imaths week

Mr Hallion launched imaths week in assembly this morning.
https://www.youcubed.org/week-of-inspirational-math-2/

Here is Monday's question - please send in your comments/answers.

Draw an 11x13 rectangle.
Can you figure out what is the fewest number of squares you can draw in the rectangle?

Tuesday's session:

Wednesday:
Triangular Numbers - what is 55th in the staircase pattern? Mrs Haigh and some of the Year 4 children were grappling with nx(n+1) divided by 2 (with help from Mr Hallion).

Thursday:
We enjoyed Mrs Crickmore's assembly on 'slow and steady wins the day'. Great paper folding to solve shape problems in KS1. KS2 challenged by the hailstone problem!
We all love The Big Numbers Song!

Friday:
More 2 D shapes today and making shapes out of isosceles triangles in KS1.

Extending the 5/6s today with 3D shapes.

Please ask your children about this inspirational week - many of them would like to carry on doing imaths every week. Thank you to Mr Hallion for organising it and to everyone for embracing it with such enthusiasm.

Ofsted Report October 2016

Our Ofsted report has been published on our website: www.cholsey.oxon.sch.uk

It should be on the Ofsted site very soon.

News from CHOKO

Subject: NATIONAL TEACHING AWARDS REPORT SOUTH AFRICA

TO CHOKO GROUP

Be informed that Rosina Komana won National Teachers Award for 2016 Provincially. She obtain Position 3 in Life Time Achiever Highly ranked category (tenth category). 

 We appreciate for the good job she has done.

 It was for the first time to enter for this competition. She won a gold trophy and a certificate awarded by the MEC of Education Limpopo Province.

She is not selfish to share the information with others.

She is willing to expand intervention programmes to the whole South Africa

We have welcomed Rosina twice to Cholsey and continue to work with her school in Kodumela. Having written to her and received lovely letters from her for over ten years now, I am delighted to share this great news with everyone.

You can keep up with the progress on expanding the project to 17 schools via the link below:
https://www.facebook.com/Kodumelaschoolslink

http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/kodumela-schools-link

Curriculum Evening

It was lovely to see parents of children of all ages at our Curriculum Evening yesterday. 33 parents came along and we hope that they all found it enjoyable and useful.   Mr Hallion had everyone counting in his demonstration lessons, and there were resources available to support children's learning at home. It was also a great opportunity for parents and teachers to get to know each other better.

We chose a Tuesday evening this time as that is the least beaver/cub/scout heavy night. We opened from 5-8 pm to allow after school club parents to pop in and commuters to get home from work.  Is there anything else we could do to encourage more parents to come along to these events?  Please let us know if you have any ideas at all.

A new headteacher for Cholsey School

Thank you to everyone - children, staff and parents - who contributed to our recruitment pack for the new headteacher.

http://www3.hants.gov.uk/occs/education/educationjobshampshire/educationjobshome/educationjobsjobdetail.htm?id=51034&swatch=jam

Working together...

 We have been working on our writing to inform this term in upper KS2. The most recent work has been on writing clear and concise instructions. To test out their learning, we asked the children to write a set of instructions for KS1 pupils on how to make a planet out of modroc. This morning the pupils in years 1 and 2 had a go at following their instructions!

Although it was messy, it was great fun and the planets are ready to dry and be painted later in the week.

Well done to all the children involved - it was fantastic to see the great teamwork on show!

New School Council

Our new School Council have met a few times already. Our first focus has been to take feedback from around the school on what we want from our new headteacher. All the children's suggestions were discussed in School Council and these have fed into a brochure that we are producing for applicants.

In today's meeting, we discussed homework and we will be producing a questionnaire for all the classes to answer.
Welcome to the team!

Harvest Festival

 Key Stage 1 Writing about Harvest

 Band on their way back - one chair each!

More Science from Mrs Avery: Why is water wet?

What does wet mean?

There are 2 answers!

One is about what makes liquids stick to surfaces and 'wet' them - which is to do with forces between molecules.

Why does water feel wet?

When you have water on your clothes or skin, it normally evaporates into the surrounding air. Evaporation produces cooling, because it takes energy. 

Part of the feeling of

wetness is actually coldness.

We feel “wetness” through sensors which sense a mixture of temperature, pressure and the way water feels, then sends this information to our brain telling our brain that water is wet!

Try this

• Dip your fingers in warm water.
• 
  
• Now, try dipping your fingers in other liquids - milk, orange juice or a fizzy drink.
• 
  
• Do all the liquids feel wet?
• 
  
• Do all the liquids feel the same?
• 
  
• What is it about the liquids that feels different?

If we put our hands in water, we feel the water swirl around our fingers and our palms.  We feel the pressure of the water.  Imagine someone squeezes your hand or gives you a strong handshake.  That squeeze is pressure on our hands, but it doesn’t feel wet.  Water gives our hands a very light squeeze, with just a little pressure that changes as our hands move through it. 

Imagine putting your hand into some sand.  You probably have to force the sand out of your way, maybe wiggling your fingers or digging a hole. It’s not easy, like it is with water that just changes shape to let your hand travel through it.  When you take your hand out of the sand, the sand doesn’t go back to its original shape, but water does! The way it moves around our hands is another quality of water that makes us feel wetness.

Most of the time water also feels cool.  It has a cooling effect on our skin. At times it can also be warm. The difference in temperature from the air helps our brain realize that the water isn’t air and that we feel wet.

It is a combination of temperature, pressure and the way it moves tells our brains that water is wet.  Our brains are able to take all this information and figure out what we’re feeling right away!  It’s pretty amazing! 

Mrs Avery's Science Post

On Tuesday in Blossom Bats Class we learned that Tuesday was Ada Lovelace day. Who is Ada Lovelace? Well over 200 years ago Ada, who was the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron, was the first person to come up with the idea that the machine could repeat  a series of instructions which is a process known as looping used in computers today. 

I remember, when I was very young, typing the following program into my very basic computer
10 Print " Hello"
20 Goto 10
 which meant that as the computer read line 10, it printed Hello on the screen. The computer then read line 20 which told it to go back to 10 and therefore printed "Hello" again and repeated this all the way down the screen until I made it stop. This is a very simple form of "looping".

Art Club

Art Club has been very busy this term! We started drawing animals in proportion, which was very challenging, but I'm sure you will agree we had a great try. 

We then looked at Seurat's La Grande Jatte painted in the Pointillist style (lots of dots) and recreated a giant patchwork version where each child painted their own section which was then stuck together to create an amazing piece of art.