NEWS
From important school notices to special events, sporting achievements and brilliant work - we'll share it here. You can also download all current academic year issues of our regular school newsletter, the Hamlet Herald.
Follow us on Twitter for up-to-the-minute news of what we're up to.
Follow us on Twitter for up-to-the-minute news of what we're up to.
Archived Hamlet Heralds
What's been going on this week?
September 2019
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Year 3 visited the River Darent in Horton Kirby in September to learn more about rivers and where they come from. The children had the opportunity to get into the river to test the speed of the water along a meander, using Pinky the duck to help us with our measurements! We also measured the depth of the water at different points along the meander and noticed differences on the inside and outside of the bends. Back at the centre, we built our own rivers using trays and soil, and tested their strength by adding in lego bricks to act as buildings. To end our trip, we studied the changes along the River Darent over time and compared it to the Thames and discussed the impact that plastic pollution is having on the wildlife in our rivers and oceans.
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July 2019
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Thanks to everyone who came to our art exhibition this year, what creative and talented students we have! |
June 2019
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It came down to penalties. Amazing goalkeeping meant that the first few penalties were saved. Then Year 6 got one past the goalie! And that was it. A harsh result for Year 5 but well done to Year 6. Amazing support from the fans. Amazing teamwork. #WomensWorldCup #Lionesses
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May 2019
21st May 2019
Y6 spent three nights camping on their Woodland Adventure trip, having lunch by the fire, zipping through trees, sing-songs and bedtime stories and lots more fun! |
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April 2019
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Y5 spent a week in Dorset and had an incredible time! |
March 2019
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In Year 6, we have been reading Munoz Ryan’s ‘The Dreamer’. It’s magical realist retelling of Pablo Neruda’s childhood has been encouraging all of us to dream big dreams.
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February 2019
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28th February Year 6 have been looking at the abstracted sculpture of Henry Moore and responding with their own interpretations of the artist's work inspired by their Humanities topic of Refugees and Immigration. |
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January 2019
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Y4 Retelling the story of Beowulf, which includes a few unfriendly faces!
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November 2018
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The staff and children have generated a short list through a series of in-class debates. We want YOU (Parents & Carers) to help us select the core values that make a Hamleteer. Please fill in a voting slip with your top 3 values from the shortlist, fold it once and either pop it in our ballot box under the shelter outside the office or ask your child to do so for you. Voting Starts Monday 3rd December & closes Wednesday 5th December. |
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7th November Year 4 had a great time on their trip to Horniman Museum, finding out about how animals are classified in the Natural History exhibit |
October 201817th October
Y6 working hard constructing Anderson Shelters |
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September 2018
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28th September Such an incredible opportunity our talented students experienced on Friday, performing on behalf of Young Voices for BBC Music Day on top of the O2! |
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5th September 2018
BREAKING NEWS: Earthquake in Year 4! Will there be any aftershocks? Be prepared... |
July 20189th July 2018
Years 3&4 enjoying the athletics competition at Dulwich College |
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18th July 2018 It was lovely to see so many of you being expertly guided around our Art Exhibition this week. If anyone is unsure as to what the ‘glittering curriculum’ bit of our school vision is all about, then the Art Exhibition is one of the best examples! It was a pleasure to see what the children are working on throughout the course of the year, amazing work from all! |
June 2018
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18 June 2018
In Year 4 we have been trying to solve the following question: On a digital clock showing 24 hour time, over a whole day, how many times does a 5 appear? Is it the same number for a 12 hour clock over a whole day? |
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8th June 2018
Year 6 visited the Tibetan Buddhist Temple in Bermondsey this week to learn about Buddhism |
May 2018
8th May 2018
As a part of our learning next term on plants in Science and our study of Marianne North in Art, Year 5 visited Kew Gardens on Tuesday 8th May 2018. We have studied the different plants, taking photographs and visited the exhibition of Marianne North’s botanical paintings. |
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3rd May 2018 As part of our Maya topic, Year 6 tried their hands - or, more accurately, tried their hips, thighs, chests and shoulders - at the ancient Mesoamerican ball game Pok-a-Tok this week. The verdict: extremely difficult! However, we are pleased to report that no-one was ceremonially sacrificed to the gods for losing. That's all planned in for AFTER the SATs. You can watch the experts here. |
April 2018
26th April 2018 Year 3 started their Ancient Greece Topic with Greek Day. We made our own chitons, wrote our names in Greek, learnt a dance linked to Odysseus’ journey and made a mosaic inspired by some Ancient Greek objects. |
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25th April 2018
Year 5 have taken part in the cycling proficiency programme Bikeability for the first few weeks back, following the Easter holidays. The children have learnt how to check their bike is safe to ride; how & when to signal & carry out appropriate manoeuvres for riding around the local area. They have been having lots of fun in the process! |
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24th April 2018 Year 4 are reading their new text for this half term – Cloud Tea Monkeys, which is set in the tea plantations of India. This week, the children used their reading skills to infer what a tea plantation looked like, creating beautiful green pastel sketches to represent what they visualised. |
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March 2018
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9th March 2018 Year 4 enjoying some physical theatre as part of our trip to Union Chapel. The children also took part in creative writing and a science of sound workshop, all based around the organ. |
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8th March 2018 As part of their topic on Africa, Year 5 have been studying different types of African masks and use their sketching skills to draw them. |
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February 2018
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23rd Feb 2018 Y3 started their new Plants topic in Science this week. We talked about the features of plants and then went outside to find some weeds that we could pull up and examine with our magnifying glasses. We talked about the way Victorian botanists had to make careful scientific drawings of plants and we did the same with the plants that we found. |
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21st Feb 2018 Year 5 have headed back to the pool this week where they have been working on refining the different strokes. |
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9th Feb 2018 This half term in year 3, we have been looking at rocks and fossils in science. This week, we made our own fossils, imprinting a figure into clay and using Plaster of Paris to create the fossil. |
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8th Feb 2018 Year 4 have been finding the area of shapes this week. We started the week with a practical activity which asked the children to make equivalent areas with different sized squares. Encourage your child to practise finding the area of 2D shapes, activities like this are helpful - http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zwqt6fr#z9dm2p3 |
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Year 4 really enjoyed their polar explorers day this week! The children took part in a range of endurance, strength and survival activities to help them explore the Arctic. There’s lots to find out about other polar explorers such as Rosie Stancer. Captain Scott, and Roald Amundsen online. |
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2nd Feb 18
This week, Year 3 have been learning about the Stone Age and as part of that they have been looking at how the Neolithic people lived at Skara Brae. They designed their own Skara Brae houses and then used lego to build replicas. |
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January 2018
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30th Jan 2018
An amazing evening at the Young Voices concert last night! a lovely experience for both children and parents |
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24th Jan 2018
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19th Jan 2018 Year 4 are learning about states of matter in Science. This week they used data loggers to investigate the effect heat has on the rate an ice cube melts. The children then discussed any anomalies in their results and explained how they knew the ice had changed from a solid to a liquid. |
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Year 3 have recreated the scene from our book Stone Age, when a child from the Stone Age and a child from the present day meet for the first time. How do they look to you? Nervous? Curious? Intrigued?
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On Tuesday 9th January, Year 5 were visited by a mobile planetarium. We got the chance to go inside and learn about all things space related. It was great to see the stars and different constellations on the ceiling of the dome and learn about the moon and sun in relation to planet Earth. As it was so dark inside, we unfortunately couldn’t get any pictures!
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10th Jan 18
Year 4 have been using their senses to explore wintery themed materials. The children generated powerful descriptions and included them in their own poetry. Your child could watch lots of poetry being performed on Youtube, including many Michael Rosen poems - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BxQLITdOOc |
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As part of our new topic for the Spring term, Africa, Year 5 have started to read the story, Journey to Jo’Burg. Take a look at our freeze frames reflecting the evens of chapter 1… |
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4th January 2018
Year 3 go back in time to the Stone Age for their literacy this term... |
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December 2017
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Year 4 have been making musical instruments out of different materials as part of their DT learning. There are lots of videos online to inspire if you would like to make another kind of instrument at home, here is just one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tmMsWh85IA |
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7th Dec 2017
Inspired by Henry Moore, Year 6 have been creating sculptures. We started by investigating the work of the famous British artist and critiquing his 'Reclining Figure'. Then, using our dance work on refugees, we made human freeze frames trying to encapsulate the journey of a migrant. From here, we used clay to make our own abstract statues. |
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6th Dec 2017
Music mentors did us proud performing at @SouthwarkMusic Tooley Street offices today to members of the public and council employees, including the @SouthwarkMayor. |
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7th Dec 2017 How important are commas? Year 5 investigated how commas are used to avoid ambiguity and had lots of fun acting out the sentences! |
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1st Dec 2017 Amazing singing, dancing and acting in our school Christmas play. So proud of our amazing pupils and staff! Thank you to all the parents/carers for attending, we hope you enjoyed |
November 2017
Matt Haig, an award winning author, visited our school on Tuesday 28th November. Year 5 and 6 enjoyed a fantastic, Christmas themed presentation, and then children from across the school bought signed copies of his latest book, which they are already really enjoying reading.
Eddie (6S) has already read half the book and said that he's totally gripped! |
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We are excited to announce that we have created a Times Table Rock Stars accounts for all the children.
Why? When it comes to times tables, speed AND accuracy are important – the more facts your child remembers, the easier it is for them to do harder calculations. What is TTRS? Times Table Rock Stars is a fun and challenging programme designed to help students master the times tables! To be a Times Table Rock Star you need to answer any multiplication fact up to 12×12 in less than 3 seconds! The goal is for all participating rockers to be Times Table Rock Stars after 20 weeks! What do I need to do? Please encourage your child to play for 5-10 minutes each day. You can download the app from Google or Apple play stores for both tablet and mobile devices. Please look out for the paper login information on Tuesday 28th November for years 5 and 6 and Tuesday 5th December for year 3 and 4. please see our Parents Guide for more information |
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28th Nov 2017
Year 3 has just started multiplication in maths, so we decided to take our learning outside and make arrays of the 3 times tables using chalk and anything that we could find in the playground! We also reminded ourselves about inverse operations, and tested commutative law to see if it works with all of the four operations. |
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23rd Nov 2017
This week Year 5 made parachutes out of bin bags to test the effects of air resistance. They made different sized parachutes and made predictions about how fast each one would fall. Design skills and teamwork were the key in this activity and the children did very well! |
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22nd Nov 2017 This week Year 4 have been exploring musical instruments and designing their own in DT. Next week we will be using our designs to make the instruments. Find out more about how musical instruments work here - https://www.bbc.co.uk/education/clips/zjvd2hv |
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This week, the children in Year 5 have been engrossed in our latest text… Frankenstein! We have been busy using aspirational vocabulary and structures in our writing, including the use of deliberate repetition of words and structures as well as the use of direct and reported speech.
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Year 4 visited the Horniman Museum this week, exploring different ways that animals can be grouped and classified, and observing microhabitats in the grounds. This links to our current science topic: Animals and their habitats. We later had a visitor from the RSPB to talk to us about the changes we can make at the Hamlet to further promote small wildlife in our school garden. |
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17th Nov 2017
This week, Year 5 have been busy putting the final touches to their William Morris inspired art work. Come along to our ‘Open Classroom’ event Wednesday 22nd November to see some more! |
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16th Nov 2017 This week, year 3 had a visit from the Thames Explorer Outreach Program. They talked to us all about how food is brought to us from all around the world. They also gave us some historical facts about the River Thames. We demonstrated how machinery has replaced people over time by playing a sugar cube game, where the winning team, the team who got their sugar onto the boat first, lost their jobs anyway, as they were replaced by machinery. |
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This week, Year 5 have been exploring the use of concrete, pictorial and abstract for our work on written addition and subtraction. Get your children to explain the process of re-grouping, using the pictures provided |
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Year 4 had a visit from the Iron Man this week! We investigated the crime scene and then wrote crime scene reports as detectives. You can watch an animation of the opening to the story here - https://www.bbc.co.uk/education/clips/z878q6f
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Year 3 went on a stroll along the Southbank to look at human and physical geographic features of the River Thames. We stopped on the Millennium Bridge to do some sketching and even had a police boat put on a show for us!
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9th Nov 2017
Thank you to everyone who came to our Maths Curriculum Evening on Wednesday 8th November. Please accept our apologies to those who did not receive a goody-pack of Maths resources. Only 40 of you RSVP'd but in the end 70 parents came; a fantastic turn-out. All the resources and slides are to be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19mwOhcB69pTqHGyE3RRxivOG8QXx9ild?usp=sharing Look out for further details regarding upcoming events. Thank you |
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We are pleased to announce that our series of calculation videos are available to view via our Youtube channel. The videos explain the Concrete Pictorial Abstract method which we follow, allowing children to develop a deep conceptual understanding of the written algorithms. Also available are our printable calculation guides. Please do let us have any feedback & feel free to share. Y6 Team
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2nd Nov 2017 Year 4 have been solving addition calculations with 4 digit numbers where they need to regroup the ones, tens or hundreds. There are lots of addition and subtraction games online, such as this BBC website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/ks2/maths/number/addition_subtraction/play/ |
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2nd Nov 2017 This week, Year 5 applied their knowledge of separation processes to identify the ingredients in ‘Alien Soup’. Using a combination of magnets, colanders, sieves, filter paper and fingers, they identified some surprisingly terrestrial ingredients: marbles, chickpeas, paper clips, sand, rice, salt and water. |
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2nd Nov 2017
The children of Year 6 were this week transported to the wilds of a heath in Scotland. They were introduced to a group of “weird sisters” and met a murderous and ambitious couple who were desperate to become king and queen. All this took place in the confines of Turney Hall, thanks to the Young Shakespeare Company, who performed an amazing version of Macbeth on Wednesday morning. The five actors also gave the children a chance to perform, either individually, or in the crowd scenes at court and in battle. There was much re-enactment in the playground afterwards! |
October 2017
This week Year 4 have been practising and then teaching each other the column method for addition and subtraction. There are lots of fun adding and subtracting games online, such as these - https://www.topmarks.co.uk/Interactive.aspx?cat=22 |
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19th Oct 2017
Year 3 were making fruit smoothies this week. We had 2 attempts at perfection and all will be tasted by Mrs Purcell for the grand finale! |
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15th Oct 2017 Year 5 are having a great time on their residential trip to Land & Wave this week. — dulwichhamletjunior (@Dulwichhamlet) 19 October 2017
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Year 5 boys had a great time at the Alleyns football competition this week
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This week, Year 3 joined hundreds of other primary school children from across London at the Albert Hall. We were part of the audience for the Primary Proms. It was fantastic to have the opportunity to experience live music making in one of the world’s most famous concert halls.
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13th Oct 2017
In Year 6 this week we have been making Anderson shelters and writing up instructions for how to make them. |
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This week, Year 3 have been dissecting owl pellets, we identified bones and parts of skeletons that we discovered inside and checked them against a chart to see which animals the owl had eaten!
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12th Oct 2017
Year 5 had their final session at the pool this week and focused on life saving skills. They did this in their pyjamas to recreate a real life situation. “It was harder swimming in my pyjamas rather than my shorts. We learnt skills like swimming under obstacles in the water and how to call for help.” Alfie 5LT |
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2nd Oct 2017 Our Year 6 had a fantastic time whilst on their residential trip to France! the children had a taste of French life and tried out their French language skills. A great experience for all |
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September 2017
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29th Sept 2017
Year 6 have been working as historians, researching old boys and staff of Dulwich Hamlet School, who died in World War One. We cross referenced some photos found in our archives with the memorial plaque in the playground and researched these names on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Website. We also found the records of a Henrich Hentschel who died fighting for the Germans. He is commemorated at our school and we hope to visit his grave in a British cemetery in Arrasit. |
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25th Sept 2017
Year 3 had a brilliant day out on Monday! We visited Horton Kirby and spent most of the day up to our wellies, measuring the depth and flow of the River Darent. The River Darent (River Darenth) is a Kentish tributary of the River Thames. Its name is believed to be derived from the Celtic word derva, meaning oak, and thus 'the river where oak-trees grow'. The Darent is about 40 km (25 miles) in length. It rises in several springs around the village of Westerham in Kent. http://www.primaryhomeworkhelp.co.uk/river/index.html |
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27th Sept 2017
Here Year 4 are investigating how the size of a drum effects the volume of the noise made! Did you know that the speed of sound is around 767 miles per hour (1,230 kilometres per hour)? |
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25th Sept 2017
Year 5 carrying out an investigation to find out what makes a good thermal insulator. The challenge was to to see which team could keep hot water at the highest temperature over a period of 30 minutes. The results were somewhat confusing! |
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29th Sept 2017
Year 5 took a trip back in time this week as they visited the Ragged School Museum. They were fully immersed into what life would have been like for children during the Victorian era, experiencing a typical lesson and a taking part in a handling session in a Victorian kitchen. |
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Lego at lunchtime! these three buys designed a wonderful dragon head, can't wait to see the finished build!
Fun Lego Facts
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Hamlet on Instagram - As part of our continuing drive to improve our communication and to coincide with #saferinternetday we can now announce our Instagram account @dulwichhamletjs. As some of you know, we have had a presence on Twitter for some time now. We will continue to use Twitter to engage with the "tweacher" community, post live updates and connect with local schools and interested parties. However to reach more parents our Instagram account will now also provide a glimpse of the rich and varied learning which happens in each year group every week.
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A huge ‘thank you’ to the DHJS team, specifically Miss Campbell, for giving our Choir members the ‘night of their life’ at the O2 Young Voices concert, The children sang their hearts out. |
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Maurice Fulcher Cricket Winners 2017
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We hope you all enjoyed our performance of the Peace Child at St Barnabas Church. We are proud of all our actors, musicians and dancers. Thank you very much to all those who made a donation to our collection buckets. We raised a grand total of £722.73. We will be sending the money to the Brixton and Norwood Food Bank
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Dulwich Hamlet has fended off a planned alien invasion. Aliens crash-landed a spaceship in our playground and interrupted an assembly with a chilling warning of their evil plans. Unfortunately for them, as most of you know, this school is also a secret government research facility and so our engineering teams were set to work designing a range of defence mechanisms including: making armour suits, cooking up anti-alien goo, creating helium escape pods, coding advance reconnaissance robots and designing 21st century Anderson Shelters. Funnily enough we haven't heard from the aliens ever since: either they have returned home or are living among us, unseen and unheard.
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Our Gold STARs award and Ms Bartle's
School Travel Plan Champions award. |
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Wow! Thank you Dulwich Hamlet children, parents & carers you have brought joy and happiness to 98 families.
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Southwark Schools Cross Country meet Oct 2016 at
Dulwich Park. |
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Once again, we were blown away by your generosity. We were delighted that Tim Boyce, Chair of Trustees of the Norwood and Brixton food bank, was able to join us for our special Harvest assembly. Following a short film he explained the role of the food bank and distribution centre and talked to us about the impact of our donations. Thank you once again
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This is a charity we feel worthy of our attention and
one we have committed to in the past. If you would like to donate to this worthy appeal your gifts will be much appreciated by some of the most deprived communities. |
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