Junior News 6 March 2020

Dear Parents,

This week has started and ended with assemblies to celebrate International Women’s Day 2020, where have been discussing a range of inspirational role models for our girls to aspire to. Please do have a conversation with your daughter about some of these key figures over dinner this weekend.

Year 2 led a highly informative assembly on Wednesday, all about ‘space.’ It was lovely to see how confident and knowledgeable our Year 2 learners are; some of the statistics they shared were quite mind-boggling.
On Wednesday night, Years 5 and 6 performed in the Northamptonshire ‘Big Sing’ at the Derngate theatre. The performance of ‘Joseph’ was phenomenal and it was so interesting for us to see how the whole ensemble finally came together. Thank you for all your support in helping the girls to learn their lines and thanks especially to Mrs. Farrar for her excellent organisation of the event.

As part of World Book Day, we used the hashtag #dropeverythingandread. The highlight of the day was seeing our oldest girls reading their own favourite stories to our Nursery girls; a real sense of the school being a family. Don’t forget that next Friday we will be supporting Sports Relief, by dressing up in sporty gear. We will also be encouraging the girls to run as many laps of our school grounds as we can!

This week across the school there has been bread-baking, suffragette studies, laser experiments, jelly exploration and spring bulb planting alongside all of our other ongoing curriculum studies; do look at our Twitter (@nhsjuniorschool) feed to see these pictures coming in regularly.

Finally, we had a packed house across the school today for our open morning. Visiting classrooms with prospective parents has been an absolute pleasure and the girls have been impeccable ambassadors for our wonderful school. Of course, it has been lovely to be able to share with our whole community the outcome of our recent ISI inspection – ‘double excellent.’

Have a wonderful weekend,

Chris Bailey
Head of Junior School

Northampton High School hosts 78 Derngate fundraiser with ‘Call the Midwife’ creator

Smash hit TV series Call the Midwife creator, Heidi Thomas, and actor, Stephen McGann, who plays Dr Turner in the programme, entertained a capacity audience at Northampton High School on Friday 28 February.

The 78 Derngate fundraising event offered an exclusive behind-the-scenes audience opportunity with one of the show’s actors and the series creator, in a bid to raise funds for the Northampton attraction’s extension project.

Heidi and Stephen gave a lively and engaging insight into the events on and off screen of the award-winning series, providing a candid view on the exacting

attention to detail required to accurately reflect how society and attitudes are presented in the (to date) nine series, with series ten to hit screens at the end of 2020.

Followed by a guest Q&A session, Heidi and Stephen spent time signing autographs, having photographs taken and chatting to members of the audience, some of whom had travelled several hours to attend.

The 78 Derngate Trust has already raised £150,000 of the £200,000 target to match fund the sum already offered by Northampton Borough Council. The appeal will finance an extension delivering a new, larger mezzanine flexible use space, visitor viewing of the Pantry in number 78, independent disabled access, a new tea room and larger shop amongst other notable benefits.

Co-Founder and Secretary to 78 Derngate Northampton Trust, Les Patterson, was thrilled to see the 400 guests at Friday evening’s event. “Northampton High School proved to be the perfect host for our fundraiser and this collaboration has strengthened our unique ties with the school. The facilities and staff were superb and our feedback indicates that the audience thoroughly enjoyed an entertaining evening; over £4,000 was raised for our extension appeal.”

Friends and supporters of 78 Derngate are asked to donate units of £100 to the fund, for which they will be recognised on engraved glass panelling of the new atrium.

Mrs Wilmot
Director of Marketing & Admissions

School hosts first ever Equestrian Eventer Challenge!

It was great to see our girls in action at Onley last weekend, as we hosted our first ever Equestrian Eventer Challenge. We would like to thank all of the staff, parents and friends of the school who worked tirelessly to make this marquee event a success.

We look forward to bringing you more information and pictures from this event next week.

Mrs Blake
Director of Sport

Achievements

Each week in assembly, girls are invited to share their achievements in activities outside of school. They are listed below for this week:

Swimming
Darcy W – moved to grade 3
Shreya S – water skills 2

Gymnastics
Safiya C – level 2
Eliza A – a back hip circle on bars
Zoe S – award 7
Ellie J-M – award 7
Kyla L – badge 6
Rebecca P – badge 7

Dance
Phoebe S – Desford Dance Festival, ballet duet 2nd, ballet solo 2nd, song and dance 1st

Chess
Risara S – U9 girls champion

Ballet
Harriet S – grade 2 merit

Tap
Harriet S – grade 2 distinction

African Dance
Ayana F – show in West End of London (one of the youngest)

Music
Jemima S – 1st place musical solo theatre

Assemblies

Class assemblies are held in the Junior School Hall at 8.35am on Wednesdays. Parents are most welcome to enjoy refreshments from 8.00am in the Community Room. Here are the dates for the Spring Term:

3N – Wednesday 11 March

Reception – Wednesday 18 March

1N – Wednesday 25 March

5N – Wednesday 1 April

Dates for Diary

w/c Monday 9 March – Science Week

Friday 13 March – MUFTI day for Sports Relief

Tuesday 17 March – Pre-School Richmond Village 10.30am-11.45am

Wednesday 18 March – KS1 day trip to the National Space Centre

Thursday 19 March – Music Composition Evening 7pm-9pm

Thursday 26 March – Pre-School transition event to Reception Class 9am-10am

Thursday 26 March – Easter Disco Reception to Year 6 4pm-5pm

Tuesday 31 March – Sports Presentation Evening 4pm-8pm

Wednesday 1 April – Whole School Photograph

Wednesday 1 April – Parents’ Evening from 6pm

Thursday 2 April – Parents’ Evening from 3.50pm

Friday 3 April – End of Term

Monday 20 April – INSET Day

Tuesday 21 April – Start of Summer Term

Friday 24 April – Day of Debating

Tuesday 28 April – Pre-School Richmond Village 10.30am-11.45am

Tuesday 28 April – Nursery Stay and Play 2pm-3.15pm

Friday 1 May – Whole School Birthday Assembly

Friday 1 May – Whole School Open Morning 8.30am-12pm

Friday 8 May – VE Bank Holiday

w/c Monday 11 May – Year 6 Osmington Bay Residential

Looking ahead: Sports Day for KS2 and Senior School is Friday 5 June

Nursery Kipper Room and Elmer Room

This week in Nursery the Elmer and Kipper girls having been continuing to explore the new environment and each area within this. We were joined by parents at the ‘Stay and Play’ session on Monday, giving the girls an opportunity to share their play and learning experiences. A playdough station has been set up in the creative area where the girls are able to make playdough independently, measuring the ingredients and mixing them together. Making playdough with different colours and smells and feeling the textures at each stage of the process has been very popular. We have celebrated World Book Day with some fantastic costumes, the girls found it funny to see their friends and teachers dressed as their favourite characters. “What are you wearing?” Maya said to Miss Hewitt. Jasmine said to Miss Trevorrow “You are Supertato”. Some of our older school girls came to share stories too.

Looking ahead to next week we will be thinking about our favourite sporting people when we dress in our sports wear on Friday.  We shall also be investigating different science experiments.

Nursery Pre-School

Highlights:

On Monday we really enjoyed sharing our PE session with some of the parents during Stay and Play. We used the parachute whilst moving in different ways and it was especially fun when we all hid under it. We also made daffodils and observational drawings of daffodils for St. David’s Day. Thursday was very exciting as we dressed up for World Book Day and the girls from Year 6 came and shared their favourite books with us and we showed them ours.

What the girls have said:

“I like the Popoids.” Srishti.
“I was Batman Girl.” Iman.
“I played in the shop.” Joanne.

Looking ahead to next week:

• Science Week – we will be taking part in lots of experiments and explorations.
• Our sound of the week is ‘h’.

Reception

Highlights:

This week we have consolidated our learning about rhyming words by writing silly sentences. The funnier the better! We have also been continuing with pictorial subtraction. We have two new role play areas, a hospital for poorly patients and an opticians. For our topic about ‘People Who Help Us’, we have been learning about people in school. We visited Mrs Petryszak in her office to ask her about her job, Mr Bailey to ask about the best bit of his job, Mrs Furniss and Miss Farrar in the Junior Office and Mrs Old who cleans for us. The girls each asked questions and listened carefully to the answers and how these people help us. The girls enjoyed having their Year 6 friends come and read to them and also share their own favourite book from home, as part of our ‘World Book Day’ activities. Our week finished with a visit to the school kitchens to see where our food is made and who makes it and learning about Florence Nightingale for ‘International Women’s Day’. What a busy week! Enjoy your weekend.

What the girls have said:

“I liked bringing my book to school for World Book Day.” Caoimhe.
“I liked asking the cleaner questions about her job.” Grace.
“I liked going to see Mr Bailey in his office.” Rhoda.
“The best bit was Mrs Petryszak’s sofas in her office and meeting her.” Shanaya.
“I liked reading with my Year 6 friends.” Keziah.
“I liked showing my book to everyone.” Isabella.
“I liked sitting at Mrs Petryszak’s desk, it was really big.” Emily.

Year 1

Highlights:

This week we continued our non-fiction writing about Space. We have looked at the planets Saturn and Jupiter and found out lots of exciting and interesting facts about them. We will finish our non-fiction writing next week by looking at the sun. Thursday was World Book Day and Year 1 celebrated their love of books and reading by completing lots of different activities to do with reading, such as designed their own book marks and front covers, taking part in role play and creating finger puppets of their favourite characters. In our DT lessons, we have been thinking about the different ingredients that we could use for our Pizza toppings and designing our Space Pizza. In Geography, we have been looking at keys and the different symbols used on a map. In Maths, we have been practising counting in steps of two and five and have made socks and hands to help us.

What the girls have said:

“I liked all the different activities on World Book Day. My Favourite activity was acting.” Leah.
“I liked Geography because I liked matching symbols and pictures.” Kinara.
“I enjoyed going swimming this week because I worked hard.” Holly G.

Looking ahead to next week:

• English – finishing our non-fiction writing and starting to look at ‘How to Catch a Star’.
• Maths – measurement length and height.
• RE – festival of Holi.
• PSHE – making healthy choices.

Year 2

Highlights:

This week we saw all of our hard teamwork come together to perform our class assembly to the rest of the school. It was brilliant and showcased all of our fantastic learning from our Space topic so far. In Maths we have explored fractions, looking at halves. We have been making equal parts, learning to recognise halves and finding halves of a quantity. In English we have continued our non-fiction writing creating planet Fact Files. In Art and Design we have finalised our pizza designs ready to make them next week! In Geography we have learned about keys as part of map reading.

What the girls have said:

“We loved doing our Space assembly!”  All of Year 2.
“I’ve learned how to do breaststroke in swimming.” Angelie.
“We’ve liked learning about fractions in Maths.” Jemima, Yilin, Kyla and Eva.
“I liked designing my pizzas!” Maya.

Looking ahead to next week:

• Maths – fractions.
• English – imaginative story writing.
• Art and Design – planet pizza-making.

Year 3

Highlights:

This week in Maths we have been drawing pictograms and bar charts to show data collected. In Science we have been seeing how exercise affects our pulse rate and breathing. In English we have been writing reports about our residential and practising speaking out loud ready for our assembly on Wednesday.

What the girls have said:

“I enjoyed doing bar charts and pictograms in Maths.” Avleen.
“I liked learning a dance in PE.” Shreya.
“I’ve enjoyed writing our reports about Burwell House ready for our assembly.” Harriet.

Looking ahead to next week:

• In English we will be writing mysterious story openings stimulated by the text ‘The Mysteries of Harris Burdick’.
• We will continue with statistics in Maths, looking at tables.

We would also like to invite you to our class assembly on Wednesday morning.

Year 4

Highlights:

In Maths this week we have identified unit and non-unit fractions before looking at equivalent fractions. Cuisenaire rods, fraction walls, number lines and diagrams have all been used to help our understanding. In English we have written our own haiku and tanka poems by trying to stick to the given syllable pattern and using some descriptive language. We have also enjoyed our first ceramics session in the Senior School Art department.

What the girls have said:

“My best bit of the week so far was Computing because we made a newspaper front page look more interesting.” Florence.
“I enjoyed English because I’ve liked making up different types of poems.” Amelia.
“My highlight of the week was in badminton when I did a rally of four shots which was my highest ever.” Lydia.

Looking ahead to next week:

• English – we will be writing cinquain poems and working in groups to perform a poem to the class.
• Maths – work will focus on adding and subtracting fractions.
• Science – we will be learning about the water cycle.

Year 5

This week has been very busy and LOTs of fun! On Wednesday Year 5 and 6 spent the afternoon and evening at the Derngate Theatre doing the ‘Big Sing’ – Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat. It was a long day, but we really enjoyed the rehearsal, the run-through and the performance in the evening.

“My favourite bit was when we did the worshipping because it was really funny to bow down to Joseph.” Natalie.
“I thought Lizzie was brilliant when she sang her solo as Pharaoh because she was the loudest and the clearest. I was so proud that she was chosen and that she was from our school.” Sienna.

On Thursday Year 5 had an amazing trip to Bletchley Park. We started by having a Codes and Cyphers workshop. Tish, our leader, told us about World War 2 and welcomed us in code…which we had to work out. The words she wanted us to remember were ‘encode’ which means ‘encrypt’ and ‘decode’ which means ‘decrypt’ or ‘decipher’. We listened to some Morse Code and deciphered the code for an air raid and then tried out four other types of codes – Pigpen, Number, Atbash and Caesar Shift. At the end of our session Tish showed us a real Enigma Machine that was used by real German soldiers in World War 2. It was also used by Benedict Cumberbach during filming of The Imitation Game!

“I really enjoyed learning about the Enigma Code and how hard it was to crack.” Georgia.

After, we went into the different huts around Bletchley Park. There were lots of work stations set up so that we could get a feel for what it would be like to work there.

“I loved going into the different huts and seeing all the different artefacts that were in the work tables.” Anya.

We also went into Hut 11A which houses the replica Bombe Machine, the machine that was designed to crack the German Enigma codes.

“It was really interesting seeing the Bombe Machine because it went through a lot of different settings a lot quicker than doing it by hand. It meant that they could decode the German conversations which meant we could win the war because they knew what the Germans were going to do.” Eloise.

After lunch we were taken on a tour around the site. We went into the mansion and into the garages. Our tour guide gave us lots of information about how and why Bletchley Park was set up and how messages were being sent.

“I didn’t realise how important the Polish code breakers were. They gave information about the Enigma Machine to the workers at Bletchley Park and if they hadn’t done that we could have lost the war.” Amelie.

Looking ahead to some of next week’s learning:

• English – editing and improving our recount writing.
• Maths – measures: length, mass and volume.
• History – Vikings

IMPORTANT DATES FOR YOUR DIARY

Trip to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre – Monday 9 March
5N Class Assembly – Wednesday 1 April

Year 6

Week 8 – #AnyDreamWillDo #DropEverything #YourGonnaMissMeWhenI’mGone

Hello everyone! It has been a busy week for Year 6. We have launched the House Singing Challenge (this year it is the “The Cup Song” by Anna Kendrick), performed ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’ at the Royal & Derngate and we have been reading fun stories to Nursery and Reception for World Book Day. In addition to these events we have had a full complement of lessons, exploring map work in Humanities, Maths learning about translation, rotation and ratios, English exploring basic Human Rights through taking a closer look at The Suffragist Movement and evaluating animations created using I-Stop Motion.
Thank you for all your support at the Royal & Derngate Theatre performance and for helping the students to practise their songs at home. It was a unique experience for the girls to perform on a large stage in front of an energised audience and as always we felt extremely proud to be a part of Northampton High School.
Good luck to all the girls at Condover Hall this weekend!
See you on Monday.
Mrs Fordham and Mr Loveday

Student Voices:

“In Humanities we have been learning about co-ordinates in maps. We learnt some rules for how to find places and where to put places on a map with a grid.”
“Today is World Book Day and the Year 6 will be reading stories to Reception and Nursery!”
“In Science we started a new topic about light and we were given time to brainstorm about light and we came up with natural light (e.g. the sun) and artificial light (e.g. electrical light). We also did some experiments about whether light travels in a straight line. Mrs Fordham turned on a laser and we couldn’t see it to begin with, but when she rubbed chalk dust over it so we could see the red beam of light….I enjoyed learning about lasers, making a pinhole camera and watching the little sparkles of red as chalk fell down into the laser.”
“In English we have been learning about the Suffragettes. It was very interesting to see women and men fight for women’s right to vote.”
“On Monday we played handball. I enjoyed it because we played lots of teams and we got to play the real rules and we all played as a team.”
“In Maths we did ratios. We did lots of questions when we had to correct what children had done. The children’s answers were all wrong so we could correct them. We also learnt the ratio symbol which is basically a colon :

The Big Sing ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’.

“On Wednesday Year 5 and 6 went to the Derngate Theatre and represented the school, participating in ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat’. We learnt 21 songs and performed them in front of a full house! Everybody enjoyed it and we were excellent representatives for the school!”
“I enjoyed the Big Sing because we sung and put some actions to the songs!”
“It was an amazing experience and everyone enjoyed it. I love performing in front of a huge audience!”
“It was really good as everyone knew the words and Beth was a really good conductor.”
“It was really fun at the Big Sing last night. It was especially hilarious when the conducting baton flew out of her hand!”
“We got to meet some of the actors and we got to hear the orchestra. It was an amazing show!”
“I loved being in the Big Sing and singing!”
“It was so cool, there were ten schools in the hall and the singing was very powerful.”
“I think the soloists were all really good, especially the Northampton High School girl.”

GAP Club

Highlights:

This week in GAP Club we have been making the most of the lighter evenings by going outside and the girls then enjoyed playing on the back playground. We have also started to prepare for our next role play area by creating farm animals with wool. On Thursday the girls enjoyed dressing up for World Book Day.

What the girls have said:

“I enjoyed coming to the library to do homework and colouring with Miss Page.” Verity, Year 5.
“Colouring with Harini.” Rebecca, Year 2.
“I made a stick man with the sticks I got at play time and Fern helped me.” Maya, Year 2.

Looking ahead to next week: 

• The girls will be continuing creating animals ready for our role play farm.

Open Day - Friday 1 May 2020

Friends of Hardingstone present: 'Live Band Cheap Thrills'

Term Dates

Northampton High School
Newport Pagnell Road, Hardingstone Northampton NN4 6UU
T: 01604 765765 nhsadmin@nhs.Gdst.Net