Let’s get creative.
Talk of Autumn filled nursey this week as we continued to share our amazing Autumn treasures. If you haven’t returned yours to nursery yet, don’t worry, we will continue to share them until Friday.
We enjoyed using some of our Autumn treasure to create our own autumnal artwork inspired by the artist, Andy Goldsworthy. Whilst doing this, we also used some of our sorting skills to sort the leaves into different colour piles.
In the Maths area we used our Autumn treasures to copy and continue repeating patterns. Why not try this at home with toys eg car, brick, car, brick, car.
Autumn has inspired our learning in the sensory areas too. We have scooped and poured red and green lentils and barley. We listened to the sound it made as it dropped onto the tray and how it felt as it trickled through our fingers. We used the light frame to create pictures with leaves made from various materials. We watched how the light made the leaves change.
Group time learning activities began this week. We enjoyed drawing different patterns on some wellies. We drew horizontal lines, spots and some children created their own patterns including ‘x’ and zig-zags.
Help at home
Next week our Nursery Rhyme of the week is Humpty Dumpty
Can you join in with this rhyme?
Reminders
- We have been sharing lots of family photographs at group time this week. If you are still to send yours in its not to late send it to the nursery email address scholesnursey@spherefederation.org
- Please make sure that your child’s shoes are named. We have some identical pairs this year.
Stay and Learn; Phonics Phase 2 10.10.24
A big thank you to parents and carers who joined us on Thursday for our Phonics Phase 2 Stay and Learn session. We hope you enjoyed watching a lesson in action, taking part in some activities with your child and that the teacher presentation was informative. If you would like to access the slides from our presentation, please click here
Here’s some more information about phonics and reading in Reception…
What do reading groups look like in class?
Children read with an adult at the same time each morning. They look at the same book throughout the week, in groups of 6 or less. We usually read 4 times a week (Mon-Thurs). The current week’s eBook is usually issued by Thursday evening.
Day 1/2- Decoding– children are introduced to new vocabulary, key decodable words (words that can be segmented and blended) and read through the book together. The aim is to work towards automaticity (reading the words on sight/memory recognition), which in turn makes reading more fluent.
Day 3- Prosody– prosody is the patterns of stress, intonation and rhythm in speech (i.e. sounding like a story-teller!) this is modelled to the children and they are taught to spot features in the text that will affect the way we read the words (for example; how is the character feeling? is there an exclamation/question mark or other grammatical features? and briefly pausing when we see a full stop)
Day 4- Comprehension– the children will be asked a range of questions to check their understanding of what they have read. These can usually be found on the last page of the eBook, if you’d like to use them at home as talking points.
Reading reports and Keeping in Touch
Teachers will check reading reports each week via Collins Hub and will make ‘keeping in touch’ phone calls to those who have not read within the week, to see if we can offer any further support. You can also ask your class teacher at any time, if you are having issues accessing reading at home. Please remember that if you do not have a compatible device, you can hire an iPad through our school office.
Reading records
Please remember to send your child’s reading records to school each Friday. Please add a short comment about how your child has been getting on with their reading at home. Remember, this can also be about other reading as well as eBooks.
Feedback
Finally, another thank you to those of you who attended the Stay and Learn. We would love your feedback!
Please scan the QR code to fill out our feedback form.
Y3/4 Topic
This week, we’ve started learning about The Elgin Marbles as part of our topic on Ancient Greece. These were statues and friezes from the Parthenon that are still debated today, since many are housed in London and not in their native home of Athens.
We discussed the reasons put forward both for and against returning them. This links not just with our topic but also writing, where we’ve been looking at discussion texts. We always enjoy a healthy difference of opinion and we also see this in action in our weekly ‘Philosophy Friday’ discussions where we share our opinions on different topics.
Help at home by prompting a discussion with your child. Cats vs dogs? Winter vs summer? Ancient Greeks vs Romans? Can they give reasons on both sides and think about something from more than one angle?
Year 3,4 Class News
In Reading, we have explored the Greek Myth ‘Icarus and Daedalus’. The children summarised the events in the story and considered how the characters felt at different parts.
Help at home by asking your child to retell this story and discuss with them how each character felt.
In Science, we have collected data on invertebrates by recording the number of invertebrates spotted in the school grounds. After recording the data in a tally chart, the children presented their information in a graph. Why not try this at home?
Henri’s Scissors
Henri’s Scissors
We’ve been reading Henri’s Scissors, by Jeanette Winter. (This is a YouTube link. 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).
The story is a biographical children’s book, about the artist Henri Matisse. We found out about his life and looked at some of his artwork. 
Our word of the week was artist. We had lots of discussions about types of art, introducing new vocabulary such as sculptor/sculpture and collaging.
We’ve been artists ourselves by “painting with scissors”, just like Matisse!
Art talk
We’ve been using our language and communication skills to respond to different examples of artwork by Matisse. We thought about which parts we liked and disliked and tried to answer some questions about the artwork.
- Why do you think the artist painted this?
- Which is your favourite and why?
I like it because I can see green diamonds. Delilah
I like the sprinkles. Mila
It looks like a rainbow. Jazmin
I can see a green dinosaur footprint. Cillian
Phonics
This week, we learnt some more new phonemes: ck, e, u and r. Here’s a video on how to pronounce these sounds using pure sounds.
We’ve also learnt the tricky word; I. Tricky words are words that should be read by sight. We start by identifying which part of the word is ‘tricky’. ‘I’ is tricky because we need to say /igh/ and not /i/.
Poetry Picnic
Children continue to enjoy listening to poems during snack time. We listen to a new poem each week and recite it every day. By saying the poem out loud, we can focus on the sounds and rhythm of each word or line. We talk to the children about how this can help us become better readers.
We also talk about how poems sometimes have rhyming words and about how poems can have fast or slow rhythms.
Follow the link to watch Reception recite this week’s poem,Leaves are falling.
Maths; counting principles
In Maths, we’ve been using our subitising skills to identify patterns to 4. We’ve practised spotting changes and identifying the changes we can see. Are there more, fewer or the same? We even tried to listen to how many sounds we could hear – without counting!
Children investigated different ways of making 4, using multilink cubes. This was inspired by our introduction to Numberblock 4.
Help at home – autumn leaves and conkers.
If you go on a walk this weekend, we’d really appreciate donations of dry leaves to help us with an art project next week. We also need some conkers to use in our maths learning – see how many you can find! Thank you for your support.
Column Addition- Year 4
This week, Year 4 have been perfecting column addition. We started the week by adding two three digits numbers, before ending the week with adding four digit number with more than one exchange!
It’s important to remember to set out your columns correctly.
Which are correct? Spot and explain the mistakes in the others.
When exchanging, we know that we can…
Exchange ten 1s for one 10…
Exchange ten 10s for one 100…
Exchange ten 100s, for one 1000…
Help at home: Practice chanting the exchange rules. I say it, you say it, we say it! You can even say them in silly voices!
Living and Learning
This week our school-wide living and learning statement has been ‘I respect myself’. We talk about the word respect often in school. One of our school rules is ‘We’re respectful.’
In 2C we had a discussion about what it means to be respectful. Last week we spoke about respecting others and their protected characteristics such as religion, race and culture. Our discussion this week involved ways we can respect our bodies and keep them healthy such as eating a balanced diet and exercising regularly.
2C spoke about the fact that everybody is different but that is okay. For our Living and Learning task we did an activity where we each drew the head of a creature/ animal or human. We then folded the paper over and passed it to a friend who then drew a body and arms. After this we passed the paper on again and the final person drew legs. Finally, we got our original drawings back and unveiled the creature that had been created. We then spoke about how all of the pictures were different and we all have different ideas/ styles of drawing and that this should be respected.
Parent- Teacher Zoom Appointments
Nursery will hold our parent-teacher Zoom meetings after half term, in the week commencing 25 November.
Please look out for further information when we return to Nursery after the half term break.
Reading as historian
This week in reading we are linking our learning to our history topic – Ancient Egypt. The children studied labelled diagrams of the pyramids and how they are structured. The children had to research whether the sources of information were reliable – they used websites to validate the information and to also study the websites to see if they were trustworthy. The children were able to identify how one source of information was unreliable as it wasn’t a secure site. They were able to validate information by finding similar information elsewhere.
1A Parts and wholes
Today, we introduced the concept of parts and wholes into our Number learning. We looked at photographs of fruit and vegetables and decided if it was the whole fruit or a part of it. Looking at pictures of carrots, we discussed how the parts could be cut in different places to make all kinds of different parts.
After that, we were given a tower of blocks and we used our imagination to pretend they were carrots. To begin with, we ‘cut’ them into two different parts. We used the STEM sentence “these two parts combine to make a whole” to help us in our learning. After that, Mrs Brown challenged us to see if we could ‘cut’ our ‘carrots’ into three, four or five different parts.
Later this week, we will learn how numbers can be split into parts too. We will also look at a part-whole model and begin to use it in our table learning activities.
Help at home: You could talk to your child about parts and wholes as you prepare food for meals and snacks e.g. This is a whole potato, how many parts did I cut it into to make roast potatoes? Even though this is small, this is a whole grape. How many parts did I cut it into?
When you discuss parts, you could also discuss whether or not they are equal parts or whether they are different sizes.