Our question this term was: ‘What is at the bottom of the garden?’ and in Class 3, we used this to focus of our Geography unit of ‘Rivers’. It has been very interesting to learn about the features of a river, where our rivers are; locally, nationally and internationally, and what life is like living near a river. We took the opportunity to visit one of our nearest rivers, The River Trent, at the Wolseley Centre and conducted some first-hand fieldwork to explore the differences and similarities between two water environments (the river and a lake). It was a beautiful day to get out and about and the children were able to put their knowledge to the test outside of the classroom!
World Book Day 2024
What a fantastic day! The children and staff all arrived at school dressed as famous book characters and it really set the mood for a joy-filled day, exploring a new book together. The children started the day in the hall together, hunting for letters to spell a word… T I D Y. This was our new book (that Danny kindly unwrapped for us). Miss Cashmore read it out to us and we spent the day exploring it more closely in our classrooms with our teachers… writing Kenning poetry, interviewing the author and creating ‘looking after the forest’ posters!
Zoo Lab UK 2024
What an amazing afternoon! All of the children from Reception to Year 4 had the opportunity to hold a scary beast (one of our 50 things!) when Zoo Lab UK came to visit St. Augustine’s. For Class 3, this was also a great opportunity to test our new knowledge of the rainforests and the animals that live in them. We needed to be quiet so we didn’t scare the creatures and have very good hand-hygiene before and after the event, to keep ourselves and the animals safe. We all had the chance to meet an African Land Snail, a giant millipede, a gecko, a snake, a tarantula and a rat – all inhabitants of rainforests around the world. For all of us, it was a special time to explore the world and creatures that live in it, learning to respect the environment and a chance to try something new!
Mother’s Day Tea Party
Class 1 painted pictures of their Mothers and held them up in the Mother’s Day Tea Party.
Class 2 read a Mother’s Day poem.
Class 3 created gratitude postcards to show their Mothers what they are thankful for.
We all sang lots of songs for our wonderful mothers.
January 2024 Dentist visit-oral health
In Class one, then children have been learning about being healthy, including healthy eating, handwashing and oral health. This week, class 1 were very lucky to have visit from a parent who is a dentist!
During the morning, the children sorted foods that are good and bad for your teeth. We discovered that children should only be having 5 teaspoons of sugar a day! They learned how to brush their teeth properly and had a go using their own toothbrushes.
Everyone had lots of fun dressing up as a dentist and learning about the special role of a dentist.
We all got oral health goodie bags which included a tooth brush and toothpaste.
This morning, we all walked into the hall to find a range of photo frames with pictures inside them. We looked closely at them and realised that each of them included one of the teachers. In most of the photos, they were either with family, at an event or visiting a place. We guessed who the teacher was in each photo and discussed the importance of the picture to them. We then spoke about why we would want to remember certain people or events. The question for this half term was revealed as ‘Why do we remember people?’. We discussed what the question is asking us and what remember actually means. We associated this word with good, happy times and how people who have impacted our lives are thought of in positive ways.
We found out that people usually have photos because of the following:
As part of our Light up and Sing service, the whole school made Christingles. Everyone had a great time making these and it was wonderful to see the children working together and helping each other.
We held a Christingle service which was in aid of fundraising for The Children’s Society. We managed to raise £51-Thank you so much!
During this service, we also held a nativity scene where the children in Reception and Year 1 dressed up as the different people from the Christmas story. The school told the Christmas story through song. It was a beautiful evening.
The worship team joined a ‘Spiritual Ambassadors Day at Denstone Church alongside the Saints Academies. The children got to work with Louisa Harrop (our school advisor for Christian Distinctiveness) to develop their important role in school.
During the day, the children had the opportunity to gain the knowledge on how to plan a Collective Worship, develop prayer spaces, make some resources and develop jobs they are responsible for around school.
#HelloYellow October 2023
#Hello Yellow is an annual national campaign to show young people that they are not alone with their mental health. To celebrate Hello Yellow, St Augustine’s turned yellow for the day by dressing in their best yellow clothes.
Class 1 read the story ‘My Monster and Me’ by Nadia Hussain. The story is about a little boy whose worry monster follows him everywhere he goes. It’s there when he gets dressed, when he wants to play with his toys, and even when his friends come over to visit. How can he escape his worries?
To help us escape our worries, we made monster dream catchers. We also decorated biscuits and discussed our own worries and what we can do when we have those feelings of worry.
Class 3 had an exciting day at Denstone College for a hockey training day and tournament. Even the atrocious weather couldn’t dampen the spirits of Class 3 who had an incredible time!
What a fantastic morning of History! Class 3 were visited this morning by a Roman legionary – complete with all of his equipment! He spoke to us about how and why the Romans invaded Britian, what life was like for legionaries and auxiliaries and why the Roman army was such an effective fighting force – their discipline, armour, weapons and training was much more advanced than the rest of the world at the time. The children were able to ask lots of questions and handle some replica objects! It was a fabulous way to put our new knowledge to the test and see for ourselves some of the things were have learned about and discussed in our lessons.
During Arts Week, we held an Art Gallery in school to show our loved ones what we had been up. We also focussed on one more artist, Frida Kahlo, who we learned was a feminist and felt strongly about women’s rights. She also portrayed herself as strong and powerful in her self-portraits with big, bold background patterns. We used this as inspiration for our own self-portraits. The Art Gallery was an amazing opportunity to share our new learning and skills!
See more of our masterpieces on our art page.
Take a look at all of our wonderful costumes for World Book Day 2023! The children and staff all went to so much effort dressing up as their favourite characters and it made for a fantastic celebration of the amazing world of books. Next week, we have special visitors coming into St. Augustine’s – West End In Schools. We are very excited to welcome them and continue the World Book Day celebrations by exploring stories through performance and drama!
AN APPRENTICE at digger giant JCB has quite literally gone back to their roots to celebrate National Apprenticeship Week (February 6 to 12).
Neve Hall is one of 78 JCB apprentices who this week returned to their old school to plant a commemorative oak tree and talk to pupils about their education pathway to a prestigious apprenticeship.
Neve, age 19, travelled from the JCB World Headquarters at Rocester, Staffordshire to visit St. Augustine’s and plant the tree which was grown on JCB’s own farming Estate at Wootton.
The tree planting ceremonies are part of a series of events to mark National Apprenticeship Week, including high-profile business talks and open days. A total of 78 oak trees are being planted by JCB apprentices right across the UK, as far afield as Stirling in Scotland and Colwyn Bay in Wales, with each tree marking a year in business for JCB since it was founded in 1945.
JCB Early Career Talent Manager Neil Fowkes said: “The oak trees symbolise not only JCB’s proud British heritage but also the importance of celebrating our apprentices’ educational journeys from their school roots to the great opportunities that await when branching out into the world of work.
“Inspiring the next generation of young engineers, machine builders and business experts is an important part of our apprentices’ training. We want them to be role models to youngsters at their old schools so every student sees what can be achieved with hard work and ambition.
“Apprenticeships are a fantastic route into a career, and hearing first hand from a former pupil is the best way to encourage the next generation to follow in their footsteps.”
Each oak tree planted by the JCB apprentices will be accompanied by a commemorative plaque which features a QR code that links students to the JCB Early Careers website. To find out more about apprenticeships and careers at JCB visit https://earlycareers.jcb.com/.
KS2
This half term, Class 3 learned all about the Tudors, focussing on the impact they had in our local area and the changes to castles during this period. We spent time exploring the Tudor family tree, key dates and used pictures and photographs of castles to look at the evolution of castles’ form and function during the Tudor reign. To top it all off, we visited Tutbury Castle just down the road to see for ourselves the impact the Tudors had in our local area. This was a whole school visit, as Early Years and Key Stage 1 have been exploring what castles are and their key features. We were made to feel very welcome by the staff there and we all had an amazing day. The children were awesome and shared lots of their learning with our tour guide, Sue, who said she was “blown away by their knowledge”!
KS1
In history we learnt about castles for our ‘Times gone by’ unit. We were lucky enough to go on a whole-school trip to our local castle in Tutbury, where we got to explore different parts of the castle, learnt about castle life from two guests and discovered even more facts from our castle guide. During this unit, we looked at how castles had changed over time by creating a timeline, life in a castle by researching who lived there and their job roles, the purpose of a castle by labelling the different parts, how to defend against enemies by finding out what the different features were used for and finally the parts and purpose of armour for the knights and soldiers.
As part of Children’s Mental Health week we held our ‘happy mind, happy me day’!
We dressed in clothes that made us feel happy, did a whole school Go Noodle in the hall and made our mental health first aid kits.
Throughout the week we had our weekly Relax Kids session and celebration worship.
This week we had one of our parents Mrs Lowrie visit us to talk about her work as a vet!
The children loved this interactive talk and found it incredibly interesting, especially the skeletons!
Thank you Mrs Lowrie for giving up your time, we really appreciate it.
Today we were lucky enough to have a visit from Hoglets and the British Wildlife Rescue Centre. They came in to teach us about hedgehogs and what we can do to best help these creatures. We met Harry the hedgehog and learnt that he has 5000 spikes, likes to live in hedges, eats lots of worms and bugs, rolls up into a ball when he is scared and has a small nose and eyes. 50 years ago, there were 30 million hedgehogs and now there are only 1 million. This is linked to their habitats being destroyed by new houses being built and no safe space for hedgehogs to go and move to. We participated in lots of activities throughout the morning to help us understand how we can help this animal survive in the future.
First, we were hedgehogs hunting for worms. When a badger or fox came and had a sniff around, we rolled into a ball. We collected 20 worms to help the big hedgehog and 19 for the small one. We found it easy because we used our eyes, however, we know this is different for hedgehogs because they use their nose as their eyes are so small. They are also nocturnal animals so it is harder to see when they hunt for their food at night.
The next activity involved us finding slugs. If we found one we would lose a point and go to the wildlife hospital, if we didn’t, we would get an insect to eat. We found out that hedgehogs like cat food and get poorly from slug pellets.
In EYFS we used clay to make our own hedgehogs. We used sticks to create the spikes, eyes and noses of our hedgehogs. This was based on a book we were read about hibernation and hedgehogs being nocturnal animals.
In KS1 and KS2 we were builders in our final activity where we used our STEAM skills. We had to create a hedgehog friendly housing estate. We had to think about: crossing roads, access to food, moving around between houses and gardens etc. Our housing estates were very creative and even included a hedgehog play area, speed camera and traffic lights!
Please see the link below for some exciting careers talks which took place this week!
The children loved learning about the exciting jobs which some people do! Thank you so much to the parents who gave up their time and put so much effort into their presentations! We are so grateful to you all.
Our friends from Burton Albion Golden Goals Club came into school today and joined us for our wellbeing walk around the village. The children had a lovely time chatting to everyone on the walk and served our guests tea and delicious cakes when we arrived back to school. The weather was perfect and we thoroughly enjoyed being out in the fresh air!
“On behalf of the Draycott and Burton area members of the Burton Albion Community Trust Golden Goals Club, I would like to thank the staff and children of St Augustine’s Academy for treating us to such delicious refreshments when we returned from our walk around the village on Friday 25th November. The children joined us on our walk and I’m sure they enjoyed it as much as we did! They were excellent at waiting on the tables and so polite. Thank you so much, we cannot wait to do it again!”
Ruth Adams.
Maths Morning
Our Maths Morning held on 20th October was a huge success! Many thanks to everyone who supported this! It was a wonderful opportunity to come into school and enjoy some fun maths games with the children and also to ask any questions you may have regarding maths in school. We look forward to welcoming you to our our maths morning next term.
We are so very grateful for your support this morning. We have so many wonderful harvest gifts to drop off at The Soup Kitchen in Burton upon Trent. Thank you so much.
We had a wonderful Harvest Festival in the school hall this morning. The children performed beautifully and read their poems and prayers with such confidence- you wouldn’t believe we were only 5 weeks in to a new term! We were very proud of them and I’m sure you were too!
It was also wonderful to have Jordan and John in for the harvest festival. After COVID quashing our plans over the past few years it was wonderful to have our visitors, parents and students back together for a worship.
We are proud to announce we have raised a whopping £1,067.75 for Cancer Research UK!! We are so proud and thankful to you all. Well done!
The summer production of Edith’s Wartime Scrapbook went down a treat with the audiences on Monday 4th and Tuesday 5th July. All pupils at St Augustine’s from Reception to Year 4 took part and performed brilliantly! They spoke their lines with clarity and confidence and sang beautifully. Whilst moving out of the house in which she has lived for 80 years, Edith Coleman discovers an old scrapbook from her childhood. The turn of every page rekindles memories of a time when war affected every aspect of her daily life. But despite the perils of the Blitz, evacuation, rations and bossy ARP wardens, we learn of how families and communities cared for and supported each other, found comfort and humour in their unusual circumstances, and ultimately triumphed in the face of adversity. A fabulous play!
We are so proud of everyone today, All of our pupils completed the Race for Life this morning! We are still waiting on a few donations but we are astounded at the amount we have raised so far! We will update you with final total when we have received all of the donations! Well done everyone! Our donation page can be found here and all proceeds go to Cancer Research UK.
A massive thank you to everyone who donated, came to cheer us on or baked such wonderful cakes for our cake sale!
We all wore red, white and blue today for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Celebration Day. The children made crowns and other craft activities outside. We had a special celebration picnic outside for lunch.
Class 2 had made some wonderful jubilee artwork! Well done Class 2!
Ahead of our Jubilee Day tomorrow we are delighted to inform you that Jesse has won our Jubilee traybake competition! Well done Jesse!
Miss Jayne has made our cake and we think it looks amazing! We can’t wait to try some tomorrow!
We had a fabulous sports day on the 27th May! Thank you to everyone who came to watch and support the children! We were so proud of every child and the team spirit, friendship and love they showed throughout the day!
To enjoy the video of Sports Day please click on the image.
We had a fabulous turnout at the maths morning today! Thank you so much to everyone for coming, the children had so much fun playing the maths games and showing off their maths skills!
Class 3 were part of the SUAT Podcast this term, please have a listen! We are so proud of our children and to be a part of Staffordshire University Academies Trust.
Well we have teamed up with St Peter’s Alton, All Saints at Denstone and The Dove to raise money to have a well drilled in Nepal. It costs £600 to drill a well and we have all raised £150 each. This is being done alongside Feed the Hungry who will be actually doing the work over in Nepal. There is a plaque with our school’s names on which can be seen below.
We are really proud of what we have achieved with this project and look forward to following the amazing work they are carrying out improving lives in Nepal.
To watch the video please click here to go to our supporting charities page.
This week has been science week at St Augustine’s. The theme was growth, take a look here to see all of the exciting things we have been up to!
Golden mile
We have started our golden mile journey once again! This involves all children and adults to complete a 1-mile circuit of the school playground or field every day. At the moment we have a mixture of running and walking but hopefully we will be running the whole distance in no time! We are all really enjoying this and have found we have more energy, more concentration and just generally feel better in ourselves afterwards. To encourage us to keep the running up, we have also applied to participate in a school organised Race for Life in June this year for Cancer Research UK. We relish any opportunity to raise money to help those who need it and cannot wait for the sponsoring to begin! More information will be sent out in due course.
Guide Dogs Visit
After learning about Louis Braille and how he changed the lives of millions of people, Class 2 were offered the opportunity to meet a guide dog. Due to this being such an important and exciting occasion, we turned it into a whole-school learning experience. We had a visit from Barry and his guide dog Woody. We learnt how a guide dog is trained, how they are essential in everyday life, the gadgets that are used alongside a guide dog and so much more. We also used this chance to show our appreciation and support of such a great cause and managed to raise and absolutely incredible amount of £150!
Nature/ Science Walk
On Monday 14th March we kicked off our Science Week with a nature/ science walk at Eland Lodge.
It was perfect sunny but cold weather and the children had great fun and learned so much from John Coupland.
The children learnt about the deer in the woods, fungi, insects and much more!
A massive thank you to Eland Lodge and in particular John Coupland for his help with this! It really is a highlight in our calendar each season for us all!
Our ‘Family Reading Morning’ was a huge success and everyone seemed to thoroughly enjoy the time to just sit enjoy the wonder of books! We have really missed inviting our parents and relatives into school in recent times, to share our classrooms and learning with them, so it was fantastic to see so many loved ones at school this morning – thank you to everyone! Reading is so important to all learning, both during and beyond our school years and this morning was a way of showing the children that reading can be a really special time to spend with loved ones too. We have another reading morning coming up before Easter, so be on the lookout for the date – to be confirmed! Thank you all again for making the morning so special.
Some of the children in Class 3 led worship this week and focussed on the story of the first people – Adam and Eve – and their fall from God. The children retold the story using the Bible and acted it out for their peers, so everyone could really see and imagine the events. The children did an amazing job of including the younger members of our school in story so they all understood what was happening. They wanted to show everyone what happened when Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s order not to eat the forbidden fruit. They fell from God and were never as close to him again. We need help to be close to Him, which is what the Bible is for and why Jesus was sent to earth – to save us. The children then explained that humans have free will – we can choose to make good choices or bad ones. It is up to us to make the good ones.
We were so proud of the children for putting together their own worship for the whole school, working together so well and telling us all the important lessons from this part of the Bible.
We had so much fun decorating our tree last Friday!! Christmas has arrived at St Augustine’s!!
Poet from the Peaks:
Today, we welcomed Andy Tooze, the Poet from the Peaks, to St. Augustine’s and what a fabulous day we had! Andy worked with the whole school and with individual classes to perform some of his own poems and to support the children in writing their own. We had an amazing day full of laughter and joy, surrounded by language, words and rhythm. Andy was a true inspiration to us all and the teachers were blown away by how enthusiastic and eager the children were to write and share their own work! He brought out the very best in all of the children and they were all enchanted from the beginning to the very end. We won’t be surprised to see a few notebooks appearing in pockets after today! Thank you, Andy, from us all here at St. Augustine’s for such a fantastic day. We know the children will continue to channel the inspiration you have fostered in them to their future writing, both in and out of school.
Kenning Poems:
This week, the children in Class 3 have been learning all about kennings and how they are structured differently to other poems. We explored a few examples together, including ‘What Am I?’ by Pie Corbett. We explored different ideas of riddles and two-word lines using noun-nouns or noun-verbs and used our rainforest work to inspire us!
Listen to our own rainforest kennings here:
This week in English, the children in Class 3 have been inspired by the COP26 event in Glasgow recently and our unit of work in Geography: ‘Rainforests’.We read the story ‘There’s a Rang-Tan in my Bedroom’ by James Sellick (in partnership with Greenpeace) and the children were shocked to learn of the beautiful rainforests in South-East Asia being destroyed to make way for palm oil plantations! They couldn’t believe it and felt angry and sad that the orangutans’ homes are being taken away day after day. Did you know that palm oil can be found in almost anything we consume or use in the supermarkets: toothpaste, cookies, chocolate, shampoo, biscuits, just to name a few!?After this, we decided we needed to take action together as a class. So, we made a pledge to the Earth:
We felt we couldn’t do this along though. We wanted to know what the UK is doing to help. So, we decided to contact the MP for Energy and Climate Change: Greg Hands MP. We wrote formal letters to him to find out what his job entails and what the UK government has done so far and is planning to do in the future to help the fight against climate.Mrs Walker and I couldn’t believe how passionate and inspired the children were by this mini-project and the work they produced only proved this – amazing! We hope we get a reply to our fabulous letters (fingers crossed!).Please see more photographs by following the link here.
As part of black history month our pupils enjoyed a collective worship about Rosa Parks. A part of this can be shown below.
Rosa Parks features on our timeline in the hall as part of our ‘Why do we remember people’ topic.
Our certificate winner this week was from Class 2. During our isolation week he had made an incredible clock as part of his maths home learning! We were super impressed!! Well done Jesse!!
Well done to our certificate winners this week!
We hope you’ve enjoyed the last week and our wonderful happy mind happy me activities!
A massive thank you to our wonderful PTA for the donation of the Easter Eggs which the children took home, School Council who ran the Easter Egg hunt & provided the eggs, and The Methodist Church for the donation of their wonderful eggs also! That’s a massive amount of chocolate for our lucky pupils!
Happy Easter, from everyone at St Augustine’s!
We stood in class bubbles for some quiet reflection time at 12pm today.
What a busy week back! It has been so wonderful to see all of the children back in Class 3, learning and playing together, just as it should be! We have been so busy reading and going over a few things with Miss Cashmore, ready for next week, but we didn’t forget it is Mother’s Day on Sunday! Usually, we’d hold an amazing service in church or school and share the special time with all of the fantastic women in our lives together, but unfortunately this year we can’t. Instead, we got creative and made some beautiful hand-made cards, painted and written by each of us in Class 3 to give to our lovely mums at the weekend. We each wrote a personal message inside our cards, as to why we love our mums so much and why they are so special and important to us! Here we all are looking very proud of our creations…
We all came dressed up today in something that represents maths – that could be number, shape, space, measure, statistics and so on! The children all looked fantastic and came ready to share why they had chosen the clothes that they had. In Class 3, we had a jumper full of hexagons, a number on a football shirt, parallel lines and even a handmade necklace to represent a repeating pattern! It was so lovely to see the children who are currently at home too – they too had found something mathematical to wear and it was amazing to see and chat to them this morning on Teams!
For our extra maths activities, Miss Cashmore sent home a pack of puzzles, including: a Sudoku number puzzle, a shape Sudoku and an Emoji crack the code quiz! At school, we went outside and gathered objects from around the school grounds. We then categorised them, ready to collate the data. We represented how many of each item we had in our categories and presented it on a giant bar chart on the playground and used metre sticks instead of our usual rulers to draw accurate bars! We had an amazing time!
This year due to some children being at home for World Book Day, our teachers have recorded some videos to share of their favourite stories! We start off with Miss Cashmore, Miss Machin and Miss Jane. We hope you enjoy them.
Class 3 pinned it up in the classroom (on our core values and prayer board), and explained to the children that during their daily prayer or quiet time, if they want to, they can take a look at the calendar and see which country name has been given for today. There is one country for each day of the month. Each country is a place where Feed the Hungry has provided aid. We spoke about the work we did with them before the pandemic and why it is such an important and worthwhile cause.
The children often take a look at which country could be in our thoughts today. There are often surprised that some richer countries, such as the UK, are also helped by Feed the Hungry!
SUAT supports and leads in the set-up of new academies joining the partnership. The services provided by the central support function cover both educational and non-educational support. In terms of educational support, SUAT is linked to the School of Education of Staffordshire University, which is an outstanding ITT provider.
