We have recently been made aware that St Anselm’s RC Church, 9 Tooting Bec Road, London,SW17 8BS (email: tootingbec@rcaos.org.uk )
Tooting Bec, hold a Ukranian Divine Litergy at 1.30pm each Sunday. This is followed by further familiy activities.
If you are interested in attending, please just turn up and you will be welcome to take part.
Please see our slideshow from the Crackers of Kindness appeal The Faith Team had a wonderful time singing for the residents of a local Care Home. Giving out the crackers and chatting to the residents – bringing such cheer to them all. As you can see it was a lovely day all round. Thank you to Mrs Eaden for organising this event and all the children who took part.
We would also like to thank the parents and children who made the crackers to enable our Faith Team to brighten so many people’s Advent.
We are delighted to be able to share with you The Friends of St Tersea’s (FOST) November 2021 edition of their Newsletter. I am sure you will agree it is really informative and enlightens parents of the excellent fundraising they do for our children. If you are interested in joining or putting yourself forward to help at any events – the next being the Christmas Market next Sunday 12th December at 12 Noon to 3.00pm, please let one of the FOST team know or contact the school office. Thanking you again for your constant support.
Please see the PE Sport Premium 2021 – 2022
This shows the impact these funds have had on the sports department in our school and the benefit to our children.
We are delighted to share with you the new faith team for 2021.22.
Continuing from last year: Giovanna & Sarah from 6W & Luis – from 6F
Maddison; Lena K; Robin; Olivia; Eldana from 5D
See a picture of the team IMG_1123.JPG _ DocHub
Maya was so moved by the reading book she borrowed from class that she became passionate about endangered wild life. Her class teacher spoke to her Mum and encouraged her to make a video to raise awareness. They went even further!
Maya made a very articulate video about the issue and pledged to learn all her tricky word spellings in return for sponsorship. Please see Maya’s video here
If anyone would like to donate please do so via her Just Giving page. Details are in the video.
St Teresa’s are proud of Maya’s determination and enthusiam to raise funds for this wonderful cause.
Well done Maya.
It seems a while ago now but Year 3 enjoyed a great day learning about Romans and dressing up in their wonderful outfits! The photos below give a great example of how involved they were and the benefits of their experience! Dressing the part always helps to give them that extra bit of enthusiasm plus having a visitor to the school to enlarge on their topic. We wanted to share some of their beautiful photos with you.
Grammar and Punctuation
A clear progression of Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar skills/objectives is outlined in each year group’s English Medium Term Plan. Aspects of grammar and punctuation will be taught in weekly skills lessons. However, at St Teresa’s we recognise that grammar is best taught in the context of real reading and writing activities, rather than through isolated exercises; therefore, some units of work from the Literacy Tree Scheme will incorporate elements of grammar through the study of a key text.
Grammar, Punctuation and Vocabulary Overview
Our ultimate aim in the teaching of early reading is for children to leave Year 2 fluent, confident and independent readers being able to apply their knowledge and skills across the curriculum. We place a great deal of importance and emphasis on the teaching of early reading.
Phonics is an integral part of early reading and writing. Phonics is developed for early readers to enable them to become skilled at thinking about and manipulating sounds in words; over time this enables them to become skilled at decoding unfamiliar words to read and encoding words in order to write. With these key skills, children are in an excellent position to access the wider curriculum. Teachers give children sufficient opportunity in reading books that are closely matched to the phonics programme, both at school and at home. The love and enjoyment for reading is reinforced in the rich, broad diet of texts to excite and challenge.
‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised’ is the systematic synthetic phonics program that St Teresa’s has adopted to support our teaching of phonics across the school. All pupils in Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage One participate in daily phonics lessons which are led by trained members of staff. The ongoing assessment of pupils’ phonics progress is sufficiently frequent and detailed to identify any pupil who is falling behind the program’s pace. If they do fall behind, targeted support is given immediately. Children in KS2 who have not achieved the required standard in phonics also receive daily interventions.
Phonics and Early Reading Policy (from March 2022)
Parental Support
Click on the link to watch a video supporting the teaching of phonics sounds
How we teach writing at St Teresa’s
At St Teresa’s RC Primary we view the acquisition of language skills to be of the utmost importance and so the teaching of all aspects of English is given high priority. Writing is integral to our children’s whole language experience; it is a crucial part of thinking and learning. We aim to teach different genres of writing by using a wide range of high quality text (selected from the Power of Reading and Literacy Tree Schemes). Children will engage with quality authors to motivate their learning and deepen their knowledge of texts. This will, in turn, provide a meaningful context for writing.
In our teaching of writing, we aim for all children to:
The Writing Process and Purpose
Children will be taught strategies and tools for the various components of the Writing Process such as planning, drafting, sharing, evaluating, revising and editing, summarising and sentence combining.
The Writing Process will consist of four key areas:
SECURING SUBJECT MATTER – children will become experts in the field so they are confident about what to write. Teachers will engage children in pre-writing activities where they can assess what they already know, research and unfamiliar topic or arrange their ideas visually. They will use a combination of techniques to develop expertise. This will help unlock creativity and bring learning alive.
IMITATION & Immersion – Teachers will use a strong, quality shared text (selected from the Power of Reading and Literacy Tree Scheme) as a model from which children internalise the key language features.
INNOVATION – Use the structure and language patterns of the model text for shared planning and writing in a new, but closely related, context
INDEPENDENT APPLICATION – children will be guided to choose and use suitable writing strategies as well as encouraged to be flexible when using the different writing components.
Children will also be taught to adopt VCOP when editing and improving their writing.
V – Vocabulary C – Conjunctions O – Openers P – Punctuation
Children will be taught to write for different purposes e.g. ‘describe’; ‘narrate’; ‘inform’; ‘persuade’; ‘analyse’. Their conception of what is ‘audience’ will be developed with models of good writing.
As a school our aims in teaching handwriting are that the pupils will:
In order to achieve the above aims children must develop:
Handwriting will change over time and children will develop a personal style. From an early stage, pupils will understand the importance of neat presentation and the need for different letterforms (cursive, printed or capital letters) to help communicate meaning clearly
Correct posture and pencil for handwriting
Handwriting letter formation display
Number formation display
At St Teresa’s we provide opportunities for children to explore a diverse range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. These books are carefully chosen to develop pupils’ vocabulary, language, comprehension and love of reading. We develop word reading and comprehension through the use of cross curricular themes, story-times, whole class, guided or independent reading. We believe children’s love of literature comes from taking every opportunity to expose them to high quality texts for both the purposes of fact finding and enjoyment.
By the time pupils leave the school, they are competent readers, who can recommend books to their peers, have a thirst for reading a range of genres and text types, including poetry and participate in discussions about books.
To be skilled as a reader, it is more than just accurate reading. What is meant and understood can be developed by focussing on these 7 areas. These skills can be shown through the texts, which children read independently but also shown in texts that they have listened to in class:
| 1. DECODE ACCURATELY | Getting the words off the page
Use of phonics, sight recognition, context, picture clues |
| 2.RETRIEVAL | Seek, find, understand
Literal responses to text Finding the right parts of the text to answer questions |
| 3.INFERENCE AND DEDUCTION | Reading between the lines
What is meant but not said Interpret meaning from what is in the text Put yourself in their shoes |
| 4.UNDERSTANDING STRUCTURE | Organisation
Commenting on presentational features Why is the text presented and organised as it is |
| 5.USE OF LANGUAGE | Use of Language
Why the writer selects a word / phrase / image / sentence Effect of different techniques Impact on reader |
| 6.AUTHOR’S INTENT | Writer’s purpose
How did the author want you to think/feel/respond Writer’s attitudes and values Impact on reader |
| 7.TEXTS AND THE WORLD | How the text fits into its context
Understanding the social, historical, cultural, literary heritage Links with other texts |
WORLD BOOK DAY 2021
The theme for World Book Day 2021 was Masked Reader. Children chose a character from their favourite book and created a mask. We launched the week with a series of masked readers and children had to guess the staff and their favourite book. This was a huge success and engaged children in conversations about a range of books.
Can you guess our masked reader?
Masked reader 5 The Second Fox
St Teresa’s Best Mask Winners
Please see the information for parents of children with autism Spectrum Disorder
M.A.P.S. flyer_2021 which maybe helpful to some parents.
We just wanted to share a few photographs of the Year 1 children, who had a great day back at school. The children were really positive and eager to learn.
Click to see the Year 1’s in action here
Our learning mantra of Never give up, Encourage others and Do your best (NED) is fundamental to what we do in school (before lockdown) and we celebrate special achievements in NED assembly once a week, where the winners were having a tea party with the Headteacher, getting hot chocolate and biscuit. However, during the pandemic, we have had to give the children a little bag with an individual hot chocolate and a small treat, instead, which is either posted out or handed to them if they are a key-worker’s child, in school.
We look forward to using the St Teresa’s NED mugs again in the near future, for our tea parties. These came from Gracie, Giovanna and Manuela, who donated some of their birthday money to pay for them!
Acts of random kindness like these, are such a great feature of our school. Thank you so much.
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The Government currently provides the school with pupil premium funding for around 10% of the children in our school.
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