News – Trinity Road Primary School

World Book Day competitions and events in school

We will be celebrating World Book Day with activities and learning opportunities from Monday 4th to Friday 8th March.

Read Your Way – win a new book!

You are invited to take part in a photo competition to be in the chance of winning a new book. The theme of World Book Day this year is Read Your Way. We would love to see photos of you reading your own way over half term. So get reading in wild, wacky and whimsical places. Please email the school office with photos and include your child’s name and class. admin@trinityroad.essex.sch.uk

Paper plate competition – win a £5 book voucher.

Everyone will be given a paper plate after half term. The challenge is to turn it into a book character or book cover. The 4 winners from across the school will each get a £5 book voucher. We cannot wait to see how creative your designs are and hear about your inspiration. Closing date for both competitions is Monday 4th March.

Check the calendar for more events!

All the events are in the school calendar and here’s a summary:

Best Wishes, Ros Clare , Reading Lead

What does the Essex Year of Numbers look like in our school?

November brought with it our celebration of ‘Barvember’ and all things bar models in the school. Thank you to all of you who were able to join us for part of this celebration with our Families Workshop at the start of the month. Throughout the school, the regular practice of bar modelling and problem solving has increased the resilience and grit to solve increasingly difficult problems, through the use of a working frame called a bar model: this has included adults as well as children!

children and adults in class for the maths workshop

The workshop led to the introduction of Maths Ambassadors from Year 6, who shared their reasoning and understanding of a range of problems with families, demonstrating their ‘Maths Talk’. We’re looking forward to developing this role further over the coming months.

We’ve also relaunched the use of TTRockstars in KS2 to increase our fluency in times tables facts, through the use of weekly class battles. This has had great uptake from children and we can already see an increase in their accuracy and speed to solve calculations. We hope that you will continue to support them to represent their class in the weekly battles.

Another way to encourage Maths learning at home is through the free White Rose 1 minute Maths app, which provides a range of sets of questions to solve in short, sharp bursts. You might also like to look for Maths in the envrionment on your way home: for example can you spot the number 7 or can you estimate the number of lights on that house?

We would like to put up a display of children taking part in ‘Maths in the Wild’, as a competition over the Winter Holiday. Please send in photos of examples of Maths you have found or children completing Maths in other ways. Examples might be baking, counting in twos with socks or borrowing a Maths sack from the library and using that!

As part of the Essex Year of Numbers, Essex County Council have released an app called Essex Year of… This includes a Maths advent calendar with the chance to win daily Maths prizes for solving a daily problem. The app also has some guides for different areas of Maths to support with Maths learning at home.

Don’t forget to join us for our next family Maths workshop on the 25th January between 9 and 10 am. The focus will be Problem Solving in classes, followed by a multiplication and division workshop in the hall.

We will also be hosting a school wide Maths Week in March: more details coming soon!

New Spring Term parent workshop announced: Setting boundaries and routines.

The SEND and Inclusion team are planning a Spring term workshop on 19th March at 9:15am, open to all parents around setting boundaries and routines to support children’s behaviour and mental health. This is expected to be hosted in the church hall again; we will confirm this closer to the time.

The workshop will be around challenging behaviour, setting boundaries and routines to support regulation and sanity for the whole family. Parents do not need to book in advance, but you are welcome to speak with Ms Miller on the gate for more information.

For those that missed the anxiety workshop this autumn term, we will run it again in the summer term. Please make sure you sign up to ParentMail so you receive all the information. You can check with the school office if your contact details are up-to-date in person, by email or by phone.

Visit our page for more on SEND & Inclusion support for parents.

Our December newsletter is out now!

We’ve emailed you our December newsletter and loaded it to the website here. You’ll find:

How much we raised with our fundraising events this term!
Essex Year of Numbers activities!
Learning stories and photos from the classrooms!
Letters from our Pastoral Manager and Assistant Head for Inclusion & SENCo!

And much more! You can also look back at previous newsletters here.

Zones of Regulation and Self -Regulation

The SEND and Inclusion team are continuing working with children on the Zones of Regulation into the spring term.

By now some of you may have heard your children talking about coloured zones related to their emotions, or practicing their breathing techniques.

We have learnt how to categorise our emotions. We have thought about triggers for ourselves and others. We have been learning how to understand how the environment can affect our thoughts and feelings and are now learning how to bring ourselves back to a calm and focused state, so we are ready to learn, play and share (green zone).

We are learning a wider range of exercises that can up regulate and downregulate our systems to move us back to the green zone, which is where we want to be most of the time.

Over the last couple of weeks, children from Rauf, Rosen and Coelho classes have shared some of their favourite activities with the rest of school.
These include; lift breathing, 5,4,3,2,1, and pulse breathing.
Children are practicing a range of these activities across the school day to help with transitions and other pinch points.

A recent pupil survey highlighted that pupils really enjoyed this work and felt the Zones assemblies and activities were helping them understand, communicate and manage their emotions more effectively. Go Team trinity!

The Zones of Regulation is researched tool that helps children recognise and manage their mental health. The school has introduced this as a systemic offer for all pupils.

In addition to this, we continue to work with an independent Occupational Therapist to strengthen our universal offer in supporting regulation. Teachers recently received sensory processing training and will be developing regulation stations in their classrooms over the next half term.

The Zones of Regulation Glossary – what words like green zone mean.

The Zones of Regulation Visual Poster

Christmas Lunch Menu

On 19th December we will be serving a Christmas lunch for children instead of the usual menu.

Children will be able to choose a main course of either: Roast Turkey, Pork Chipolata and stuffing served with roast potatoes, carrot and pea medley, roast parnsips, brussel sprouts and gravy.

Or roast seasonal vegetable & cranberry Whirl served with roast potatoes, carrot and pea medley, roast parnsips, Brussel sprouts and gravy.

For dessert, there will be a choice of Christmas ice cream pot, Chocolate and orange iced sponge or Satsuma.