecting tools.
Art - Mrs Railston taught some of the children this week to do some careful observational drawings of shells using continuous lines. They drew using handwriting pens and concentrated and worked hard!
Dolphins
This week, Dolphins have been planning and writing a narrative story based on the wordless book, Journey by Aaron Becker. They have explored a variety of adjectives and adverbs to describe the setting and actions of the character.
In maths, they have looked at rounding numbers to 10 and 100.
They have embraced being historians and scientists, thinking critically about the Palaeolithic period and how to group rocks by their properties. This will link in with their art over the next few weeks where they will be turning the class into a stone age cave!
Puffins
On Monday we were visited by Neomi who is a practising Muslim. She travelled from Exeter to tell us about her faith and show us some artefacts. This links with the Religious Education topic which the children are currently doing where they are learning what it means to be a Muslim in Britain today. Thank you to Mrs Adams for arranging the visit.
We have completed our Place Value unit in maths and will now move onto a short one week unit on Addition and Subtraction.
We have also completed our narrative unit in English. The children have written stories based on the events of Shackleton’s expedition in Antarctica. They have been inspired by the resilience and determination shown by Shackleton and his crew.
Seals
Seals class have finished their pieces of writing ready for the parents/carers to look at during our parent consultations at the end of half term. Seals have been working really hard. They will be visiting our friends at Woolacombe on Thursday for a Football and Tag Rugby festival and joining the rest of KS2 in a workshop and show at the Plough Arts Centre at the end of next week.
This year, throughout the school we will be introducing and using the Zones of Regulation. The Zones of Regulation is all about developing our social emotional regulation skills and competencies.
The first concept (unit) explores how regulation also helps us have more control over how we manage our feelings, energy, and behaviour. We will explore the same concept over a few weeks before moving onto the next one. These will be introduced in assemblies and then discussed in class. Each of concept expands upon skills, lessons, and vocabulary taught in earlier ones.
We have attached some information so you can continue to support your child at home with the current concept.
Further explanation on The Zones of Regulation can be found via this link https://zonesofregulation.com/how-it-works/
