Whitehouse Common Primary -

8 Free Primary Music Resources

Music plays a very important part in bringing people together and during this period of extended school closure the power of music could be transformational.

For teachers, parents and pupils, working from home brings about a new set of challenges but a regular musical interlude could be a welcome addition to your daily routine.

Whilst every country has its own language we can take comfort in knowing that the language of music is universal. Music can do great things for your mood and well-being.

Here are 8 FREE practical resources and activities to get started with:

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Keeping Safe Online

There are a number of amazing resources online that your teachers have been recommending. Please do make the most of these as many of them are what we use in school and they have been providing free access for parents. 

Whilst you are at home it's very important to make sure you are still keeping safe online! Please talk to your child about staying safe online. The following websites are really useful in exploring how to stay safe online. Take a look!

READING Free e-books to enjoy

Oxford Owl have a number of ebooks that you can access from home. These include some of the RML books, Project X books and some great graphic novels. You will need to register an account (which is free to do).

There are a number of other literacy based activities too. Happy reading!

Take a look: 

https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/books/free-ebooks/

There are also some ideas and top tips for creative writing, so have an explore of the website!

Don't forget to try and read authors linked to your Book Award

Spanish at home

¡Hola! 

As promised here are some ideas of how you can carry on your Spanish learning at home. It's lovely to hear that some of you have already been doing some Spanish! ¡Bien hecho Ruby y Sophie!

You can send anything you produce to your class Showbie and your teacher can pass it on to me, or you could ask an adult to tweet it to @whcps, or send it to our school enquiry email address and it'll get to me that way. 

Most of all, stay happy and safe, and keep smiling. I miss you all very much. ¡Hasta pronto!

Sra Stevens xx

1. Explore a map of Spain. Use your knowledge of Spanish to practice saying the names of the cities. Can you find the names of rivers, mountains, seas and other geographical features? I know Y3 are really good at this as they've just been looking at it in their geography lessons! 

Then try and find some maps IN SPANISH, for example, this one. Make a list of country names in Spanish and then add the English word next to it. If you speak another language, you could add the name in that language too. And it's not just country names that are sometimes different. On that map, can you find the name for London in Spanish? What about Moscow and Stockholm, Tokyo and Rome?

2. Where is Spanish spoken? Not just in Spain! Find out where in the world you would find Spanish speakers. Find the countries on a world map. Why do these countries speak Spanish? Can you find out how they got their names? Make a country factfile with details of famous places, people, animals, sports, physical features, important events in history, festivals...

3. Have a go at the British Council Spanish Language Challenge - click here to download. And when you’ve tried the Spanish one, you could try another language - French   Arabic   German   Welsh or Mandarin. And if you speak another language or would like to explore a different one, why not download the blank one and make your own?

There are suggestions of helpful websites under Curriculum - Subjects - Spanish - Parents but here are a few favourites -

For activities, songs and games:

Digital dialects - https://www.digitaldialects.com/Spanish.htm

Rockalingua https://rockalingua.com/ (NB some things are paid but plenty of free songs, games and worksheets!)

Spanish Games https://www.spanish-games.net/spanishtopics

Calico Spanish Kids https://www.youtube.com/user/kidsimmersion

For stories :

Spanish Fairy Tales https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY0TNnnoZMapIQ3cXv1M1rg

BookBoxSpanish https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiqZIGpZl2Oc2kKd0EnK-vA and BookBoxInc https://www.youtube.com/user/bookboxinc if you’d like to explore more languages.

RadioLingua has offered free access to some of its excellent resources for the next 3 months. The HighFiveSpanish would be the place to start but you could also learn some French or even have a go at some other languages with the One Minute..videos. https://radiolingua.com/learnathome/

Babelzone have also offered their resources for free for the next 3 months. If you want to log in, use the school initials (4 letters) and the password is the colour in our name plus the 2 digit number in our postcode! https://www.lcfclubs.com/babelzoneNEW/index.asp You can use the Spanish resources but also the French ones so Y6 could start getting ready for September and their new language adventures! 

Let's Go Cultural at home!

Hello! Hallo!  ¡Hola! Yia sou and Merhaba

I hope that you're all safe. well and happy at home, exercising with Joe Wicks, dancing with Oti, enjoying story time with David Walliams and of course keeping up with your activities sent by your class teachers.

I thought you might like some ideas of how we can carry on with our Let's Go Cultural! project whilst we're not physically at school, so here are some suggestions. You can send anything you produce to your class Showbie and your teacher can pass it on to me, or tweet it, or send it to our school enquiry email address and it'll get to me that way. 

Most of all, stay happy and safe, and keep smiling. 

Sra Stevens xx

PS Spanish will follow tomorrow! And watch out for photos and videos of our exciting project week in school!

1. Did you enjoy our Erasmus+ visitors being here? What did you do and learn while our visitors were here? What was your favourite memory? You could write a thank you letter or a recount, or record yourself dancing or talking about your experiences.

2. Find out about famous monuments in Austria, Spain, Greece and Turkey, and in particular in Styria, Cartagena, Elefsina and Istanbul.

3. Festivals and celebrations – explore festivals that are celebrated in our partner countries throughout the year. Do we celebrate them too? Are they similar to a festival we celebrate? How are they celebrated? Food? Dance? Music? What about festivals we celebrate?

4. The next phase of our project looks at traditional games and pastimes. Why not find out about traditional games played in England/the United Kingdom.

Talk to your older relatives (or write them a letter!) – what did they play as children? What toys did they have?

What games were played at breaktime in the past?

What equipment did they need?

You could make some posters or even a video to explain what you discover!

5. Traditional tales and stories from England as well as our partner countries are also something we’ll be looking at. Have a look for some stories that originate from Spain, Austria, Greece and Turkey. You could retell them using a storyboard, or even act them out!

6. Check out the project blog to see what our partner schools have been learning about too!  

https://erasmusplusletsgocultural.blogspot.com/

There are suggestions above but there are lots of other things you could explore about our partner countries. Geography, history, art, famous people and much more!

Have fun! 

Guidance for activities in line with Early Learning Goals

Dear parents / carers,

Firstly I would like to thank you for all your efforts in supporting your children with their learning during this challenging time.

I hope that you are finding the suggested activities and resources useful in supporting the work that you are doing each day.

Please also be reminded of the importance of spending time together during this period and of the impact of talk, imaginative play and social time (playing board games, spending time in the garden, bike riding and walking etc.) on your child’s development and learning.

Make the learning fun and use the opportunity for additional time at home together to put learning into meaningful and ‘real-life’ contexts.

With uncertainty around current plans, I have put together some additional activity ideas relating directly to the Early Learning Goals.

The intention is that, by the end of the academic year, most children will be achieving most of the Early Learning Goals. They need to be achieving all elements of the goal independently in order for this to be considered as ‘achieved’.

Although we are aware that time away from school will reduce the amount of input we can give directly to this, I have listed each Early Learning Goal with some key suggested activities which will support your child in making further progress towards them.

Please continue to support your child in all aspects of their learning and continue to spend a little time (10-15 min) each day to practice phonics, read together and practice letter formation and name writing. It would also be beneficial to keep revisiting basic maths skills each day (10-15 min) such as counting to 20 and beyond, touch counting objects accurately to 20, knowing number pairs to 10 (number bonds) and within 10 e.g. 1 + 4, 2 + 3 and 5 + 0 all total 5 etc.

Keep enjoying quality time together, keep having fun, keep smiling and laughing together and take care of each other.

With warmest wishes

Mrs Slassor

Emergency Childcare - Easter Period

If you are a Key Worker and need Emergency Childcare over the Easter Period please complete the booking form here so that we can ensure staffing numbers are correct.

PLEASE NOTE: Childcare provision for Whitehouse Common children will continue to take place at Hollyfield Primary School and as you will already be aware, we are no longer able to offer before or after school care.

Booking Form

Update to Parents - 27/03/2020

Dear Parents,

I cannot believe that a week has passed since our school closed to all our wonderful children, apart from providing much needed childcare for the children of key workers. I am sure, like me, you could never have imagined that this would happen. I cannot express how I feel about this, but am comforted that this is a temporary arrangement and that sometime in the future we will be back at school or ‘doing the school run’ yet again.

As a school team, our main priority now is to try and support our key workers so they are able to do their jobs supporting the infrastructure of our country and saving lives. You may be aware that, from next Monday, we will be providing our key worker child care provision, run by our own staff in a self contained part of the building, at Hollyfield Primary School.

We all need to be mindful that an unprecedented situation like this is going to add layers of anxiety and stress to our lives so we need to look after ourselves and take time out to relax. Many of our children can teach you relaxation techniques that they have learnt recently in school and I am sure you will have ideas that you could share with them too. (This could also be lots of fun!) Please do note that there are many support mechanisms in place for children and adults and a range of information can be found on our website.

Please may I take this opportunity to remind you that homework for children is on our school website. There is much there for the children to do and we will review and update this after the Easter ‘holiday’. Staff will also be making contact with children in their class approximately every 2 weeks to have a general chat and maintain contact. Mrs Horne will also be calling children who she sees on a regular basis for extra support.

On behalf of all of the staff team here, I would like to say that we do miss all of the children very much and look forward to seeing them and you soon, when it is safer to be back in the community. We hope you will all join in with the 8pm clap for our key workers; we will all be doing this too.

We wish you strength and we wish you well.

Best wishes

Mrs Debbie Allen

Head Teacher