Class News

Science: grouping and comparing materials

Today, in our topic lesson, we progressed our materials (what’s the matter?) learning by testing different every day materials to find out if they are opaque, magnetic and can conduct electricity. We worked scientifically to carry out the investigation, recording our results as we went.

Next, we’ll record our results using a 3 way Venn diagram.

Topic: properties of materials (science)

This afternoon, we started learning about our new mini topic: What’s the matter? In this topic, we’ll be learning lots of new science knowledge as well as progressing our working scientifically skills.

For our first lesson, we focussed on different everyday materials and their properties. We thought about what would happen if everyday objects were made from different materials…

To help keep our conversations focussed and scientific we tried to use key vocabulary:

• transparent
• translucent
• opaque
• rigid
• strong
• conductive
• magnetic

Ask your child if they can explain what each of these terms means!

To show how much we learnt, at the start of the lesson we said everything we knew about a 2p coin (first thoughts). Before repeating this again at the end of our learning – you’ll notice that our second thoughts are much more scientific.

Swimming dates (January-February)

Please see below your child’s swimming dates.

PE – gymnastics

Today in our PE lesson we started to learn about gymnastics. Our learning today was all about jumping. Ask your child if they can tell you, or show you, what our key learning points were.

Can your child name the jumps in the above images? For a challenge, can they tell you something that’s good about the technique and something that could be improved?

Over the next few weeks we’ll progress our learning into balancing, rolling, creating sequences of movements and using apparatus safely.

Living & Learning: staying safe (our own health)

Today, we wasted no time in carrying on where we left off in 2018 by getting straight into our learning. This afternoon, we focussed on our living & learning theme for the coming weeks: staying safe. Of course, there are lots of ways to stay safe but today we focussed on staying healthy – in particular, mentally healthy.

We started by sharing everything we knew about physical health.

Then, after some research (including a couple of videos), we shared everything we’d learnt about mental health.

Finally, we thought about ways we can look after our own mental health.

And practised a few mindfulness techniques.

Ask your child to reflect on their learning and how they can look after their mental health at home.

Happy New Year!

We hope that you have all had a lovely time over the Christmas holidays and enjoyed the New Year celebrations. We’re looking forward to seeing you all on Tuesday 8th January. Remember, Nursery is closed on Monday 7th January as staff will be going on home visits to meet children that are going to be joining us in Nursery over the next few weeks.

Please remember to join in with our Home Link activity by sending us some of your holiday photographs.  Children love to show their friends and we’ll use their photographs to help children to remember and talk about some of their experiences over the holidays.

Email your photos to  scholesf1@spherefederation.org 

A special visitor…

Children wrote to Father Christmas to invite him to visit us in Nursery. They were very excited on Tuesday morning when they discovered that he had got their letter!

We listened carefully to the story that Santa read and afterwards, we told him what we would like for Christmas. Before Santa left, he kindly gave all the children a present. Thank you, Father Christmas!

The Santa Trap

With Christmas near, we have based our learning on a fab festive picture book. This week, we have been busy writing all about The Santa Trap. Bradley Bartleby is a beastly brat who just wants all the best presents from Santa. And when he doesn’t get them, he decides to build the ultimate trap.

We’ve been rehearsing, drawing, innovating and creating our own Santa traps, based on the story by Jonathon Emmett.

There were so many brilliant ideas today!

Why don’t you check out our work on twitter #thesantatrap ?

Here are just a few …

Safeguarding – Road Safety Pantomime

It’s all about Christmas at the moment but we also reminded children about staying safe near and on roads. This week, we watched a pantomime with a road safety message. Help at home by reminding children how to cross the road safely, talking to them about the green cross code.

A special visitor

All the year 1 and 2 classes had a special visitor today.  Santa visited each class; reading a story, talking to children and handing our early Christmas presents. We thought we couldn’t get any more excitable…but we did!