Whitehouse Common Primary -

Excellent Work (Week Beginning 12/10/18)

Spotlight on Attendance Newsletter 2018

Whitehouse Common Primary School are working in partnership with parents to improve school attendance. We would like to congratulate the many parents who make sure their children attend school regularly. Please take a few moments to read our Spotlight on Attendance newsletter by [clicking here]. Thank you.

Hockey at Bishop Vesey's - but where are the sticks?!

This half term, Year 5 have been very lucky to have their PE lessons taught by a specialst hockey coach at Bishop Vesey's Grammar School and use their astro field. We look forward to our lessons every Friday and have learnt a lot - including different types of passes, how to hold the sticks, different ways of moving with the ball, and tactics for a game. Some of us have been selected to attend an after-school club too, in preparation for the Wilson Stuart Active Society competition later this half term.

In the photos below, you may notice our hockey sticks are missing... the coach, Mr Roberts, has a great game called 'floor ball'. This is where we practise our skills of passing / receiving the ball, looking around for clean / dirty space, keeping pace, and thinking about tactics. Not having the sticks, let's us focus on these skills and we can then apply them when using sticks.

Excellent Work (Week Beginning 1/10/18)

Newsletter 5th October 2018

Please [click here] to read the newsletter

Please [click here] to read KDDK Half term club

Celebrating linguistic and cultural diversity - Day 7

In Y6 RE in the summer term, there is a series of lessons about the beauty of words. When Sra. Stevens teaches this, she obviously gives it a languages twist and shares some beautiful words from other languages to discuss. There are many words that are untranslateable as a single word, requiring several or even several sentences to explain. This article lists 38 and there are a few favourites below drawn from this article. Do you have any favourite words that come from other languages? 

Goya

(n) the suspension of disbelief that occurs in good storytelling; a story that feels like reality.

Urdu

Ubuntu

(n) the belief that we are defined by our compassion and kindness to others

Nguni (South Africa)

Waldeinsamkeit

(n) the feeling of being alone in the woods

German.

Tsundoku

(n) the act of buying a book and leaving it unread, often piled together with other unread books

Japanese

Celebrating linguistic and cultural diversity - Day 6

The INTERNATIONAL CHALLENGE was sent home with children ten days ago after an assembly in which Señora Stevens launched our fortnight celebrating linguistic and cultural diversity to KS1 and 2. 

The children have been posed an International Challenge consisting of 20 tasks related to languages and culture. Children can choose how many and which tasks they wish to complete and record their responses on the challenge sheet. Anyone who completes 8 or more tasks will receive a certificate. Complete more than 12 and children will be entered into a prize draw. 

KS2 can post their entries in the white box in the Oaks Hall; anyone in KS1 should give their entry to their teacher who will pass it on to Señora Stevens.

The closing date to return the challenges is Friday 5th October. 

Celebrating linguistic and cultural diversity - Day 5

Did you know that there are languages that still exist in the world but are only spoken by a few people so are in danger of dying? 

They include Taushiro and Kaixana that only have one speaker each, Chemehuevi that has three speakers and Ongota which is spoken by people in a small village in Ethiopia. The problem with these languages is that the people who speak them are old, and young people aren't learning them as all these languages exist in places where there is another official language that is used day to day, like Spanish, English or French. Dictionaries have been written for a few of the languages and in some cases, there are programmes to try and teach younger people how to understand and speak them before it's too late. 

Find out more in this very interesting article 

Another language that is rare and also very interesting doesn't use words but whistles! Here's a video about the language that dates back to Ancient Greece - look Year 3! - and is still used in Antio, a Greek island village. And Silbo Gomero, used on the island of La Gomera in the Canary Islands, was named by UNESCO on their list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009.