Upcoming Diary Dates

This week	Event	Details
Monday 22nd May (9am)	Farms for City Children Assembly (in-school event)	A Visiting Speaker from Farms for City Children – our new charity that we are supporting as a school – will be sharing about what they do in assembly.
Monday 22nd May (2pm)	Kindergarten to Junior Transition Q&A	Parents of children moving up to the new Class 1 (Willow Class) in September are welcome to attend a Q&A session to find out more about transitioning to the Junior School. Join us in person or virtually ( Zoom invites sent and recordings will be shared).
Thursday 25th May (afternoon in-school)	Sailing for Hazel, Chestnut and Oak Children	Sailing at Wimbledon Park will be taking place in school. Children will return to school in time for afterschool clubs.
Friday 26th May (after drop-off)	Oak Walk and Talk with Sarah	A chance to meet our new Headteacher personally while enjoying springtime in the park.
Friday 26th May	End of Half Term	Have a great week off and see you all again on Monday 5th June!
Week commencing Monday 5th June	Event	Details
Thursday 8th June (afternoon in-school)	Sailing for Hazel, Chestnut and Oak Children	Sailing at Wimbledon Park will be taking place in school. Children will return to school in time for afterschool clubs.
Friday 9th June (10-11:30am)	Open Morning	Prospective parents and children are welcome to attend this Open Morning to find out more about the magic of The London Acorn School. Book a place at Open Day – The London Acorn School

Welcome from our Headteacher

The beautiful summer weather is bringing new experiences to our children, from more elaborate Morden Cottage garden games and picnic lunches to sailing on Wimbledon Park Lake for older students. I was particularly impressed with the way that children moved through the journey to sailing together, walking in pairs and using tram and tube under supervision, but also paying attention to other pedestrians and passengers, not to mention their willingness to move outside their comfort zones and get sailing their own craft.

Meanwhile, in our more junior sections of Class One and Kindergarten, we observe a lot of beautiful creative play and expressive drawing, with children stretching their imaginations to the utmost with the aid of our carefully designed play items. The focus of many of our play resources is flexibility and neutrality, so the children have to work hard to decide what they will play, and how they will use our play items themselves. A key example of this is presented by our frames in Kindergarten – they can be draped or adjusted by children to be a castle, a shop, a tent for a camping trip, or indeed anything else that they invent. Inventiveness, ingenuity and problem solving then flow naturally, in a way that they cannot do with ‘pre-made’ playthings that give clear prompts to how children should work with them, and so limit play options. The social talk amongst children as they create their play together through inventiveness and problem solving is often the most magical because you can literally hear the ideas forming.

Given the option, and especially if they are a bit tired, children will naturally gravitate towards the easiest form of stimulation and go for the ‘pre-made’ (don’t we all!), and if the pre-made is not a shared item, no conversation, sharing or negotiation is needed.

As we are aiming to stretch our students, socially, academically, and even physically I would like to share a request from our faculty with you. Please can you make sure that your children keep pre-made play items – from teddies to fiddle toys to top trumps – at home. There is a place for them, and we do have quite a few pre-made items, held in common, in the school. Eliminating them from the school day will gently nudge children to finding stimulation in effortful creativity, setting up the neural pathways to make them into eager and natural learners, skilled at conjuring up ideas, books and play items from scratch.

With warmest regards,

Sarah

Announcements, Reminders and Important Information

New Starters:

Please join us in welcoming Maria-Bella and Sunny Valente Valois to Kindergarten this term. We hope you and your family settle into our community and enjoy your learning journey at TLAS.

Thank you:

Thank you to all our parents who contributed to the wonderful occasion of our May Day Festival (please see photos below). It was fantastic to celebrate our diversity as a school with such a tasty array of dishes from all over the world.

Reminder:

Follow us on Social Media @thelondonacornschool on Instagram and Facebook for daily posts, including photos and videos and event reminders.
Term ends on Friday 26th May, afterschool clubs running as normal. Term will start again on Monday 5th June.

Exciting opportunities:

Barnes Children’s Literature Festival is returning on Saturday 24th and Sunday 25th June. Not only have they got a legendary line-up of authors speaking, including Sir Michael Morpurgo, but they also have a rendition of The Wind in the Willows, great research for our own Wind in the Willows musical. For more information, visit https://www.barneskidslitfest.org/.

Kindergarten News

The cuckoo and the donkey, they quarrelled one fine day,

As to who could better sing, as to who could better sing,

In this lovely month of May, in this lovely month of May.

The cuckoo said now hear me, and soon began to call.

But I can do it better, but I can do it better,

Sang the donkey with heehaw, sang the donkey with heehaw.

Such sweet and lovely music, it echoed wide and far.

They sang so well together; they sang so well together.

Cuckoo, cuckoo, heehaw, cuckoo, cuckoo, heehaw.

In our May Day Festival, as well as celebrating the arrival of spring, we also celebrated our differences and similarities, shared a wonderful time as families and as a community.

We introduced a new ring time this week. It starts from how the cuckoo and the donkey can actually make lovely music together, then enters the festivity and love in a bird’s wedding, and closes with little white doves resting in their dovecote.

In Summer Term, children’s energy and creativity bloom like colourful flowers, but at the same time forces and ideas may clash. We are focusing more on helping children learning the ways of being kind to each other. Tiredness, hunger and thirst hinder the ability to listen and to self-express. Fruits are added onto our Tuesday and Wednesday menu. We have also been encouraging kids to drink more water and to let us know when they need a rest or some fresh air. It will also be helpful to incorporate quiet times for home rhythm before they completely exhaust themselves and have to stop.

Older Kinde children’s hard work finally got the allotment beds ready. They planted corn and squash seeds this week. In the classroom, we continued the “frog” craft project. Theodora made her cute frog with really big eyes on her birthday and she loved it so much! Happy birthday, dear Theodora! We’d also like to open our arms to greet Maria-Bella and Sunny for officially joining kindergarten. A big WELCOME!

In Woodwork, Kindergarten have been making a huge mess in the workshop! They have been using spokeshaves to remove bark from branches and create walking staffs.

Junior School News

Willow Class have been gathering information about Morden Hall Park in order to write an information leaflet as part of their Sustainability Topic this term. What’s more, they have been linking RE (Mindfulness) and Science (Ecosystems) with Art to create a class display. What beauty we can create when we work together.

Hazel Class have made practising their debating skills in English – beware parents! The students have been debating Victorian parenting in relation to our class text, Rooftoppers. They are creating convincing arguments supported by evidence as well as learning formal oracy skills.

Oak Class have been introduced to Homer and the overall picture of the Iliad and Odyssey. We will be working on stories from the Odyssey for the rest of term. We also took a lesson to explore dress and clothing in Ancient Greece. With maths, we have begun the journey to understand negative numbers. Meanwhile, in literacy, we have been sharpening our punctuation and returning to spelling tests, with commonly misspelt words the spelling theme of the week.

Hazel and Oak Classes also learnt the ropes last week and took to the water with sailing lessons. It was fantastic to see every child sailing on Wimbledon Lake and getting over any fears of capsizing with the reward of ice cream! Our confident students are already looking forward to a little more wind next lesson.

Woodland Craft

Willow Class

It was great to see Willow class after a long break, and their sharing and entwining of flowers in their festival wreaths was impressive.

Hazel Class

We looked at bee anatomy and then did part one of a printing project, beginning to print bees and leaves on cotton bags. There was also time for some mud-flinging, imaginative games and insect- spotting.

Chestnut and Oak Classes

We practised tree ID at the start with ‘leaf tickets’ to the woodland, where whittling, using a frayed branch to sweep a hawthorn den, receiving visitors, running, mud play, discussions and exercising on logs all took place. The insect field guide was handy, and most of us tasted birch sap, sent over from Sweden in frozen bottles by my aunt, which was respected – but not much liked!