Forest Schools and Bikeability
It’s a busy half term for our year 5 students. They have started Forest School and have Bikeability to look forward to next week.
Forest School has been a huge success for the children. Perhaps not so much for parents with all those muddy clothes! From playing in the mud kitchen to bug hunting, children are picking up plenty of new skills and learning to play alongside each other imaginatively.
Bikeability is also another great opportunity to pratcise skills and learn resilience and take safe risks.
Help at home: Get ahead by taking a family bike ride this weekend. Head out to the woods for some imaginative play.
Craft club
Spring has sprung in craft club this week. We have enjoyed making some Spring time pictures today.
We painted our hands and printed them to make some wonderful flower paintings. We also used dots to colour in pictures of chicks and rabbits.
Just look at our creative pieces of art! Well done, Craft Club!
Year 5 Maths: Decimals and Conversions
This half term in maths, Year 5 have been working hard on multiplying by decimals and converting units of measurement. The children have been using their knowledge of place value and times tables to help them multiply decimals accurately, thinking carefully about how numbers shift when we multiply by tenths, hundredths and thousandths.
The children have also been exploring different units of measurement and practising converting between them, such as millimetres, centimetres, metres and kilometres. The children have shown great perseverance when tackling some tricky multi-step problems, and it has been brilliant to see them explaining their thinking and helping each other spot patterns in the maths.
Help at home: See if your child can spot measurements around the house or when out and about, from millimetres on a ruler to kilometres on road signs, and challenge them to convert between them!
Books and beans
We LOVE reading in Nursery and we’re always excited to join in with celebrations for World Book Day. The children from Year 5/6 came to read our favourite stories to us . We all had a lovely time.
Here are a few photos – Can you name the characters and match them to the book?
We’ve been planting our own beans this week. We’ve spoken about what they will need to grow and how we will look after them.
We’ll be watching our beans closely to check for any changes. Have a look at drop off, or pick up they are in Sunshine Room.
Next week’s learning
We’ll continue with our growing theme and will listen to Oliver’s Vegetables by Vivian French.
Nursery Rhyme of the week
Sound of the week
Help from home
Over the next few weeks , we’re learning about growing up and looking at how we change as we get older.
It would be great if we could look at some photographs of children when they were babies and toddlers. If you’re able to, please send us an email with one photograph of your child as a baby and one photograph of them as a toddler. We’ll use these in group time and will also be creating a ‘Guess who?’ display in Nursery.
scholesnursery@spherefederation.org
Reminders
Lunchboxes – please ensure that these are clearly named on the outside of the bag/box. We have a number of identical lunchboxes in Nursery and need to ensure that the correct lunch is given to each child.
The Hundred Decker Bus
The Hundred Decker Bus
This week, we enjoyed reading ‘The Hundred Decker Bus‘ by Mike Smith. In the story, a bus driver who is bored of his everyday routine decides to take his passengers on an unexpected adventure. As more and more passengers hop on board, extra decks have to be built onto the bus, creating a very tall and unusual ride!
Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog along the play bar and turn off autoplay – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip.
Linked to the story, we’ve been learning about the differences and similarities between cities/towns and the countryside. The children have shared their ideas about what life might be like in each place and discussed what they might see, hear and do there.
Our Word of the Week is countryside. We’ve explored what this word means and how it compares to living in a busy town or city.
Phonics
This week in phonics, we’ve been reviewing our Phase 3 sounds and practising reading words that contain two or more digraphs (two letters that make one sound). We also review tricky words every day. Tricky words are words that cannot easily be sounded out, so children need to recognise and remember them.
Help at home: We’ve previously introduced a few fun games you can play at home to practice tricky words. Here’s another you could try…
Tricky word stick person (a modified version of the ‘hangman’ game)
Write the correct number of dashes for your chosen tricky word and let your child make guesses. Encourage your child to use letter names rather than sounds for spelling tricky words. Draw a part of the stick man for each incorrect guess- you can give extra chances by adding a hat, shoes, gloves etc. to the stick person!
Focus Artist – Michael Craig-Martin
This week, we also learned about a new artist, Michael Craig-Martin. He is a contemporary artist known for his bold, colourful artworks and simple line drawings of everyday objects. His work often features bright colours with strong outlines, turning ordinary items into striking pieces of art. Inspired by his style, we created our own artwork based on a transport theme, using bright colours and clear outlines to design our pictures.
PE – Multi-skills
Rainbow and Sunshine Class loved joining together for PE outside on Tuesday in the spring sunshine. The children worked in pairs to practise their ball control skills, rolling the ball – or “mouse” – backwards and forwards to each other. As their control improved, they challenged themselves to roll the mouse through a “mouse hole”, which they created using cones. The children showed great teamwork and concentration while developing their coordination skills. We’re looking forward to developing this game over the next few weeks.
Reminders
Reception Class assembly – Thursday 12 March at 2.45-3.15pm
This is an opportunity to come into school to find out what your child has been learning about and to see some photos from our visit to This Green Moon.
World Book Day in 2C
KS1 had the very best day, off time table, doing everything to enjoy BOOKS! We love books, reading and dressing up!
We had a whole school assembly where adults shared an extract form their favourite book or poem. It was great to come together and see everyone’s book character costumes.
At 11am we joined in the BBC’s National Online Lesson about reading. This was rather interactive and helped us to underpin the importance of your ‘reading vibe.’ Basically, where you like to read and what do you like to read.
I like to be cosy in my bed when I read- Liezah
We have a daily reading session with our school reading books, so of course we kept that in our day:
In the afternoon, 3/4C came to read books with us and we also made some colourful bookmarks. It was heart warming to watch how caring the older children were towards the Year 2s.
The World Book day activity pack had some great activities in it. We just didn’t have enough time to complete the challenges in there. One of our favourites was the ‘create your own wordsearch’ based on your chosen book. Children have brought them home to complete.
Don’t forget: To take your child’s World Book Day Token to a bookshop to claim their free book.
Year 3, 4 Production
This week, the rehearsals for the Year 3,4 production ‘Shakespeare Rocks’ have started.
The children have been working hard to project their voices, learn their lines, sing the songs and practise their acting. We are really impressed so far.
Please continue to help your child at home to learn their lines and/or the song lyrics. Well done for the hard work so far!
Team 3,4
World Book Day
Today, we’ve celebrated World Book Day. The children have dressed as a character from their favourite book – the costumes are fabulous! Well done, everyone.
We’ve celebrated reading by:
– sharing our favourite books
– listening to the class novel
– listening to stories and extracts read by different members of staff in assembly
– taking part in the BBC Live Assembly
– reading and sharing books with KS1 children
– completing a range of reading-based activities
Help at home by visiting the authorfy website and discovering a new author. Remember that it is free for everyone to use this year!
World Book Day
We had an AMAZING day yesterday for World Book Day! Thank you so much to all parents and carers for providing children with such fantastic costumes and for sending them to school with their favourite books.
During the day we discussed our favourite books, characters and authors. We designed our own book cover and wrote sentences about the books we like.
We also had some of the older children from 3/4A visit our classroom and read with us. It was so much fun !
Help at home by reading as much as you can at home! We want all of our children to be confident and fluent readers by the time they leave KS1.
World Book Day
We’ve had a great day celebrating World Book Day today and the children looked fantastic in their costumes. We spent the day talking about our favourite books, reading to younger children and completing some interesting activities.
