Class News

Self-isolating at home?

If you’re learning at home this week, here are a few activities for you to try and some that we have planned for Nursery. We hope you enjoy joining in at home; don’t forget to keep in touch and send us an email. Scholesf1@spherefederation.org

Five Currant Buns

• ‘5 Currant buns‘ is one of our favourite rhymes. We like to make currant buns in the playdough area using bun cases and baking tins. What could you use for  cherry on the top?  Children love to role play shops; we have created a  ‘bakery’ in Nursery with a till, some coins and order pads.
• If you have the ingredients at home, have a go at baking some currant buns. Children love to bake and its beneficial for children in so many ways.  If you don’t fancy traditional currant buns, use a basic Victoria sponge cake mixture and add some currants.

Five Little Speckled Frogs

• Sing a long to the rhyme together at home. If you have some paint, have a go at making some frog stick puppets to use to act out the rhyme.  You could paint frogs or try  printing them if you have an old sponge or scourer. You could even try and make a frog using your handprints!
• If you want to find out more about frogs, there’s an old episode of ‘Come Outside‘ all about frogs that you might like to watch.

Grand Old Duke of York

• Get a small blanket or towel and a few small soft cuddly toys. Stretch the blanket out and hold it between you and your child. Sing the rhyme and bounce the toys on the blanket. As you ‘march to the top of the hill’, raise your arms and as you ‘march down again’, crouch down lower. Children love to try and bounce the toys off as they reach the top of the hill!

Little Miss Muffet

• Do you have some porridge oats or rice crispies at home? In our sensory area, we’ve been talking about Little Miss Muffet and helping to mix her curds and whey. We used different sized bowls and scoops and children loved scooping, pouring and mixing the oats. Warning – It can be messy, but is easy to sweep/hoover up!

I’m a Little Teapot

• Let your child enjoy an extra long bath time and give them some plastic cups and jugs to play with. We’ve been using teapots in our water area at Nursery and mixing cups of tea for our friends. During group time, we’ll be singing the rhyme and decorating a teapot (outline drawn on paper) with patterns. We might use spots, stripes, circles or zig-zags.

Have fun!

Isolating at home? This learning is for you.

Here is some home learning for when you can’t be with us at school.

Remember to send pictures of your child’s home learning to scholesf2@spherefederation.org

Maths

This week’s maths learning is on our focus number 4.

Click on the screencast links below:

• Screencast 1
• Screencast 2
• Screencast 3
• Screencast 4

Your child’s learning will be most effective if you sit with them to pause the clip and check / praise / support your child as the clip moves on.

More maths fun at home…

In class this week, we will be setting up a ‘shop’ and using pennies to pay for items. Perhaps you would like to play shop at home too?

Phonics

This week we will be learning  l/ ll and ss.

Watch and join in the Jolly Phonics songs.

(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.)

• Lesson 1: Screencast new sound l/ll
• Lesson 2: Screencast new sound ss
• Tricky words recap- watch the tricky words youtube video to recap all the words we have learnt in phase 2!

• We have now reached the end of phase 2! Until the end of term we will be doing lots of revision of the sounds we have learnt so far!

Here are all of our sounds on a mat. Go through the sounds each day.

Have a go at reading the following words:

Literacy

This week we are moving on to a new Pirates topic and reading the story – Pirates Love Underpants

• Lesson 1: Watch the story. Recap the main events. What characters are in the story? Create a story map of the events that happen.

• Lesson 2: Oh No! Someone has stolen the golden underpants! Can you create a WANTED poster describing the person we are looking for. Draw the person and add some word labels to describe them, using your sounds.

• Lesson 3: Make a treasure map. Add words to label the map. You might like to have a go at tea staining your map to make it look old and well-used!

• Lesson 4: Create your own pirate adventure by changing the setting or characters. Add your new characters/setting to your story map or create a new one. You can be as imaginative as you like! Make sure you tell your story to an adult, so they can let us know all about your super adventure!

Topic

Choose some of these activities to complete throughout the week. These are based on our new Pirate topic!  They may spark other interests and ideas that result in other learning opportunities. Let your child lead the learning!

More Nursery Rhyme Fun…

Our World Nursery Rhyme Week learning areas…

Rainbow Class Superstars singing their favourite nursery rhymes…

(click the image below)

Rhyme Week

It has been a week full of rhymes for Rhyme Week.

We performed our favourite nursery rhymes and used our characters to help us act them out.  Can you guess what rhymes we have been recreating?

Our focus book this week was – Each Peach Pear Plum.

We had lots of fun playing I spy to find the characters hiding on each page.

As well as nursery rhyme week, it was only anti-bullying week. Lots of children came to school in the socks to celebrate their individuality and how we are all unique!

Home-Link Challenge

In class, children have loved creating treasure maps and exploring the classroom and outside for treasure.  Our provision next week will be based around pirates to support their interest.

Can you create a map of a journey you go on outside or in your house? You might choose add landmarks you see, arrows to show your journey or label your map.

Email your maps to – scholesf2@spherefederation.org

Rhymes, rhymes and more rhymes!

Has your child been singing more nursery rhymes at home this week?  We’ve certainly heard lots of singing in Nursery and we really enjoyed all singing together outside, too!

• Twinkle Twinkle – We continued our learning from group time in the maths area where we had lots of different stars to count and sort. There were different colours, textures and sizes to sort.

• Five Currant Buns – This is always a popular activity! Children used the coins to pay for currant buns that they were selling in our playdough bakery.

• I can sing a rainbow – In our Fiddly Fingers area, we developed our pincer grips by using our fingers and thumbs to pick up the tiny rainbow buttons and beads to put on the rainbows.

• Five Little Speckled Frogs – Children loved feeding the frogs delicious bugs and making them jump into the pond.

• We also enjoyed printing Baa Baa Black Sheep, drawing Incy Wincy, mixing Little Miss Muffet’s curds and whey and trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again!

Finally, outside we’ve enjoyed flying kites in the wind, marching to ‘The Grand Old Duke of York‘ and riding the tricycles.

Welcome! 

Some of you will have already noticed that we have a new member of our Nursery team. We’d like to officially welcome Mrs Gosper to Nursery; she works every afternoon and will be Yellow group’s Key Person, along with Miss Morris.

5/6B Certificate Celebration

Here are our certificate winners for last week…

For great living and learning…

Daisy B – You are someone that everyone in school can look up to. You carry the 8 R’s with you everywhere you go and you at the first to help others if necessary. As it’s anti-bullying week this week, you deserve this award as you are kind, thoughtful and a genuine pleasure to have in the classroom. Well done, Daisy!

For sport and physical activity…

Hannah – You show you are adaptable by choosing to work in different peer groups during PE lessons. You get on well with everyone and you are a great basketball team player! Keep it up, Hannah!

For great learning…

George – All adults in the classroom have seen a huge improvement in your confidence and willingness in class. You are taking safe risks by putting your hand up. Well done, George!

Celebration certificates

Our certificates this week go to…

For great learning…

Joseph – for challenging yourself in all lessons this week.

For sport and physical activity…

William – for great enthusiasm and determination in PE.

For living and learning…

Gabriel – you know how to be a great friend and respect similarities and differences.

Numbotters of the week– Ava A  and Edward for earning loads of stars!

Our new class reward system is still going down well too. For making good choices throughout the day, children can write their name on a raffle ticket (some children have got 9 or 10 tickets in this week). On a Friday, 5 winners will be drawn out and can choose a prize from the Raffle Reward box.

5/6 S Certificate Celebration

This weeks certificate winners are…

For great learning…

Connor- you are a great active learner in all lessons. I love that you have a passion for your learning. Well done – keep it up!

For sport and physical activity…

Alex- for demonstrating enthusiasm during lessons and you always work well as part of a team. Thank you.

For living and learning…

Charlie H- you contributed so well during the anti-bullying lesson. You demonstrated a very mature attitude. Well done.

Well done everyone!

History: democracy

This week, we’ve learnt about democracy. We knew a lot about it already – mainly because of our School Council elections (Did you know that we’ve recently rebranded our School Council? They’re now the Junior Leadership Team).

Democracy is a legacy of the Ancient Greeks. In particular, the Athenian people.

We discussed what we already knew, and came up with our own definition (ask your child what democracy is).

First, we found out about Athenian democracy. We were really frustrated to find out that you had to be a citizen of Athens to have a vote; on the face of it, this seems OK. But then we found out that to be a citizen you had to be a male who was born in Athens and had completed one full year in the Athenian army.

In our next lesson, we compared Athenian democracy to British democracy now – ask your child what’s the same? What’s different?

We all agreed that we’re very lucky to live in a country that is so fair – even though we know it could be even better!

Anti-bullying week 19-20 November 2020

This week, it’s Anti-Bullying Week and the theme for this year is ‘United against bullying’.

We took part in Odd Socks Day this Monday to celebrate our differences.

STOP is a key message linked to bullying. In our school, STOP stands for two things:

• the definition: Several Times On Purpose
• the solution: Start Telling Other People

Recently, our school council (now called the Junior Leadership team) met to review our school definition of bullying and our child friendly anti-bullying policy. Thank you to the JLT for their valued contributions. As a result, our definition and policy have now been updated.

Child friendly anti-bullying policy

What is bullying?

In our school, this is what bullying means:

Bullying is where you hurt someone, physically or emotionally (including online), several times on purpose.

What might bullying look like?

If any of these things happen several (lots of) times, it is bullying.

• Hurting peoples’ feelings, for example, name calling, teasing, threatening, ignoring, leaving people out or spreading rumours
• Hurting peoples’ bodies, for example, hitting, punching or kicking

This could be in person or online (cyber bullying) and could be because of someone’s race, disability, gender, appearance, age or any other protected characteristic.

What could you do if you are being bullied?

Start

Telling

Other

People

Who could you tell?

• Miss Hague, Miss Pallister, Mrs Goodwin, Mrs Beesley or Mr Roundtree (they are child protection staff)
• Any other members of staff
• Friends
• Someone in your family
• A trusted adult
• Childline (0800 1111)
• Write a worry slip and put it in your classroom Voice Box or the whole school worry box
• Email stayingsafe@spherefederation.org

Our views on bullying 

STOP bullying – bullying is wrong! We’re a happy and healthy school.