Message from the Head of Primary - 23 April 2020

Dear Parents,

I had the opportunity to speak to some of our parent representatives this afternoon. Not only was it great to see some friendly, familiar faces but it was also a pleasure to be able to talk about some of the measures we are putting into place in Primary.

The Inclusion team has reviewed our current set up of supporting pupils who require specific, additional help. For our pupils who are new to English and those with specific needs, the Inclusion team are offering their support to each year team on a daily basis. These sessions started this week and have been positively received albeit some children are finding the excitement of seeing their friends on Zoom much more interesting than learning! These timetables will be posted on Class Dojo on Sunday.

This week, year teams have also been reviewing their provision of on-line support. Many parents have feedback to say how supportive and impressed they are with the demonstration videos class teachers are posting. As from Sunday, we will be enhancing this provision by offering small groups of children daily Zoom sessions with their teacher. These sessions will be to support learning and enable teachers to check in with their pupils. Over the course of the week, all children will have the opportunity to have a Zoom session with their teacher but we are very mindful that some children will be unable to access these sessions because of parents’ availability and technology access. Parents will be emailed by the class teacher to inform them of their child’s Zoom session. In order to ensure siblings are able to access these Zoom sessions, year teams have staggered their times throughout the day. Teachers will also be inviting their pupils to a short, whole class assembly once a week. Children will be initially placed on mute and asked to raise their hand if they wish to speak and then be unmuted. I ask parents to make sure their children are safe online by ensuring they are; not alone, they are dressed appropriately and that they are reminded we will be in Ramadan. The timetable for Zoom sessions will also be posted on Class Dojo on Sunday.

Parents in Year 5 & Year 6 will have received information this week about our migration from Class Dojo onto a new VLE site called Canvas. We are planning that, by the end of May, Years 1-6 will all be using this new platform. I ask that parents in Years 5 & Year 6 read the information sent to them and access the videos that have been uploaded onto the Canvas section of our school website: this will support us to enable all pupils to be able to access their online learning by Tuesday 27^th on Canvas. Please don’t hesitate to ask for support if you need it.

Over the forthcoming weeks, we will be sharing a plan for parent workshops, transition meetings and parent-teacher consultations. We intend for all these ‘usual’ activities to take place, although it may be through a different medium.

Stay safe.

Kind regards,

Andrea Smith

Head of Primary

This week, the Primary SEND and EAL Team have started offering non-compulsory EAL and SEND support sessions to children in Years 1 – 6 who have previously received support from our department. The feedback from students and parents has been great, and it has been brilliant to see the children’s happy faces once again – it has been far too long! These Zoom sessions will continue throughout Ramadan so look out for the Zoom invite in your email inbox.

Please remember, if your child has any worries, concerns or anxieties and would like to talk to someone at school please reiterate to them that they can contact our school counsellor, Miss Bunmi, at oluwabunmi.tobun@oryxschool.qa. She can also be contacted by giving her a call on 66011301 from Sunday to Thursday between 8:30-9:30 am and 12:30-1:30 pm. She’s always happy to listen and provide reassurance.

It's been a fantastic second week in FS1! This week we further got into the pirate spirit as we all dressed up as pirates and did a special pirate dough disco LIVE with SHONETTE BASON! It was great to see all our FS1 pirate crew involved! We also got creative as we made our own pirate hooks and chose our own pictures in the 'Pirate Pete' story. In Maths, we represented our numbers in different ways and looked at 2D/3D shapes. For phonics, we learned the sounds i, n, p, g and o. Excitingly, next week we will be conducting a simple experiment to investigate change and create our own pirate list! We will continue to learn our next 5 sounds in phonics and complete Maths based activities.

FS2 have had a fantastic week of fun learning! We enjoyed our new topic on Fairy Tales and started reading the story- The Gingerbread Man. In literacy, the children wrote some wonderful sentences. They wrote about the animals in the story as well as who made the gingerbread man and what the fox did! In Science we carried out an experiment to see what would happen to the gingerbread man if he got wet! Children enjoyed making their own videos and sharing their results. In Maths we have been learning about halving and sharing; the children used lots of fun objects around the house to show how to share equally. We will continue with lots more exciting activities over the next few weeks!

This week in Year 1 we have been getting creative. In English we have been discussing Superheroes and their super powers. The children have also created some comic books with characters they have designed themselves. In Maths the children have been learning all about fractions and money, so it has been a very busy week for them all. The children have designed some superhero masks in Topic which have been extremely creative with the different designs.

Year 2 have had another productive week and we are all so pleased with how hard they continue to work, well done! The children are becoming much more confident with their learning in Maths, which has involved a lot of number and place value work. Year 2 have been learning how to place numbers larger than 100 onto number lines and they have been comparing and ordering numbers too. In English this week the children have been really busy, they have been using commas to punctuate list sentences and learning about homonyms and using them in their own sentences. We have all had a chance to zoom with our classes this week to complete a spelling test – it was lovely to see so many of you and we can’t wait to see you again soon! Thank you for all of your amazing work Year 2 – keep it up!

The year 3 team are very impressed with the quality of work that has been produced in all subject this week. We have received outstanding acrostic poems, imaginative chocolate rooms and great attempts at tricky measurement tasks. We are proud of each and every one of you!

Next week, we will be focusing further on measurement and problem solving. In English, we will discover the fate of the remaining characters in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Year 4 have been extremely busy this week. We have started our new Science topic of ‘Living things and their habitats’. They have thought carefully about some questions that they would like answered about our new topic. In English we have continued to look at some other features of comic strips, writing captions and summaries which was a lot of fun! We have also been developing our knowledge of different methods for solving mental addition and subtraction problems in maths. Next week we are moving on to poetry, I’m sure we are going to enjoy listening to and writing some nonsense poems of our own.

This week in Year 5, children have been busy looking at what makes an effective story opener and the variety of features they can use to hook the reader. They then created their own interesting openers for our key text ‘Iron Man’. The children have also had a lot of fun making musical instruments and performing with them.

It has been another great week with some fantastic work being submitted daily. This week the children had the opportunity to look at some discussion texts, which was focused on the hunting of pheasants. The children will have the opportunity to shared their views in their big write tomorrow where they will write a balanced argument. In Maths the Year 6 pupils had the opportunity to work on their decimal & algebra skills throughout the week and they completed many challenges. In Science, the children created some wonderful power points & posters about animal classification. Finally, I hope everyone has a relaxing and enjoyable weekend. Take care everyone and be safe!

Ramadan Kareem from The Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies.

Thank you to all our students and parents for their excellent learning interactions this week.

Our students have learned a lot of skills in the three compulsory subjects and have made remarkable progress in understanding how the distance learning course works, they have also shown commitment in attending classes and completing their homework on time.

What a fantastic week we have had! We have thoroughly enjoyed watching all the performances you have sent us.

In KS1 the children have been learning how to play some fun cup songs and some children even created their own! Well done!

In KS2 the children have been putting on their best performances. We have seen some fantastic singing and playing of instruments. Look out for the Year 5 and Year 6 Videos that we have made to celebrate some of your amazing work.

Next week will be the start of Ramadan. Music is FS and KS1 will stop for the month. KS2 music will be optional and will be project based. We will be looking at the history of Arabic music.

Bonjour! / Hola!

This week in our primary MFL lessons, Year 6 French enjoyed looking at a French newspaper and interpreting the headings of news stories. I was very impressed with how engaged students were! Year 5 Spanish students learned how to say the time in Spanish this week and will build this skill in the coming weeks!

Younger students, from Years 1 and Year 2 engaged in big numbers for Ms Miguel, who has begun making a video for them, and really enjoyed the experience!

MFL teachers again provided tailored videos to all French and Spanish class groups in order to help students and parents to understand their work this week. We are becoming more confident in the process of creating videos and we hope to become more and more ambitious with what we can achieve in the coming weeks!

This week in primary PE students have been able to try out our new weekly challenges that the PE teachers have been setting. These challenges have been set to give students a break and allow them to compete against the other boys and girls in their year group. Students have also had the chance to get creative and celebrate earth day by making their own PE equipment by reusing items that they have in their homes. We are excited to see some designs and will share these with you soon.

Just a reminder that as we approach the holy month of Ramadan, it is an expectation that students still complete their online PE lessons. The PE teachers have been mindful that some students may be fasting and have created activities that are not too demanding. We would greatly appreciate if all students complete their lessons as normal and take additional breaks if they need to.