Supertato to the rescue!
Children are thoroughly enjoying the Super Veggie themed enhancements to Nursery. They loved creating their own vegetable superheroes; thank you to everyone who supported us and provided their child with a vegetable for the home link activity.
In maths, we’ve been learning about heavier and lighter using the balance scales. Lots of children knew the word ‘heavy’ but many needed support to understand ‘light/lightest’. You could continue this learning at home by asking questions during everyday activities. Which bag from the supermarket is lightest? Which toy is lighter?
Outside, some children showed real perseverance when building a frame for a den. They had to work out where to put each connecting part and cooperate with each other, to help hold the poles in place until the cube was stable. Great team work, Nursery!
The tadpoles and arrival of our eggs have also created lots of excitement; we’ll continue to learn about their life cycles over the next few weeks as we watch them grow and develop and wait for the eggs to hatch!
Golden Star
Well done to our Golden Star from this week.
How we see things
We are just loving our Science mini-topic, Seeing, which has been very successful. This week, we have investigated how reflective materials are under a torch light.
First of all, we made predictions about which materials would be the most and least reflective. Most of us thought that tinfoil would be the most reflective. We then tested the materials and made conclusions from our results.
Actually, our results showed that the spoon was most reflective.
On one sunny day this week, we looked at how our pupils change size in light and dark.
Paige said, “My pupils are like pin holes in the sunlight.”
Super, Seeing, Science!
Phonics
Your child has been learning phase 3 trigraphs. A trigraph has three letters but only makes one sound. Can your child tell you what a trigraph is? Can your child tell you a trigraph that they know? Your child has learnt the trigraphs ear, air and ure.
Your child has now learnt all the phase 3 sounds.
Please continue to practise these sounds with your child. You can do this by searching for the sounds in your child’s reading book. You could also play splat. First, write all the phase 3 sounds on pieces of paper. Then, splat the sounds using a spatula as your child tells you the sound you have splatted. Can your child tell you all the phase 3 sounds? Let us know by sending us an email!
Easter Fun
We have had lots of Easter fun this week. First, we went to the library and read an Easter book. We talked about how the book was a non-fiction book and looked at the contents page. Then, we talked about Easter celebrations and why Christians celebrate Easter.
On Thursday, the children enjoyed joining in with the bonnet parade. They also enjoyed the egg rolling competition. We compared how fast and far all the eggs went as they rolled down!
Have you been up to anything exciting this weekend? Please email or bring to school some photos. This will help your child write about their weekend news on Tuesday.
Super Veggies!
Once the Easter excitement has faded, we’re going to enjoy reading about the adventures of ‘Supertato’ and his vegetable friends. Many children have shown an interest in this book and its superhero characters. We’ll also continue with our ‘growing’ theme and learning about different life cycles. As well as our new Nursery children, we will also welcome some other visitors to Nursery. Some are small, wriggly and live in a tank and some are very fragile and will spend the next 21 days in our incubator… You’ll have to ask your child to tell you more!
For this week’s home link activity, can you visit the supermarket or raid your fridge to find some weird and wonderful veggies to send into Nursery? We’re going to transform them into superheroes – watch this space for some photos next week.
Easter fun
It was lovely to see everyone’s smiling faces on their return to Nursery this week. We enjoyed hearing about all of your fun adventures over the holidays; from camping trips with inflatable sofas, sledging in the mountains, meeting Princesses and building sandcastles in Wales!
This week, our learning was themed around Easter. We enjoyed sampling hot cross buns at snack time and talked about the Easter story and some of the ways that Christians celebrate Easter.
One of the most popular activities this week was decorating and rolling eggs. After rolling our eggs, we noticed that the shells had begun to crack. We enjoyed cracking them open and carefully removing the shell. Many children were amazed at what they found inside! They loved peeling away the egg white to reveal the yellow yolk.
Outside, we enjoyed taking part in egg hunts. Children took turns to hide the eggs for each other and pretended to be the Easter bunny. We counted the eggs back into the basket each time and somebody realised that the golden egg had gone missing! We looked all over for it, but couldn’t find it anywhere. We drew a map of the Nursery garden to make sure that we searched everywhere. A few children thought that Jack had stolen it, just like he stole the golden egg from the giant. Mrs Brown called Jack’s mum on the phone but he was out – probably climbing beanstalks! Eventually, we decided to make a giant, golden egg; we certainly wouldn’t loose that one!
When the missing egg was found (it was hiding in a welly!), some children decided to make a special nest to help keep it safe.
At the maths table, we counted eggs and compared their sizes, colours and patterns. We also had some stacking chicks; it was quite tricky to find the matching top and bottom parts. In our Fiddly Fingers area, we used a timer to race against the clock to see how many eggs we could pick out of the nest in 3 minutes. Using the tweezers was difficult, but it was great to see children persevering until they mastered it.
The Wizard of Oz – writing
The performance of The Wizard of Oz this week was one of the best we have seen at Scholes (Elmet) Primary School.
The acting, singing, scenery and story telling left us all wanting more.
Not only that, but experiences like this provides a stimulus to help us to write. It makes our writing more meaningful and easier to put pen to paper.
In Year 3/4 we have been working on direct speech within a story. So, this was an ideal opportunity to create dialogue between characters.
Here is our writing sequence:
- watch and retell the story of The Wizard of Oz
- recap by looking at photographs from the performance
- add speech bubbles for what the characters said
- turn speech bubbles into written direct speech
Here are some examples of our work that we feel proud to show off:-
By Alex, Connor and Imogen.
Egg-cellent Easter fun
Thank you to all the parents and carers who sent decorated hard-boiled eggs and Easter-themed headwear today. We had great fun rolling our eggs and well done to the bonnet parade winners.
Living and Learning – table manners
We have talked about table manners in our Living and Learning lessons this week. The children shared lots of ideas about how to behave at mealtimes.
We have to use a knife and fork.
In my family, we ask before we can leave the table.
We wait for everyone before we start.
We watched a video about Crawford the Cat and table manners too!