This Week’s Headline Story…
Pupils Join Fundraising Push For Landmark Run
21st March 2025
With little more than two weeks until the London Landmarks Half-Marathon, pupils at Highfield and Brookham School have joined the fundraising push. Highfield and Brookham owner Bill Mills, Head Suzann…
Nursery Demonstrate Great Coordination And Agility In PE
The Den children eagerly look forward to their weekly PE lessons with Mr Rodriguez. This week, they began with an exciting ‘bear hunt’, where they move their bodies in various ways such as crawling through the grass, running from the bear, and jumping across the river. Next came a game of target practice, where the children used tennis balls to try to knock coloured balls off cones, while musical statues is a fantastic way to engage and motivate the children during the session. It not only extends their listening skills but also challenges them to use their core strength to remain very still. This activity combines fun with learning, helping the children develop important physical and cognitive abilities in an enjoyable way.
Denise Horn, Nursery Class Teacher
Reception Prove To Be Bright Sparks In The Forest
This week in forest school, our young explorers embarked on an exciting journey to learn the art of fire lighting. Using a flint, Vaseline (affectionately labelled ‘dragon snot’ by the children), and dragon tissue (cotton wool), the children demonstrated remarkable perseverance to create a spark. The joy and sense of achievement when they finally succeeded was truly heartwarming. Alongside this fiery challenge, the children also engaged in building dens, climbing trees and delving into the wonders of the mud kitchen. These activities not only fostered their creativity and resilience but also provided endless fun and learning opportunities.
Rosie Snagge, Reception Class Teacher
Help At Hand For Pollinators Thanks To Busy Bees In Year 1
Year 1 have been learning how to help bees. The children know that bees are important pollinators and have decided to create a bee-friendly garden in school. They worked as a team to write a set of instructions which explain how to create the garden before piecing together a colourful picture using paint, tissue paper and coloured paper to promote their bee-friendly garden. We hope to then share our instructions with our friends and family so that they too can help the amazing pollinators in our community.
Kathleen Salusbury, Year 1 Class Teacher
Year 2 United In Quest To Conquer Division
Year 2 continued their voyage of discovery in the world of maths by learning more about the division symbol and how it means sharing into equal groups. Compared to addition and subtraction division is more difficult and the children showed great determination and resilience while tackling this challenging new concept. The children persevered during their independent application to translate pictorial representations into equal groups and also write number sentences to go alongside them.
Rachael Berry, Year 2 Class Teacher
Year 3’s Deep Dive On Smooth Running Of Smoothie Challenge
In the wake of last week’s Great Smoothie Challenge, Year 3 were this week tasked with reviewing all aspects of the popular DT project. The children were encouraged to think about how they faired on the day of the competition, whether they were successful or not. They reviewed how effectively they worked in their teams in the production and marketing of their fruity products and how leadership skills and qualities shone through. Year 3 also looked at the process as a whole to highlight any problem areas that they felt they could have improved upon.
Kim Martin, Year 3 DT Teacher
Determined Year 4 Get To Grips With Tricky Fractions
Year 4 maths marvels have begun to work on solving addition and subtraction calculations involving fractions. The children quickly grasped that when the denominators were the same, the numerators had to be added or subtracted. Using prior learning of converting improper fractions into mixed numbers, the children successfully completed increasingly challenging questions.
Oliver May, Year 4 Maths Teacher
Year 5 Footballers Thrive In The Sunshine
St Edmund’s were the visitors as our U10 girls played their penultimate round of matches of the current football season. Playing with bags of confidence under blue skies, the A team had the lion’s share of the possession but were unable to turn their dominance into goals, thanks in no small part to exceptional goalkeeping from the St Ed’s shot-stopper. The B team played well as a cohesive unit and were rewarded with a nice goal from Ava K while the U10C team showed great resilience and teamwork throughout to breach the St Edmund’s backline twice courtesy of Grace H and Alessia P, who was named player of the match by the opposition for the third successive game.
Natalie McIntosh, U10 Girls Football Coach
Year 6 Play Pride Rocks A Roaring Success
Year 6 joined forces with Year 5 to stage six amazing performances of Pride Rocks this week. Eight key skills underpin the curriculum at Highfield and Brookham – listening, speaking, aiming high, teamwork, creativity, staying positive, problem solving and leadership – and all eight skills were central to the successful staging of this middle prep production. The children faced speaking publicly on the stage, taking guidance from their director and getting creative with the movements and actions of their respective animals from the Prideland. Year 6 also had to find ways to seamlessly enter and exit the stage surrounded by more than 100 fellow pupils in a tight space, take the lead by embracing their characters in voice and body, work together to perform as an ensemble, stay positive when their energy levels were dipping and aim to make each performance better and better. This they achieved in spectacular style, as witnessed by the beaming smiles and joy on the faces of 105 happy and confident young performers at the end of each show.
Sarah Baird, Head of Drama
Year 7 Hone Their Skills On The Basketball Court
Year 7 took to the basketball court in PE this week. Having recapped key skills such as dribbling, passing and shooting, the children were challenged to apply all those skills in a competitive match. During the match, Year 7 learned that effective communication and working as a team was essential. And it was heartening to see that the young players had the confidence to put their basketball skills to the test, even if it didn’t always come off.
Sergio Heredia Rodriguez, Year 7 PE Teacher
Year 8 Linguists Succeed In The Right Environment
In Spanish, Year 8 have this week been learning core vocabulary to describe environmental problems. The children were extremely focused as they constructed sentences describing some of the serious problems affecting our planet such as global warming and deforestation. And their determination paid as they managed to recall and employ the target language effectively in their written and spoken language.
Annabel Keville, Year 8 Spanish Teacher