Living and learning : strong emotions
In our Living and Learning sessions we have been talking about our feelings, and in particular, strong emotions. We all have felt angry, sad and happy at some point. We identified emotions on other people’s faces and talked about how emotions can feel overwhelming but will pass over time. Can you guess the emotions that the children below were trying to show?
Visit to John Smeaton Academy
Children in year 5/6 had a great time at John Smeaton Academy. They carried out several experiments in science and even baked their own cookies.
Reading in Year 3,4
Last week’s activity was Question Master! Well done to everybody who brought in their reading records with the Question Master activity completed. There were a range a questions asked – some to the author, and some to the illustrator – but all were well thought-out.
Marianne asked: “How do you create such amazing stories?” and “Where do you get you ideas from?”
Thank you to all the adults who wrote some fantastic comments in their child’s reading records. Remember – useful comments might include what went well, what they need help with or how many pages they read at home.
This week’s reading task is Fact File! The children need to choose a character or person (fiction or non-fiction) from the book and create a fact file all about them.
- What’s their full name?
- How old are they?
- What do they look like?
- What is special about them?
Where I Live
This week the children have been exploring and discussing where they live. We have been discussing the different rooms in our homes and how each home is different. We also learnt the poem – Home by Nancy VandenBerge. We created actions to help remember the words.
Can your child recite it for you?
In Maths, we have explored matching. The children have been finding matching objects which are the same. They enjoyed making matching models, matching objects to the shadows and finding matching pairs.
In Literacy , we have been using our new phonics knowledge to add initial sounds to our pictures.
Check out what else has been happening this week.
Home link
Take a walk around your local area. Can your child spot local landmarks or features. You may choose to make a map of your journey, a bird’s-eyed view of your street or make a model to represent your local area.
I’ll huff and I’ll puff…
Have you read the story of ‘The Three Little Pigs’ recently? Children have loved listening to the story this week and re-telling it with their friends using the story props.
If you have a copy at home, read it with your child and see if they can join in with some of the repeated refrains in the story. If you don’t have the book, see what you can remember and have a go at re-telling the story together. There are lots of versions on-line if you need a reminder. What are the main events in the story? Remember to include some important story language as you tell the story.
- Once upon a time…
- “Little pig, little pig, let me come in!”
- “Not by the hairs on my chinny, chin chin…”
- “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down!”
In the Sunshine room, our new construction small world area has been extremely popular. We’d like to say a huge ‘Thank you’ to Miss Backhouse, who gifted the construction toys to Nursery in summer on her retirement.
Outside, children have enjoyed mark making on the floor in the rain using paints and they continue to show their interest in construction, fixing the climbing frame and building towers.
We’ve also enjoyed cycling, singing along to the Lion King and balancing on wobble boards.
Whilst digging in the planters, children were very surprised to find some unexpected treasure. They discovered some potatoes hiding, waiting to be dug up and eaten. We also harvested some weird and wonderful shaped carrots! Children helped to wash and prepare the vegetables for snack time. Everyone enjoyed tasting them with their toast on Thursday afternoon, fresh from the garden. They were delicious!
Family photos
Thank you to everyone who has e-mailed a family photo. They’re displayed in our home corner. If you haven’t had a chance yet, don’t worry, please send it in this week.
Autumn
Next week, we’ll learn about autumn. We’ve already seen some bulging pockets full of conkers that children have enjoyed collecting! Watch out for a little brown bag coming home with your child soon. We’d love you to collect some autumn treasure and return it to Nursery for children to talk about with their friends. You could also e-mail a photo of you collecting things on your walk and let us know any words your child uses to describe what they find. scholesnursery@spherefederation.org
Diary entry writing
Over the last couple of weeks, we have been building up to writing our own diary entries. We read numerous stories from our class novel – Survivors and used these to generate ideas for our own writing. We based the majority of our ideas on the story of Mawson who was the sole survivor of an expedition to Antarctica. We spent some time focusing on vocabulary and generated words that would describe the landscape, emotions and the hardship of an expedition. We began to consider suitable fronted adverbials to add to our writing. These were being used to add extra detail and interest to our writing and to demonstrate our ability to vary our sentence structure. The children also needed to include relative clauses in their diary entry. Everyone worked super hard on their diaries and they were a pleasure to read.
WUSU…per Stars!
Every day, , Year 5 and 6 participate in 10 minutes of Wake Up, Shake Up to get our heart beats nice and high
Children have the option of dancing to songs from our WUSU playlist, or skipping and showing off some cool skills!
Obviously the adults like to join in too!
Geography – looking for human or physical features on maps and aerial photographs
We have been looking at maps, keys, aerial photographs and talking about physical and human geography in our topic lessons this half term. We walked around our school grounds, marked the route we took and found the things we saw on the map and aerial photograph. We also found our school on Google Earth. Does your child know their address? Help them to learn it and find where they live on a map or Google Earth.
Reading Records!
Wow! We’ve got some fabulous front covers done for our reading records – well done! Keep them coming in.
The children have an activity to complete each week. Inside the front cover, there’s a list of fun activities linked to reading. Check with your class teacher what the activity is.
Maths – place value and counting
We’ve been counting forwards and backwards from different numbers. We use a 100 square, number lines and songs to help us.
We have also been using a range of models to represent numbers.
We use real life examples to demonstrate how 10s and 1s can be used. Here we have 12 pens made up of one pack of 10 and two ones.
By seeing and making a range of representations, children are able to secure a deep understanding of numbers.
Most of the following representations focus on partitioning (splitting up a number into parts) a number into tens and ones.
The middle box on the bottom row shows 12 being made by cubes. The second picture in that box is to show how the cubes can be drawn. Children find it far quicker and easier to draw a long line to represent a ten than drawing a rectangle that is divided into ten squares.
Use these at home to support your child’s learning.