The Reception children are making wonderful progress on their phonics journey. Working in groups, they have this week been focusing on recognising and practising their sounds. Through engaging activities, the young learners identified words that began with each sound and practised writing their sounds using special rhymes. The children always strive to do their best in everything they do and it’s a joy to see them excited and motivated as they continue to develop their reading and writing skills.

Rosie Snagge, Reception Class Teacher

In maths, Year 1 have this week put to the test their understanding of addition and subtraction to create fact families within 10. Combining their knowledge of the part-whole model with the educational resources at their disposal, the children worked together to find the fact families for a given part-whole model, explaining their thinking to the class before tackling other examples. Having displayed a sound understanding of the topic as a group, the children adopted the method to tackle problems on their own, taking great pride in every correct answer.

Kathleen Salusbury, Year 1 Class Teacher

Year 2 focused on using one of their very best resources – their senses – to reinforce their knowledge of numbers in Spanish. The children watched and listened carefully as the numbers one to 10 were presented courtesy of a fun and engaging video, complete with popular dance moves, before the young learners recited the numbers back as a group with amazing enthusiasm. And such was their impressive grasp of numeric vocabulary that the children were able to ask each other their age and give an assured and word-perfect reply in Spanish.

Leana Staring, Year 2 Spanish Teacher

In art, Year 3 have been brushing up on their watercolour techniques. Having discovered that watercolour painting can sometimes be trial and error, as it’s more difficult to paint over mistakes compared to oils and acrylics, the children took great care as they applied their new-found knowledge of the medium to produce art based on their termly theme of Antarctica, inspired by the work of wildlife artist Shelly Perkins. Discovering cool colours on the colour wheel, Year 3 produced amazing paintings that they can be incredibly proud of.

Olga Houghton, Head of Art

In maths this week, Year 5 were challenged to create equivalent fractions. They did so using a fun board game based on ‘Connect 4’. In their game, players rolled two dice to create a fraction and then covered that fraction or an equivalent fraction on the board. The first player to cover four fractions in a row won. The visual nature of the game, coupled with the novelty of using dice and a board in this high-tech age of ours, really engaged the children who demonstrated a strong grasp of the principles behind equivalent fractions, although not quite enough to defeat Mr Parkinson…yet!

Danny Parkinson, Head of Maths

In a lively Year 6 literacy lesson, the children explored spellings which are aligned with the national curriculum. They used creative strategies such as mnemonics, rhymes and visual patterns to remember tricky spellings and enjoyed practical learning away from their books. As a result, spelling rules were deepened which built up the children’s word accuracy and their confidence.

Simon Gunn, Year 6 Class Teacher

Kick-starting the new rugby season against Feltonfleet, the U12As immediately put the visitors under pressure with their dogged tackling in defence. Although the visitors asked a few questions early on, it was Highfield who came up with the answers and, thanks to some fantastic link-up play, scored two quick tries. This set the tone for the rest of the game as Highfield kept the ball moving at pace with great handling, touching down at regular intervals to win by eight tries without reply. The U12B team was also on good form and secured excellent wins against both Feltonfleet and Amesbury, demonstrating the impressive depth within the year group.

Dan Bather, Director of Sport

In science, 8A were tasked with investigating lasers and the phenomenon of diffraction. They were given some simple instructions on how to take pertinent measurements using their apparatus and then had to work together to collect enough data to try to identify any relationship between the distance between grating and screen and the spacing of the dots formed on the screen. This provided an opportunity to discuss when we should use line graphs or bar graphs and also had everyone thinking about why experimental scientists take multiple readings to give reliable results and consider other important features of good scientific experimentation.

Peter Hesselmann, Year 8 Physics Teacher