St Luke’s Church of England School Newsletter 21 January 2016 Message from Mrs Tyler Thank you to Mr Stephenson, Miss Milne and Miss Hardwick for organising such a great STEM Week. Children and adults alike have had great fun learning and exploring through the various activities we have experienced during the week – from Dr Kirsty Flower and her PhD research students leading KS2 activities about the ‘unique recipe’ that makes you who you are (DNA), animation technology at the Camden Learning Centre, neuron research at Swiss Cottage, St Margaret’s School girls running a lunchtime Maths Club …. to learning about the feeding habits of our visiting owls and Space Day in Reception! It has been wonderful to see the children growing in curiosity and resilience as they develop their investigation and problem solving skills. Indeed we all learned a valuable lesson as we discovered that great scientists often fail many times before they succeed - Thomas Edison had to ‘try, try, try again’ 1,000 times before he perfected the electric light bulb! Of course, as I write this newsletter the week is not yet over – tonight we have our Parents’ STEM Evening and tomorrow all the children and staff will visit the Science Museum (hence the newsletter is being produced a day early). Thank you to all the staff and volunteers who have made the week so special – should we make it any annual event? PACE After School Club at Fortune Green provides after school care until 6.30pm Monday to Friday. A member of SLS staff escorts children to the club after school on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Please speak to Miss Hardwick for more information. STEM Week Awards Year 4 Daniel P for showing great enthusiasm for DNA. Year 3 Hiba Noor for asking some super questions. Year 2 Edward for super animation. Year 1 Amaya for great rocket design and construction. Reception Reuben for building an impressive tower. News from KS1 Another busy week in KS1 - alongside learning about money and time in Maths and writing recounts in English we have also enjoyed lots of STEM activities. On Tuesday afternoon we worked on our rocket projects. The session started with a talk from Mrs James on features of good design and how we could think about this when we were building our rockets. After completing the rockets everyone came together to show their model and test it to see if it would remain standing up. Everyone passed the test – phew! Our trip to the Camden Learning Centre was just as much fun. The children were shown how to draw a picture on the computer and then use an animation program to make their drawing move around the screen. The CLC have said they will be sending us the children’s work so hopefully you will be able to see it quite soon. We are really looking forward to rounding off such an exciting week with a trip to the Science Museum tomorrow. News from Lower KS2 We have had a fantastic STEM week in Key Stage Two. The children have particularly loved the trips and visits from real scientists! We have been particularly impressed with the children’s general knowledge. Hopefully, the children have been able to see the links between the different subjects. This, in turn, will help them develop both scientifically and mathematically. We have carried out a few Maths investigations this week, requiring the children to apply their Maths knowledge. We will continue with these investigations next week, so you may like to ask them at home about what they have been doing. On Thursday we were lucky enough to have a visit from research scientists from King College. The children absolutely loved extracting DNA from fruit, creating DNA models and de-coding DNA.

2015-16 and 2016-17 term dates are on the school website. News from Reception What a fun STEM Week we have had! Monday’s focus was Science and the children got a little messy mixing together different ingredients to make bubbling potions and colourful clouds. On Tuesday they were able to use the ipads to look up images of stars and planets - they drew pictures using ‘paint’ on the laptops, built mazes for the beebots and took pictures of each other with the class camera. Wednesday was our Space Day and the children all looked fantastic in their costumes – thank you so much for all the effort you put into them! Throughout the day the children went on a spacewalk, prepared an “astronauts’ picnic”, used space gloves to investigate moon rocks and shaving foam, and used their engineering skills to build shapes, rockets and towers. On Thursday the children played lots of dice games and thought about some puzzling Maths questions. The children have really enjoyed taking part in STEM Week and have been recording each day in a diary. For homework over the weekend, please help your child to write about Friday’s trip to the Science Museum and return the booklet to school on Monday. Thank you! Dates for Diary (Spring term) 2015-16 and 2016-17 term dates are on the school website.