Focus Half Terms

FOCUS UNITS

Every half term at Glade Hill we have a whole school focus.  The focus units are a key part of our Glade Hill curriculum because they are centred around areas we believe are important for the personal development of our pupils.  The focus units always involve a challenge and we encourage everyone in our community to join in including parents, grandparents, staff, friends  and governors.  Our focus areas this year are:

Autumn 1 - Ambition 

Autumn 2 - Diversity

Spring 1 - Outdoor Learning

Spring 2 - The Love of Books

Summer 1 - Healthy Living and Keeping Safe

Summer 2 - Our Wonderful World

Love of Books 

Spring 2

The quotes below absolutely reflect our beliefs about reading. We firmly believe that reading unlocks doors for children, and it is the 'gateway' to all other learning. We are passionate about creating a love for reading at Glade Hill, and have been promoting a love of books throughout this half term. We want children to enjoy reading, and not see it as a tick-box exercise or just because they have to, but because they want to! 

Below, you'll be able to read about all the exciting activities we've done this half term, but we don't want the momentum to end there! We want children to continue to read at home (3 or more times) and find a love for reading. We try to provide a whole range of genres and types of books, from novels, to non-fiction picture books, to graphic novels. Please talk to your children about books, and help them to find their passion. If they already have it, keep encouraging it! Ask your child about what they're reading, listen to them read aloud, encourage them to bring home books for pleasure, and not just their book banded book.

This half term, we've had lots of exciting activities planned. Here's what we've done this half term: 

• We had class swaps where one class would go to another, and the children would read to the younger children, and sometimes the other way round! Children loved being able to choose a book they loved to share.
• We had a 'Read-A-Thon', where pupils were sponsored either per page, chapter, book or minutes of reading to raise money for books for our own classrooms, but also for the QMC Children's Ward. You raise an INCREDIBLE £3104.53! which meant we were able to spend £1250 on books for the QMC from a fantastic book shop called Wonderland Bookshop (Home - Wonderland Bookshop) 
• The pupil council will be going on Monday 25th March to donate the books to QMC Children's Ward.
• On World Book Day, children dressed up as their favourite book character or came in comfy clothes. Some classes participated in the Premier League World Book Day Quiz and some engaged in a zoom with Ian Eagleton (a children's author), as well as many other book activities in the classroom. All classes joined in the Masked Reader (where teachers and TAs at Glade Hill hid behind a book, and children had to guess who it was). 
• We had a book swap for both pupils and parents and carers. Thank you to everyone who brought in books! It meant every children could take home a book. 
• We have run a year 3 & 4 and a year 5 & 6 Reading Cafe, as well as set up an EYFS weekly Reading Cafe and continuing with KS1 Reading Cafes.

 Diversity  

During Autumn term children at Glade Hill explored diversity by respecting and valuing people’s differences.

Each week we focused on different themes:

• Remembrance and the Commonwealth
• Diwali
• Disability awareness                           
• Class representation
• Chanukah
• Christmas around the world.

We did this through listening to music, learning phrases in other languages, playing inclusive sports such as boccia and inviting our parents in to teach us about different cultures. Black History Month was celebrated with Shanine and Freddie from Diversify by dancing and learning some Ghanian phrases and, Diwali festival by making diya lamps.

We all had so much fun learning about our world and our local community at Glade Hill.

Focus Units 22.23

Autumn 1 - Self-Motivation and Resilience 

Autumn 2 - Community and Charity

Spring 1 - Healthy Living and Keeping Safe 

Spring 2 - The Love of Books

Summer 1 - Nottingham

Summer 2 - Financial Education

SELF-MOTIVATION AND RESILIENCE

Are you a BUCKET FILLER?

During the first half of the Autumn term we challenged ourselves to

'FILL A BUCKET!'

Each Year Group and the Grown-Ups had 5 challenges that they had to complete every day to fill their own bucket.  The children realised that some of these challenges were actually quite tricky and they had to be very self-motivated and show resilience to complete them.

Some of our challenges included:

Community and Charity

In autumn two, our whole school focus is raising awareness for charities which are important to our school community. Families were surveyed to find out which charities were important to them, and we have mapped out particular charities across all the year groups which we are going to learn about and raise awareness for this half term. Children will raise awareness for their charity by hosting class assemblies to their parents!

Alongside this, we have set our school community a 'Charitable Challenge.' We believe that people who support charities show the following qualities:

Kindness

Generosity

Helpfulness

Friendship

Respect

...and they...

Donate

Volunteer

Work as a team. 

And we would like our children to have a go at embodying these values. 

At Glade Hill we are GOLDEN and we SPARKLE and we are CHARITABLE!

To complete the challenge, families have to work together to carry out some charitable acts which represent the above values. We are asking families to record it on their challenge sheet (see above), but to also email pictures of them completing the charitable acts to the class teachers so they can be celebrated!

Watch this space to see what our families get up to!

Spring 1 Half Term Focus Unit

Healthy Living and Keeping Safe

This half term out focus unit is all about living healthy lives and keeping ourselves safe.

There will be four different focuses: Mental health and wellbeing; internet safety; keeping fit; and healthy eating. 

All of the children and staff will be taking part in the...

 Good luck everyone!!!

Nottingham

During Summer 1, we thought about why Nottingham was an amazing place to live. 

We learnt about the different celebrities who were born and lived in Nottingham, different places to explore in Nottingham and why the River Trent is so important to the city.

The children were tasked with planning and mapping their journey to school in the most creative way possible! We had some amazing maps, and have managed to make three school displays with them all on.

Financial Education

For our Summer 2 focus, we have been learning about money and finances.  We have been thinking about the recent rises in the cost of living.   We have also revisited out charity work from the Autumn term and organised enterprise events for the charities close to the hearts of our community.

Design and/or make a family meal for £5

For this challenge we asked the children, families and the staff to work together to create a family meal for £5 or less.  We  planned the meals and cost out the ingredients.  The idea behind this was to make an online Glade Hill Cookbook for everyone in the community to find recipe ideas for a good price.    The completed recipe book is attached below.   We hope all our families have found a new favourite recipe whilst saving a bit of money too.

Charity Enterprise Events

FOCUS UNITS - 2021.22 

Autumn 1 - Ambition 

Autumn 2 - Diversity

Spring 1 - Healthy Living and Keeping Safe

Spring 2 - The Love of Books

Summer 1 - Outdoor Learning

Summer 2 - The World

Ambition

We got the year off to a great start by supporting our children, staff and families to be more ambitious.   We have learned that we can achieve our long term goals can by breaking them down into smaller goals.

All the staff and children and many of our families have been completing the 28 day challenge.  We wanted to make or break a new habit in 28 days.   We challenged ourselves to get the longest streak of days we possibly could.  We realised that if we broke our streak it was ok we could just start counting again.

Here are some  of the challenges we completed.

I am going to stop biting my nails

I will write an entry in my diary everyday

I am going to get up early for school everyday

Stop eating chocolate

Exercise everyday

Eat 5 pieces of fruit and vegetable every day

Drink water everyday

Give up juice

You can start a new 28 day challenge whenever you want to. 

Download the record card to help you.

DIVERSITY

As our focus for Autumn 2 we delved into Diversity, aiming to understand all the ways people can be diverse and how we are all diverse from each other. 

In school, each week of the half term had a different diversity focus: Diwali week, Remembrance week, Disability week, Choose a Class Country week, Channukah week, Polish week and Christmas around the world week. For each of these we had 'Music Mondays' where we listened to, danced and enjoyed music around that week's theme; 'Word Wednesdays', where each class learnt a word or phrase and 'Free Choice Fridays', where the classes had a chance to enjoy an art or creative based activity around the theme, such as making Diwa Lamps!

Out of school, families were invited to make a family box to bring into school where their children could show and explain different items about their family, culture or religion and how this made them diverse. We absolutely loved this and experiencing all the diversity within our classrooms was a special feeling.

Below you can see some of the amazing activities we got up to during our diversity half term and the wonderful family boxes, showing off our individual diversity!

Healthy Living

During the first half of the Spring Term, our who school focus was Healthy Living.  We wanted to encourage our children to think about the choices they make to keep themselves healthy and safe.   We learned about healthy eating, exercise and keeping ourselves safe online.

Give it a Go, Eat a Rainbow!

We set the children a challenge to eat a rainbow.  This involved eating or trying fruits and vegetables.  For some children we acknowledged that this was tough so during an assembly we discussed what a 'try' is and how different fruits and vegetables help to keep our bodies and minds healthy in different ways.  We learned that different colour fruits and vegetables contain different nutrients and vitamins and eating carrots really does help us to see better in the dark!

Have a look at the gallery to see how ambitious some of our children were with their choices.

We are very proud of everyone who achieved the challenge and have now improved their diets. 

Remember to try and eat 5 portions of fruits and veggies every day!

Love of Books 

We had a fantastic half-term delving into our love of books focus theme. It was a wonderful celebration promoting the importance of reading for pleasure and sharing a range of literature. Throughout it, the children had many opportunities to enjoy our daily ERIC time (Everyone Reads In Class), and were challenged to set themselves a reading target each night. Children who achieved their weekly 3 reads were able to collect their reading awards and prizes in our termly celebration.  During the focus half-term, we also launched a 'reading in funny places' competition. We loved seeing all of the brilliant entries, and our winners received a fabulous reading hamper.
 

One of the highlights from our focus unit, was our visit from a local Patron of Reading -Gareth Baker. After teaching us about the skills needed to be a great author, each year group participated in a story-related workshop and held a brilliant book sale at the end. Finally, we finished off our celebration with our whole school world book day focusing on the picture book ‘The Word Collector.’ 

OUTDOOR LEARNING

For this focus half term we had to complete the Robin Hood Challenge. Every child was given the task of completing an outdoor activity and when they did they were able to colour a target on their challenge cards.

In school, each class was tasked with learning more outdoors! We had to plan a learning opportunity for Maths, English and 1 Wider Curriculum area. As a school we have actively been learning more outside, and have loved engaging with our outdoor learning!

Take a look at some of the activities we got up to in and out of school!

To help us learn more about the world we live in, our Summer 2 focus unit was the:

‘Wonderful World Challenge’.

To pass the challenge, the children had to complete 5 or more of the following tasks…

- Read a story set in another country.

- Find a happy news story from another   country.

- Research and draw a country’s flag.

- Try a new food from a different country.

- Learn ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ in a different language.

- Name the capital cities of 3 different countries.

- Listen to some music from another country.

- Listen to another country’s national anthem.

Here are some quotes from some of the children…

‘It was fun learning about different countries!’

‘I liked trying new foods!’

‘My favourite task was listening to music from a different country!’

Well done to all of the children who completed the challenge!