Everyone is welcome. Everyone belongs!

Dear parents and carers, 

A spooky Halloween greeting is in order, as today students and staff were celebrating the end of our first half-term at school! In Middle Primary we have had a wonderful start to the year. We were happy to see new Year 3 faces and so pleased of course for our returning Year 4s in September. We also welcomed Ms. Chelsea, our class TA who has quickly found her groove here at ISG. 

Grateful to be together with fewer restrictions students, each day we begin with a morning meeting. A 15-minute activity that helps students regulate their emotions and focus on the day’s learning. We’ve had a lot of interesting issues come up through shares, whether it be politics, changing schools or our hobbies outside of the class. Our morning meeting gives us the space and the time to have these conversations. A lot of our learning and community-building this term was inspired by the idea that if a class team works well together, it has a positive impact on all of its members and what they can achieve. To this end students collaboratively created their Essential Agreements for themselves and Mr. Jamie and we have focused on the IPC personal goal of ‘Being Respectful’ throughout September and October. 

In Literacy we put on our detective hats and explored the world of Adventure & Mystery stories, from being trapped on Mars to a daring ocean rescue each story captured the reader’s attention and were a joy to read. To read the class anthology of stories click check the student Seesaw journal. 

Trying to understand that our IPC subjects are interconnected pupils visited the Gravensteen and aimed to find out more about this cultural point of interest ‘through the lens’ of different subject areas. Back in the classroom we had subject focused pieces of work including a play by the historians, tourist maps courtesy of the geographers, historical paintings of the location were provided by the artists and designers built a model of the castle. This month we considered ways children can use the Internet positively and how they can look after their wellbeing while being online. Students created safety posters to display around school about potential risks of being online and later collated data on digital device usage across year groups. We had a fascinating analysis of the data and created our own bar charts to share our findings. 

Have a great week ahead, we hope you enjoy the Autumn break and look forward to seeing students on Monday 8th November.