To kick off our brand new year in Beeches class we have: written a description about the best day of our holidays. Everyone seems to have had a great summer and we are all ready for the new challenges of Beeches.

Our new topic for this term is The Romans and we are looking forward to learning all about these interesting people. If you have any artifacts you would like to share with the class we would love to use them in our display.

In Science we will be learning about Living Things and Their Habitats.

In RE we will be studying Christianity.

This morning we did some problem solving in Maths and we will be continuing with learning about Place Value, fractions and Time this term.

In Literacy we will be writing recounts, exploring characters and learning about Myths.

All this and so much more....

The children have new Spellings To Learn books that they will take home to practice their spellings. They will be tested on Thursday and get a new list on Friday.

PE is every Thursday afternoon and we are learning football skills. Please make sure that kit is kept at school as we have lots of other sports opportunities this term.

Mrs Pullen will be working with us in the mornings Monday - Thursday.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to catch us on the playground after school. We will be having a drop in session after school on Wednesday, so that your child can show you around our classroom - it's already looking very smart!

Thank you for your continued support.

Kind regards

Mrs Strover and Mrs Pullen

Thank you for all your support so far this term. Poor Mrs Pullen has been poorly this week, so things have been a little manic, but we finally managed to get our times tables and spellings tests completed this morning. Well done to all those children who have been practising at home - it really shows! The Spellings to Learn books seem to be proving a success, so please ensure your child has it in school for Friday so they can glue in their next weeks spellings.

In PE we are continuing with our football skills - now that the weather is getting cooler, children may wear jogging bottoms for PE. Please ensure your child has their kit in school for PE on Thursday. We do sometimes have extra unscheduled PE workshops, so its a good idea to keep your kit at school at all times!

Tomorrow we have the Harvest Festival at the Methodist Church which we are very much looking forward to - the children have prepared some work and would love you all to see it - its at 1.30pm, so we hope to see you there. 

Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow,

Mrs Strover

The children are all enjoying our Romans topic and some would like to try their hand a building a cross section of a Roman Road! I am attaching some slides from the powerpoint we looked at to remind them!

Times tables for next week are 9 and 12.

Spellings are in the Spellings to Learn blue books - sorry I forgot to hand them out last Friday!

We have been learning about time this week and converting 12 hour to 24 hour clock and working with train timetables. Please ask your child questions to help them with finding times - eg: If a train should have arrived at 15:30, what time a will it arrive if it were delayed by 45 minutes etc.

Have a great weekend!

Mrs Strover

13.10.17

What a busy week! The year 5s worked with the Fire Brigade yesterday, learning all about "Restart your Heart", whilst the year 4s spent some time with their peers in Silver Birches. Today we all enjoyed Kik Theatre with the amazing Ian! We had a Roman themed session, where the children recreated tableaux of various Roman Gods (including my personal favourite, Bacchaus!), as well as acting out one of the Labours of Hercules - I wonder how many other labours the children can find out about? Can you guess which God they have dramatised in these pictures?

Have a great weekend!

Mrs Strover

Friday 20th October - Superhero dress up day!

Well done for all the amazing superhero costumes today! The children were able to tell the rest of the class why the person/ character they had chosen is a hero.

This afternoon the children have been playing maths games that help them consolidate their learning from this term - especially number bonds to 100, multiplication and division facts and place value. It would be great if they could practice converting 24 hour clock to am or pm times over the holidays.

Have a super half term!

Mrs Strover and Mrs Pullen

9/11/17

We've had another busy week in Beeches - and its only Thursday!

On Monday the children had fun in Science trying to find out which drink was the fizziest by weighing the carbon dioxide. On  Tuesday we went to church in the afternoon for a service led by Oaks class and today we have had a visit from Mr Shackleton, an WW2 pilot. This was particularly interesting for Beeches as we have just written some amazing recounts from the perspective of a Battle of Britain pilot. The children found the talk really interesting and had some good questions too. We felt very honoured to have Mr Shackleton here.

I am aware that the parents evening slots have now all filled up, so if you did not get a slot, please speak to Mrs Lewis in the office, or myself, and we will arrange an appointment for you.

I look forward to seeing you next week.

Kind regards

Mrs Strover

Friday 17th November

It was lovely to see everybody at parents evenings this week - thank you for your continued interest and support.

As discussed with many of you, we have been working on geometry this week and some of the children have found it tricky to use protractors and compasses. If you can encourage your child to practise these skills at home they will feel much more confident in school. 

Today we used fidget spinners to investigate angles and turns, which the children thoroughly enjoyed!

Congratulations to all the children who did extremely well in spellings tests this week...keep up the great work!

Calling all engineers!

Following the popularity of our Battle of Britain topic in English this term, Mr File has agreed to enter Beeches into the "Fly to the Line" competition next year. We have to design and build gliders and compete to fly them the furthest. This will be a DT/Science project in school, but we need parents' help - the children will be working in small teams of about 4, so will need an adult to help with cutting etc. If you have a spare afternoon each week when we come back to school in January we'd really appreciate your help. I'm hoping to use Friday afternoons for this project, so if you can commit to 6 weeks the children would really appreciate your help. Please also ask grandparents, as I am aware most parents will be working at this time. Many thanks in advance for your support.

Mrs Strover

Congratulations to the School Council who raised an amazing £77.30 from their Bring and Buy sale on Monday. The money will be used to sponsor endangered animals through the WWF...more details to follow next term...

Thanks to everyone who sent in donations for the sale, and everyone who came along!

Mrs Strover

10.1.18

Happy New Year and welcome back to Term 3!

Firstly, thank you so much to everyone for your cards and gifts at Christmas time - you are very generous! I hope everyone had a great break - the children have certainly been throwing themselves into their learning this week.

We have already begun our studies of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky poem and the children have been learning to perform this nonsense poem. They were all amazing yesterday and we hope to perform to Oaks class soon - watch out for video clips...

In Maths we will be focusing on Place Value up to a million, metal addition and subtraction, geometry and fractions.

In Science we will be learning about Humans and other animals - we will be finding out about nutrition, bones and muscles.

Our Topic will be about the Anglo Saxons this term and we look forward to finding out about this interesting period of British History.

RE this term is focusing on The Gospel and we will be meeting Rev Jane and asking her about her role as well as investigating the role of the Church in society.

In French we're learning all about how to order food in a cafe.

In addition to our PE sessions on Thursday we will be having PE with Mrs Everett on Tuesdays, so please ensure your child has their kit in school for these sessions. It it useful to have jogging bottoms during the colder weather as we will still be using the outside area for our lessons when we can.

As usual, we will have Times Tables tests on Wednesday and Spellings on Thursday. Please encourage your children to learn these. They have an enormous sense of achievement when they do well. We will also continue with our Accelerated Reader programme, so please remind your child that they need to read every day and bring their book in to school every day.

Many thanks for your continued support.

Mrs Strover 

18th January 2018

I hope you have had a chance to view our amazing performances of "The Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll - they are on the Home Page of the website under "School Videos" in the bottom right corner. To go along with the performaces the class have also drawn their own version of the Jabberwocky based on the information in the text, along with their own imaginations.

This week we have welcomed Miss Lilley to Beeches. Miss Lilley is a trainee teacher and will be working with us for the next three weeks. We are very lucky to have her!

The BBC Radio 2 500 word short story competition launched this week with a Live Lesson on Monday including lots of our favourite authors. It would be great if you could encourage your child to write a story. You can find out more and submit the story via this link:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4h26FXFQ4KfMV7VVSbJxY3g/500-words-2018 

The stories are judged on: originality, characterisation, plot, language and enjoyment (of the reader!), so children don't need to worry too much about spelling and punctuation! I will be a judge for the BBC for the 6th year and am looking forward to seeing how Beeches stories match up to the national entry. We will have a prize in class for the best entry submitted by Beeches.

Have a great week

Mrs Strover

2.2.18

The children have really enjoyed working with Miss Lillie on their own versions of the Jabberwocky poem this week. Here are a few examples of their performances.

Friday 2nd March

Although we have been snowed off for much of the week, Beech class enjoyed a spot of Winter Olympics this morning... overall winners in our Curling competition were Barack Obama team: Shelby, Elias, Harry (Skip) and Daisy. Then we wrote some instructions on how to play as Mrs Strover found it very confusing!

13.3.18

We have been having a great Science week so far! Yesterday Folkestone School for Girls showed us how to test the pH of soil, identify different animal poo and how our digestive system works.

Today we have been extracting DNA from a strawberry, which was awesome! This was an amazing opportunity for the children thanks to Mr and Mrs Clayton and Mrs Attwood from Pfizer. The experimenting is a new initiative and we were the first school to have a chance to try it out.

Did you know that we share 50% of our DNA with a strawberry, 60% with a chicken and 70% with a slug!

Wednesday 14th March - Science week. Mrs Levett showed us how to find the density of igneous rocks.

Friday 16th March - Science Week: classroom experiments.

To round off our week we did some investigations in class - we found out about chemical reactions between baking powder and vinegar, air bubbles lifting raisins, floating flowers, static electricity snake, air pressure, magnets and more!

We have had a fantastic week of Science and the children are all inspired by what they have seen and done. It was lovely to hear about their own rock collections this morning.

20.4.18

Welcome back to Term 5! Goodness me, it's already been a manic week with Sponsored Bounce yesterday!

The rest of the term holds much more excitement with Exodus training (we saw the church all set up this afternoon and we're very excited to get involved next week), Bikeability, Hockey and netball tournaments, Arethusa (revisited) and a trip to Dover Castle...

We will continue to do our spellings and times tables weekly. PE will only be on Tuesdays this term. Please ensure your child has a named kit in school at all times. In English we are focusing on Instructions and Explanation texts and in Maths we are covering money, fractions, co-ordinates and multi-step word problems.

As the weather has become warmer, please ensure your child has a named water bottle and is wearing sun tan lotion and a sun hat.

If you have any more questions regarding the Exodus training (year 5s only), please speak to me or Mr File. We will begin on Monday.

I hope you liked the brooches the children brought home yesterday - they looked great sparkling in the afternoon sun yesterday!

Have a lovely weekend,

Mrs Strover

27.4.18

A group of Mathematicians went to Junior Kings School yesterday to take part in a Maths Challenge afternoon. You can see the types of challenge they had to solve at http://dcbeagle.com/y5samplepresentation.html.  The children all worked very hard and were a credit to our school.

Here are some examples of questions they encountered:

“I think of a number, double it and add 10. My answer is 22. What is the number?”

MAKE 24

Use ALL the numbers to make 24

 A    4   7   8   11

 B     3   10   14   17

 C    3   5   9   16

 D   4   4   12   15

 E    2   6   8  15

Go to the dcbeagle website for the solutions...or ask one of our amazing mathematicians: Lily, Emma, Jacob, Sophie!

1st May 2018

Our last "upside down" session with the cocoons in Exodus training...

4.6.18

Welcome back to Term 6!

The children are very excited to be growing tomatoes in Science this term - we have a competition on to see who can grow the most tomatoes on their plant.

Many congratulations to our Glider Team (Elias, Oliver, Lucas, Harry and Jacob) who took part in the regional finals at Headcorn Airfield today....and won! Thanks to parents who took the team along with Mrs Slingsby and Mr Ireland who have been helping us throughout the project. Lots of photos to follow I hope!

19.7.18

Congratulations to Saoirse (year 4) and Jenny (year 5), winners of our Spelling Bee this afternoon. Well done to all the children - runners up were Tom (year 4) and Emma (year 5). Keep practicing those spellings - you never know when you might need them!