Beautiful May Day Queen and Maids

So far we have raised £203!

😬 Yes it’s true. From writing our letters and delivering them to our  neighbours we managed to raise £203 so far!

On Thursday we walked around Astbury to collect all our envelopes. We hoped people had read our letters and wanted to buy raffle tickets. We were very surprised and very grateful as lots of people did. We even got to talk to some of them and they thanked us for their letters. 

As well as collecting letters we also stopped into Astbury Care home to meet some older ladies and gentlemen and have a quick chat. Some of the people we met were older than us, they were between 86 and 92 years old. They really liked meeting us and we liked meeting then too. 

After our walk we watched the May Day Commitee and helpers putting up the tents for May Day.
With all our hard work and lots of walking we think that we may have beat the other classes at making the most money! 

Thank you to all the parents who were able to help on the stall on Saturday. Your help was very much     appreciated. 

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Look what arrived this morning!

Mrs Gifford came in to give us a letter that came in the post. 
It was a reply from one of the neighbours to one of our letters. John and Glendale wrote to us to thank us for our letter. They said they’d be out on Thursday but had enclosed their £5 and their raffle ticket stubbs. How great is that! We were so excited. 👏🏼😬

May Day preperations

Last week we went out to deliver our letters we had been writing to the neighbours. We wrote to them about the our May Day stall and asked if they would like to buy any raffle tickets. 

Before posting our letters we turned our classroom into a post office. We decorated our envelopes and put raffle tickets in with our letters.

After sorting out letters we set off on our delivery round. 

On our way back we learnt about road signs, pedestrian crossings, speed limits and how to make lorries honk their horns!😀

We will be going back on Thursday to see if there will be any raffle tickets waiting for us. 
We have done our bit for May Day so now it’s time for you to help aswell. We need you to sign up for a time slot to help out on our raffle stall. Our stall has great views of the dancing, will be opposite the fire engine and is usually close to the food. Miss Irwin will be asking you to sign up. The time slots are only for 15 minutes. Please help us to raise lots of money (also to beat all the other classes at raising the most money). 

May Day competition

This afternoon Miss Irwin taught us about the Village tradition of May Day and how it’s a big celebration for our school. We learnt about the maypole and the Queen and her retinue.    

Then we were told we were entering a competition to design a the May Day front cover for the programme book. We got very excited! 

Using old May Day photos and ideas we had learnt about May Day we drew our designs.
     

 We know the whole school is entering the competition but we are keeping our fingers crossed that one of us might win! 😬

Our drawing skills were very good and our colouring was careful and neat.

   
    
 

May Queen and little Maids

  As Astbury School we have a wonderful tradition in taking part in the yearly event of May Day. This is a day when the whole community of the village comes together to celebrate the new May Queen of the year. The Queen is chosen from our school as are her attendants. The whole school is involved in dances and each class has a stall to run where all the money raised comes back to school. There is also food and drink tents, local business stalls, rides and last year we even had the fire service with a fire engine. It’s a wonderful family day for everyone to enjoy.

On Friday in Celebration worship we had the draw for who would be the school’s new May Queen and Chelsea was picked out of the hat. The current Queen Lily-Lou will retire in May and Chelsea will have her ceremony and take her place as the new Queen. As part of the tradition every little girl in Reception will be a little maid to the new queen. This means they will be in photos, sit on the throne with her and be a big part of the day.

As part of the girls maids costumes they wear all white dresses provided by school. They are asked to wear white pumps to accompany the dresses. These can often be tricky to find at the time. Lucky for us Rufus’ mummy noticed that there were white pumps for sale in Marks and Spencer’s now! We thought it might be worth while letting parents know now.

 
Little boys in Recepton also are part in the day.They become part of the procession and get to wear little shorts and waist coats provided by school. Parents are asked to provide white shirts to go underneath their waistcoats. Boys wear black pumps.

More information on May Day will be posted as we get nearer to May. Please keep your eye on the school newsletters and this blog. 

May Day costumes and Saturday arrival information.

Boys costumes will go home on Friday. They must come ready dressed in their costumes. 

Girls Maid dresses will stay in school for them to get changed into when they arrive at school at 12.45. 

All children must arrive at school on Saturday at 12.45 through Miss Irwin’s classroom. The gate will be open at 12.45. There they will be signing in register and then children will be sent to the rooms to get ready. No parents are allowed beyond Miss Irwin’s classroom. 

Parents are best to then get a place ready for viewing the procession, getting a seat in church or a seat on the field at the farm to watch dancing. 

Only Maids mums who have offered help will be allowed to come into school. But they will have to leave before the procession.  

If you are unsure of timings please check the letter on the school website. 

If you are helping on a stall Miss Itwin will have a wrist band for you to wear which gets you free entry.

Raffle ticket collection!

Yesterday, we had a wonderful surprise when Rachel the play therapist popped into our class. She brought back in one of our class Jonah envelopes. We had posted it through her door on Tuesday. She had read Annabelle’s letter and said she was so impressed she had to buy some raffle tickets! She bought £5 worth! 
We were very pleased. We thought maybe our plan might have worked. 

So today was the moment of truth. We would find out if all our hard work of planning and writing our letters, making our packages and posting all 50+ letters to our neighbours had worked? 

After play we set off on our walk.  

  We found our first envelope  just near the daffodill green.  

 But then not many more for a few doors. It was then we thought maybe people were on holiday, or too busy, or maybe didn’tike raffles! We started to. Have sad faces. 😟

But then…

As we got further down the road and spilt into teams to check different sides of the road we found a few on some door stops, then a few more, then a few more! We were starting to prove our critics wrong! Our bag was getting full!   

 
We even had people come out and talk to us and chase us to give us their tickets! 

When we got back to school we counted up all the envelopes, we’d collected 30!

We have managed to raise from our letters £138. We are extremely happy and Miss Irwin is very, very proud of us all. 😀

So please help us to raise more money on the raffle by telling everyone how hard we’ve worked, so they might want to buy tickets too! 

Where is Kenya?

Today we started our week long short topic of Kenya and Mqwito Primary school.   

  We used globes to find where Africa was and learnt Africa is a big collection of countries. Then we tried to find Kenya. We did really well. 

Then we learnt about the Kenyan flag and what it’s colours are for and made our own version. 

   

In the afternoon we had P.E on the field and today we learnt how to hit a ball with a tennis racket. It was great fun! 

   

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

On Thursday we are going to join Class Moses for a joint P.E lesson, to learn our May Day dance! Fingers crossed!   😃

Newsletter 25.4.14

Dear Parents,

This week we have started our new topic of growing we carried on observing our seeds that we planted before half term. Some of our sunflowers are really growing big but some of our beanstalks have not yet appeared! We have been using rulers to measure them to see if they have grown. Some of us have seen a 2cm growth in just one week. Its super exciting.

We have also been on our trip to Astbury Garden Centre where we looked at the things they sell and talked about why people would use them. We have made a list of the things we would like in our garden centre and Miss Irwin is going to put it on the blog to see if anybody has anything spare in their gardens that we can borrow for our role-play. Miss Irwin did remind us that it was probably unlikely we might no get to borrow a dove house or water feature but spare ornaments, potted plants might come in!

In our phonics this week we have gone onto our next set of sounds- we are now on GREEN sounds. The green sounds are blends. We have learnt that when we see blends at the end of the word we can squeeze them together and say them faster. For example instead of saying l d, we now say ld. We have been on blend hunts and are spotting them in words around the classroom and in our bug club books we are doing really well.

Next week on Monday Mr O’Leary will be teaching the class Miss Irwin has instructed us to help Mr O’Leary all day because he might not know where things are or how we do things in Class Jonah so we all have to be his helpers. We will be doing P.E on Monday afternoon with him so we all need our P.E kits in school.

In Maths next week we will continue to measure but we are also going to start learning about money and what the value of coins are. In our writing we will be sequencing stories and how plants grown and practising writing our super sentences.

How you can help at home:
*Practising writing words with end blends in e.g
*Look at coins and see what coins we recognise- are they different colours, do they have numbers on them, do we know the names of them?

Notice
Please make sure you have read the School-Newsletter-3rd-April-2014
as it has lists of what the children are expected to wear for Astbury May Day and asks for donations for the stalls. We will be starting our dancing this next week. Costumes will be supplied nearer the time.
Girls need: white pumps and white socks.
Boys need: black pumps, white socks and a white long sleeved shirt.
It might be worth while talking to parents from last year to see if they have any out grown pumps or shirts they don’t need anymore. There is a white pair of girls pumps with Miss Irwin as donated by Mrs Edgerton-Brooks from last year. Check with Miss Irwin for size.

Mrs Rowe found these pumps in Primark for only £2.50!

Have a nice weekend
Miss Irwin and Miss Kippen