Art – printing
We’ve used out printing skills that we learned on the Hepworth Gallery trip last week. There were some ‘ooohs’ and ‘ahhhs’ as children saw what pattern their tile made.
Design and Technology – Cooking
Over the last couple of weeks, the children have had a great time making and tasting leek and potato soup.
The children used knives safely to cut the onions, potatoes and leeks using the claw grip and bridge method. The children also discussed the importance of food hygiene.
At home, why not make this recipe?
How To Catch A Star
Literacy
This week our focus story was ‘How to Catch a Star‘ by Oliver Jeffers. (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). We read the book and spent time retelling the story in our own words.
Phonics
During our recent Phonics lessons we’ve been expanding our digraph knowledge. Digraphs are two letters that make one sound. Here are the ones we now know so far:
ck, ss, ll, ff, zz, qu, ch, sh, th, ng, nk
Help at home: you could write these digraphs on paper to play with your child. They’d be great as flashcards to practise or if you made two sets, you could play games such as Snap or Matching Pairs. You also hide one pack around the house and then use the other as a prompt to find the right one.
The Phonics challenge in class this week was to challenge a friend to a Tricky Word Boo game. You need to read as many words as you can and collect them in a bowl as you go. Be careful though! If you come across the word ‘Boo’ – you need to put all your words back. The winner is the person with the most cards at the end.
Help at home: You could play a game of Tricky Word Boo at home.
Word Of The Week
Our word of the week this week is ‘reflection‘.
We use this song to help us practise the word of the week in class:
Poetry Picnic
Each week we learn a new poem and we recite this poem every day. By saying the poem out loud, we can focus on the sounds and rhythm of each word or line. We talk to children about how this can help us become better readers. This week’s poem is called ‘Mice’ by Rose Fyleman.
Here’s Sunshine Class reciting it 🙂
Maths
After watching an episode of Numberblocks, we enjoyed making our own Stampoline prints to show different ways of making 5.
Help at home: You could watch the Stampolines episode with your child
PE
During our PE lessons, we’ve been using the large equipment in the hall to practise our balancing skills. Balancing is one of the fundamental movement skills. It is a key skill for many sports such as tennis, gymnastics, football, ballet, dance, golf and many more.
Winter weather
The winter weather is well and truly here. We had fun in our outdoor classroom mark making in the frost with paint brushes and water and being ice detectives.
Tree Planting
Year 5/6 had the opportunity to plant some trees in our local area this week. This was part of our Where In The World Am I topic in which we looked at carbon stores.
Help at home: Look at the Woodland Trust website for more ideas for how to help biodiversity in your area.
Testing our memories!
Each week in class, the children complete recaps as part of their learning in topic and science. These are great at getting the children to recall the learning they’ve done recently but also remembering the learning they’ve done in previous years. Today, they completed a topic recap as their morning task. It tested their knowledge on geography – the children had to remember the vocabulary linked to fieldwork from last half term. It also made them recall their learning on computing and climates from a previous geography topic.
Skipping School
Last week, Years 3 and 4, had a fantastic afternoon with Skipping School leader – Chris. Chris took the children through each step, such as how to hold your skipping rope in a smile shape and when to jump after the rope clicks the floor. They then worked up to doing complicated straddle jumps and crossing the skipping ropes! The children were great and were really resilient (as it can be quite tricky!) while working together and encouraging one another.
Some of Year 4 will be participating in the Skipping School Competition after Easter which is all about getting moving and having fun while doing so! We will be practicing the skipping skills we learnt today, up until that point.
Help at home by getting the children skipping.
Mad about Maths
For the past few weeks, Year 1 have been learning how to compose numbers. Last week, we focussed on making 6 and 7. This week we are focussing on 8 and 9. We have been using Numicon, our fingers and rek n reks to compose our numbers.
Help at home by composing numbers using household objects. Oranges and apples work well!
Christmas Craft Club
We’ve had a wonderful time this evening for our final Craft Club of 2025. The children enjoyed making candy canes and Christmas trees using finger painting.
They also drew their very own Elf on the Shelf.
See you in 2026 Craft Clubbers!
Whatever Next!
This week, we listened to another of Jill Murphy’s stories titled ‘Whatever Next!’. It’s about a little bear who went on an adventure to the moon. This story led to lots of conversations about space and rockets. We watched a rocket blast off into space and joining in with the countdown from 10. We created our own space station in our small world area and blasted our own rockets in to space ….. blast off!
In the story baby bear makes his own space rocket from a cardboard box. We decided to make our own rockets in the creative area using different shaped boxes and bottles. It was quite tricky working out how to attach the different parts together.
We enjoyed singing the number rhyme “5 Little men in a flying saucer” this week. Showing the amounts on our fingers as we sang the song. The children are getting really good at this important mathematical skill.
Help at home: Can you sing a number song at home and use you fingers to show the amount?
Here are some number songs to try.
1,2,3,4,5 Once I caught a fish alive.
Next week’s learning:
We are looking forward to reading ‘Stickman’ by Julia Donaldson in our story times next week. If you don’t have a copy of the book at home, you might enjoy watching the BBC animation together.
In maths, we’re learning about length so will be using the words long, short, longer and shorter to compare different objects.
Sound of the week
i for iguana
Pull your lips back and make the i sound at the back of your mouth.
Nursery rhyme of the week –
Twinkle, twinkle little star
Reminders
Please return the Christmas slip to let us know if you can attend one of our ‘Stay and Decorate’ sessions in December. Please see the letter for more details of dates and times.
We hope that you have a happy and healthy weekend.
2C at The Hepworth
What an incredible day! 2C were excellent ambassadors for our school. We had members of the public commenting on how superb their behaviour was. There were so many highlights, as already posted by KS1 classes, but we enjoyed the coach saying our school name as a start!
Learning about Barbara Hepworth and being surrounded by her mesmerising sculptures really did inspire us to be creative. We were sad to learn that Barbara actually died in her art studio owing to a fire. It felt like a privilege to stand next to the tools she used to create her sculptures.
Our sketches from the gallery walk were transferred into our print making workshop.
We have brought our prints home so we will explore turning them into our 2026 calendars-watch this space!
Of course, a trip wouldn’t be a trip without a lovingly thought through packed lunch. We were more than ready to eat!
We arrived under bright blue skies but sadly the rain poured in the afternoon so we didn’t get the chance to explore outside. Instead, we had some time in the gallery before returning to school for a run around our playground. 2C had the most enjoyable day.
A HUGE THANKYOU to our wonderful adult volunteers-you were A*