School Events/ Curriculum & Learning

Growth Mindset

This term our whole school focus is on developing our Growth Mindsets. We’ll look at how these important things help us learn more effectively:

Risk-taking – having a go, asking questions, trying out new things, challenging ourselves

Just Right Learning Challenges – going out of our comfort zone, stretching ourselves, trying things that are a bit harder than what we can already do

Effort – we try, try, try again. We persist. We are resilient when things get difficult. 

Making Errors for Learning – we celebrate making mistakes as a chance to grow our brains. Mistakes are essential to learning. They aren’t the opposite of getting things ‘right’, they’re showing we’re on our way to getting things right. 

Feedback – we find out ways we can improve and keep growing our ideas and skills. 

Skills Mastery (not perfection) – we aim to master skills, we compare what we can do now to what we could do before, we don’t compare ourselves to others. We practise to develop our fluency. 

Flexible Thinking – we learn different ways to solve problems, we’re curious about how others solve problems. We develop a range of strategies that we can use to solve unknown problems in the future. 

We accept that we will find ourselves in … The Learning Pit!

5/6

Hello families of my lovely Year 5/6 class. 

It's week two and I've really been enjoying getting to know my students and I am looking forward to having a wonderful year of growth with them. 

Here is a bit of what we will be working on this term. 

Maths: Place value, breaking down and working with big numbers and representing these numbers as decimals and fractions. 

Writing: Persuasive texts, responding to texts and peer feedback.

Integrated curriculum: Growth mindset

Reading: Independent reading -looking for new words to expand our vocabularies, podcasts, book club and the Class novel “Wonder”.

The students have also been such caring helpers with their prep buddies. 

Please free to contact me or pop into the classroom before or after school for anything at all. 

Imogen (Miss Pem)

Welcome New Foundation Students!

Foundation students at NPS have hit the ground running! Such an amazing start to the year by everyone, including our fantastic Year 1 group who have been kind and caring role models for their younger peers. We have engaged in lots of play based learning, keeping our learning fun and engaging, whist learning all about our school values and extending our social skills. 

Welcome to the 2-3-4 All Stars!

We’ve enjoyed a great start to the year, getting to know each other and working on all the ways to work well together as a group. On Wednesday, the class spontaneously renamed our group “2-3-4 All Stars”.  

Our big focus this term is developing an awesome team culture, so we can grow and thrive and feel great being at school. We’ll be practising, practising, and practising our routines so the days go smoothly and we get to use our class time for enjoying our learning. 

Every day we will be doing Community Circle, sharing our ideas and experiences and practising our respectful listening.

Developing our Growth Mindsets will be a feature of all our work. 

In Literacy, we’ll look at how we take risks, use feedback and persist when things get challenging. We’re starting each day with independent reading, choosing ‘just right challenge texts’. We’ll build our comprehension skills through questioning and discussions. In Writing we’ll produce a collection of short texts of different types (like information texts, poetry, procedures…) and we’ll reflect on how much these challenge us. Word study will include targeted phonics lessons and building our vocabulary using morphemes (parts of words). 

Our Big Idea in Maths is Place Value. We’ll look at our Base 10 number system and how we use place value to write more complex numbers (including 6-digit numbers and decimal places for those who are ready). We’ll look at partitioning and renaming numbers, representing them in different ways. We’ll move onto looking at how we use place value to do addition and subtraction. We’ll also be looking at measurement, starting with measuring time, and moving onto measuring other things. We’ll also explore statistics. 

Rai will be teaching the class Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Jacqueline will teach the class on Thursday and Friday. You can talk to either of us about any concerns or news. If you want to meet with both of us together, we can make a time on Mon-Wed. 

We’re looking forward to a really great term. 

Rai & Jacqueline 

MUSIC

Prep / One 

Students will explore beat, rhythm, and melody through singing songs, reciting rhymes, playing instruments, and responding to music with movement. This term, the focus is on the famous composer Tchaikovsky and his ballet The Nutcracker. Students will be introduced to the instruments of the orchestra, identify patterns in music, and watch professional ballet performances. While listening to Tchaikovsky’s music, they will explore the moods it creates through movement activities, visual representations, and class discussions.

Grades 2, 3, 4

This term, students will be introduced to Tchaikovsky and his iconic music from The Nutcracker ballet. They will deepen their understanding of orchestral instruments by watching performances and learning how ballet interprets music and conveys mood. Students will also explore musical form through listening maps that highlight patterns in the music. Additionally, they will practise reading rhythms and creating melodies using online tools, instruments, and music games.

Grades 4, 5, 6

In Term 1, senior students will investigate the life and times of Tchaikovsky. They will explore his music and watch a range of ballet performances featuring pieces from The Nutcracker. Students will develop their music-reading skills to perform a short section of March of the Toys using an online piano. Towards the end of the term, they will create a brief Canva presentation, sharing interesting facts about Tchaikovsky and his work.