The Snail and the Whale
The Snail and The Whale
We’ve been reading The Snail and The Whale, another book by one of our favourite authors, Julia Donaldson
We’ve been retelling the story in our own words and writing special blackboard messages, just like the snail trail messages in the story!
The book had some fantastic adventurous words to describe landscapes and actions. Our word of the week was humongous. We discussed the meaning of lots of other words too.
Can your child tell you what each of these words mean? They could use the images to remind them.
Maths
This week, we’ve re-visited the composition of 5 in various ways.
Transition
On Wednesday, the Reception children had a wonderful visit to their new Year 1 classroom. It was a delightful experience for the children as they met their new teacher and explored their future learning environment.
The children were excited and engaged, participating in fun activities to make them feel welcome and at ease. This visit was a positive step in helping the children transition smoothly into Year 1. They left with big smiles and lots of enthusiasm!
The dancing raisin experiment
Phonics
Summer 2 week 5 has focused on:
root word ending in: –er, –est
longer words
In provision, we’ve been reading words ending in –ed and sorting them by the sounds that –ed makes:
‘t’ final sound: jumped, helped, screeched etc.
‘id’ final sound: boasted, painted, printed etc.
Help at home; Sentence Substitution Throughout the school year, we’ve suggested lots of practical ways to explore phonics at home with easily made resources and games. There are also some great quality online phonics games. Sentence substitution is a great way to practise both reading and comprehension. The goal is to replace one word in the sentence, whilst ensuring that the sentence still makes sense. This is a free to access game on ‘Phonics Bloom’ Click here to play at home!
Poetry Picnic
Each week we will be learning a new poem. We will recite this poem each 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.
This week’s poem is Sliced Bread
The children enjoyed exploring synonyms for the word nice and came up with many alternatives, such as delightful and delicious. This sparked a lot of interest in changing and adapting various parts of the poem. Check out some of their new poems!
Nell Bank
On Friday, we set of on our trip to Nell Bank. We began by listening to a story about Pete who liked to be TIDY but maybe a little bit too much.
We worked together safely to clear up a big mess! During this activity, we explored ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle, and discussed what would happen to litter if it was left.
Afterwards, the children had the opportunity to go on a mini-beast hunt to help Pete find lots of worms. Following this, it was time to help Pete make a new home in the woods. One of their favourite parts of the day (outside of lunch, of course) was the water play area.
Ahoy there!
Children enjoyed listening to ‘Pirates Love Underpants‘ and we’ve been busy digging for treasure in the sand tray and counting gold coins in the maths area.
During maths group times, we’re learning about positional language. Next week, we’re going to use treasure maps of the Nursery garden to find some treasure. Children will need to use lots of positional language to describe where the treasure is hidden. For example, the treasure might be next to the sandpit, underneath the bridge, behind the planter or on top of the bird table.
Help at home: Try to use positional language in your day to day conversations and during play. For example -Can you put your teddy underneath the box? The car is behind the garage. The monkey is on top of the tree. Put your shoes next to the cupboard. As you look at illustrations in a story, ask questions such as ‘Where is the cat hiding?’ or ‘What can you see in front of the fence?’
The older children have also been busy visiting Reception and have enjoyed exploring and playing in their new classrooms. We’ll continue to visit over the final few weeks as part of our transition process.
Reminders-
- Please send your child with a waterproof coat everyday. The weather is very mixed at the moment and we enjoy playing out in all weather, even when it’s warm but wet!
- A few water bottles have missing names. Please take a minute to re-label your child’s bottle if it has come off.
Meet your new teacher – transition day 2024
We welcomed a visit from the children who will be in our classes in September. All the teachers in Key Stage 1 are staying in the same places from September 2024. The children were excited, apprehensive, happy and nervous – all at the same time! Feel free to pop over to say hello before we break up for the summer.
1,2B Design and Technology
1,2B completed our design and technology (food) learning today.
We used a recipe for make wraps. We cut, spread, tore and folded to create our own wrap.
Help at home by getting your child involved in food preparation.
Wrap it up!
Today, as part of our D & T learning, Class 1A set off for The Hub to make their own wraps. They were given the choice of cream cheese, ham, peppers, lettuce and cucumber of ingredients to put in their wrap. Everyone thought carefully about making healthy choices. The children used skills such as slicing, chopping, spreading, arranging and rolling and everyone tried hard to use the bridge grip when slicing. Well done Class 1A!
After all the hard work, they enjoyed the fruits of their labour. Yum!
Help at home: Perhaps you could give your child the opportunity to show off their skills by allowing them to make their own healthy wrap or sandwich at home. Or better still… perhaps they could make you one.
Money – making the same amount
In Maths, Year 2 are re-visiting money. We know how to recognise and describe each of the coins and notes. Today, we started by trying to make the same amount of money in several different ways. See some of our work below.
Key Stage 2 Sports Day
Friday saw the event of the year that we’d all been waiting for – sports day! All the children turned their hand to a range of competitive races from the sack race to the long distance. The weather was good and even the sun made an appearance. It was so good to see all the children looking happy and healthy and thank you to all the parents, grandparents and carers that came to support us! Thank you also to the crazy people that took part in the adults race – I’m sure you made your children proud!
Obstacle courses
One of the Prime Areas of the Early Years Foundation Stage is Physical development. Throughout the year, children have been developing their movement and balancing skills in a variety of ways. This week, we enjoyed taking part in an obstacle course. They balanced along the beams and walked across the wobble boards, trying carefully not to fall off.
At the end of the course, children showed us that they could balance on one leg without wobbling!
Next week’s learning
Following on from our learning about the seaside, we’re going to listen to ‘Pirates love underpants!’ next week. (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’re sure you can imagine the role play that this will inspire… Look out for treasure maps in children’s folders soon!
Nursery rhyme of the week – Jack and Jill
Phonics – Children in Red, Blue and Green group will be playing games to practise some key phonics skills including:
- identifying initial sounds in words (playing I-Spy type games)
- segmenting and blending words orally (e.g. h-a-t and b-u-s)
- spotting rhyming words
Clean Up!
Clean Up
This week, our story took us on a journey, all the way to Jamaica!
We discussed key words from the story: sanctuary and island.
The story even inspired a group of children to build their own animal sanctuary- Well done Harry, Liezah, Jake, Norah and Gracie!
The book had some great messages about looking after our environment. Linked to this, our word of the week was pollution.
In our writing, we’ve written about what happens when you leave rubbish on a beach and how it hurts the animals in our seas and oceans.
Maths
This week’s focus has been on deepening our understanding of how to compare quantities. We have explored this skill in a range of ways: comparing groups of objects, comparing by looking and then by counting, creating groups with equal amounts and using our sense of magnitude, e.g., knowing 8 is a lot more than 2 but 4 is only a little bit more than 2.
We’ve also explored sharing using objects and seeing which quantities can be shared fairly between 2, 3 or 4.
In provision, we’ve been playing ‘Roll and Build’- using our subitising skills to calculate total amounts on two dice, building the amount and matching it to the correct numeral.
Artist focus; Alexander Calder
We’ve been looking at Alexander Calder‘s mobiles in art this week. We started the week with a gallery experience, looking at images of the mobiles around the school hall and drawing them.
We then drew around shapes, or created our own shapes, and cut them out of paper.
Next week, we will be collaborating to make our own mobile art using our paper shapes!
Phonics
Summer 2 week 3 has focused on words ending in the suffix -ed but sounding like ‘t’,’ id’ or ‘d’ such as helped, floated and stormed.
Please continue to use the Little Wandle sheets, sent home with your child each week.
Poetry Picnic
Each week we will be learning a new poem. We will recite this poem each 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.
This week’s poem is Five Little Peas.
Click below to watch Reception recite this week’s poem!
Reminders, Messages and Dates
Baby photos – Please send in or email (scholesreception@spherefederation.org) a baby picture of your child to support their learning. We will be discussing how they have grown and changed.
Transition Morning- Wednesday 3 July Drop off and collect your child from their usual Reception classroom on this day. We will send a slip home with your child on this day, confirming which class they will be in from September.
Learning journey drop-ins- Week commencing 8 July
An opportunity to “drop into” school and share your child’s learning journal with them. We would like to welcome you into the classroom on one of the following sessions:
Tuesday 9 July 8.45– 9.15 or 3.15-3.45
Thursday 11 July 8.45-9.15
Quarters
In Year One this week, the Maths focus was all about fractions. We already knew about halves so, this week we learnt about quarters. We know that a quarter is one piece of four pieces and that the four pieces have to be the same. They must be equal to one another in order to be quarters. Quarters in shapes helped us to think about the concept visually and we worked practically in pairs to begin to quarter numbers too.
Help at home: You could challenge your child to cut their food into quarters. Pizza or sandwiches would be a great start. How many pieces will there need to be to be quarters? Are they all equal? If they’re not equal, is it a quarter? Can you find a different way to quarter someone else’s pizza or sandwich?
