Daneshill Diary 16/10/15

Headmaster’s Notes

This week the whole school came together for a service in celebration of the harvest. Harvest Festival is perhaps less significant as an indicator of the seasons than it used to be with our weather continuing to prove so unpredictable. The apples on the trees in the garden remind me that it is the time of mellow fruitfulness albeit that most of them are on the ground now and need picking up! The mornings are noticeably darker on the way to school which means that soon the clocks will be falling back and the children will not enjoy such long days outside.

Thankfully our school teams continue to take advantage of their time outside though and on Wednesday the combined results of the boys and girls teams gave us 11 wins from 12 matches. Almost a perfect score!

Other good news this week came from Wellington College with Georgia Lea (Head Girl – Y8), Olivia Irby (Y7), Isla Rattray (Y7) and Flick Young (Y7) all receiving definite offers of places. Well done girls!

Mr Spencer

News from the Pre-Prep

This week in Reception we have been looking at the British countryside and its animals through the Percy the Park Keeper stories by Nick Butterworth. The stories have certainly inspired our children and their den building has been a joy to behold! The arrival of some new outdoor toys and equipment has proven a great success with the brooms and wheelbarrow proving to be particularly popular with the children. Next week we will build on our topic by using our beautiful grounds at Daneshill so let’s hope for more good weather!

The Year 1 children came bouncing into school with their favourite toys on Wednesday. This was an opportunity for the children to develop their speaking and listening skills whilst making the connection between toys in the past and those that we have today. This week’s English focus has been built around rhyming words. The children successfully identified rhyming words and began to create their own rhyming lists with a partner. We will develop these skills further next week and create our own ‘rhyming walls’ in the classroom! It would be lovely to see the children looking for rhyming words in their books at home to consolidate their learning.

What fun we have had on Wednesdays after lunch for the last two weeks. Year 2 are up and running, connecting to the WiFi in 2B and exploring the world of apps on our very smart new iPads. There has been good teamwork and bright ideas on programming, creative art and memory games. Please let us know about your family’s favourite educational apps as we would like to add to our library. Whilst using an iPad is very exciting, a skill that is still needed is touch typing. How many of your children can type a sentence with a capital letter and full stop?

Pre-Prep Teachers

Nursery Corner

The children have been enjoying the much loved Julia Donaldson story “Room on the Broom”. We have been talking about the characters in the story and how they all help the witch and everyone has made a ‘truly magnificent broom’ with the animals and witch sitting on it! They have been using their puppets to talk through the story and the children enjoy repeating the words as they do so, “Down said the witch” and “Is there room on the broom for a dog like me?”

The story links in with our transport theme and we have also been discussing how we would all like to get around the world. The children have enjoyed pretending to zoom to the moon, fly in the sky, boat in a moat and much more!

We introduced the ‘p’ sound which they all practised forming with the support of our rhyme ‘down the piggy, back up and give him a curly tail” and we have continued working with numbers to 5 and using our fabulous new Numicon number sets, which are an excellent addition to our Nursery.

Have a lovely weekend,

Mrs Beeching

Sports News

It was fabulous week for the Daneshill netball teams in games against St Andrews and Robert Mays.

Both U.13 teams were victorious in their fixtures against Robert Mays on Wednesday. The teams looked strong from the start and took the ball comfortably to the shooters with fast and accurate passing. Both shooters demonstrated strong attacking drives and it was impressive to see the girls put their training into practice this week by avoiding the over-head throw and ensuring their bodies were in front of their opposition when taking a pass. Both teams showed their versatility by frequently changing positions and they executed their new positional responsibilities well.

The U.10’s and U.11’s also had a fantastic week in their fixtures with big wins against St Andrew’s. Daneshill also put their training into practice and moved forward to receive the ball instead of dropping behind their opposing player. They showed good body control and quick reactions to a turnover ball, defending all the way down the court. They also showed improvements to their self-discipline this week with fewer penalties as a result. Well done to all.

Special mention this week to Eliza Harker in Year 5 for being selected for the District cricket squad. A superb achievement.

Also to Nicholas Thomas (Year 4), Ben Kellard (Year 4), Alejandra Thomas (Year 1) and Tomas Webster (Year 1) who all ran their first race in the Chiltern Edge Cross Country League at the weekend. Super talented ‘Team Thomas’ (Alejandra and Nicholas) won their races with Ben Kellard coming in second place by a whisker. Well done to them all – a very courageous effort!

Miss O’Neill