PE – football
We have been developing our football skills so far this half term. We’ve been using our existing knowledge of how to pass a football using the inside, outside toes and laces of out feet/ trainers. The children have worked on improving the accuracy of their passes, over longer distances, with a partner. This week, we introduced the idea of defending. The children worked in small groups and passed the ball between them with a defender trying to intercept the ball. This also meant they had to think about their spacing, accuracy and communication skills.
The Great Big Book Of Families
This week we’ve been reading The Great Big Book of Families. (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.) Through the book, we have explored and celebrated the variety of families. In the writing area, we drew our families and we used loose parts to make the faces of people in our families.
Help at home: Photos
Thank you for sending your family photos. There’s still time to email one if you haven’t had the chance yet. Over the next few weeks, we will also be thinking about our homes. To help support our discussions, please send in one picture of your front door. You can email photos to scholesreception@spherefederation.org
Phonics
This week, we have learnt the phonemes (the sounds a letter makes) i, n, m and d.
The children have learnt how to identify the sounds by their graphemes and how to form the graphemes in their writing. They have practised identifying initial sounds and blending sounds together to say the whole word.
We have introduced new vocabulary linked to our phonics learning:
Phoneme– The sound a letter (grapheme) makes
Grapheme– The letter that represents the sound
Segmenting- Breaking up a word into its phonemes and sounding aloud (ie. cat becomes c-a-t)
Blending- Blending the phonemes together to read the word. (ie. d-o-g becomes dog)
Each week we will be sending a ‘learn at home’ sheet, which recaps the phonics learning from the week. Please look at this with your child and complete the activities.
Help at Home: Be Sound Detectives – Find objects around your house or outside that have an initial sound that we have learnt: s a t p i n m d
School Library
Over the last couple of weeks we have introduced the children to the school library. They have impressed us with how well they followed the school rule ‘We are respectful.’ They were quiet in the space and they were very careful with the books. This week, your child chose the book they wanted to bring home to share with you. Please remember that this is a book to foster a love of reading. It is a book for you to share at home and not for your child to read aloud to you.
eBooks
Next week, you will be issued your first eBook to share with your child. The first book will be a wordless book. As with the library books, these books can foster a love of reading, even without words. Discussing story events, characters and settings all help your child to understand comprehension in reading.
Please read with your child each week. As teachers, we have access to reading reports. We will be giving out certificates in class to celebrate your child’s reading at home.
Your login details and reading record will be sent home soon. Please let us know if you do not have access to a device to read at home, as we have iPads for loan at the school office.
Poetry Picnic
Each week, we will learn a new poem and will 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 the children about how this can help us become better readers. This week’s poem is called Chop Chop.
Chop Chop
Chop, Chop, Choppity Chop.
Cut off the bottom and cut off the top.
What there is left, we put in the pot.
Chop, Chop, Choppity Chop
Here’s a video of Rainbow Class performing the poem. Look out for a video of Sunshine Class next week.
Frida Khalo Gallery
Each half term, we will introduce the children to a new artist. This week we introduced Frida Khalo. We watched a short informative video to find out about her. After that, we set off to visit a ‘gallery’ that we had set up for the children. At the ‘gallery’ we viewed photos of some of Frida Kahlo’s work. We noticed how many of her paintings had bright colours in them and that animals featured in many of them too. Frida’s self portraits will inspire us to paint our own self-portraits over the next couple of weeks.
Let’s get busy.
This week, many children continued with their transition sessions and have stayed for a full day at Nursery. We’ve had lots of happy faces as children waved good-bye to parents and carers each morning.
Here are a few photos of our play and learning this week – you can see that children are very busy and happily, engaged in play. This is just what we like to see once children have settled into their new environment! We strive to make Nursery a happy and healthy place to learn.
We were really excited to pull up the carrots from our garden this week. Look how big they are. We washed them, cut them and enjoyed them at snack time. Yum, yum.
Now that children are familiar with our Nursery classrooms, over the next few weeks, you’ll start to see some changes in our areas of provision as we introduce new small world areas and themes for our learning.
Help at home – Can you sing the ” Wheels on the bus” nursery rhyme? Can you remember all of the actions? The Wheels on the Bus
Next week we will be reading our first focus story ” The Three Little Pigs”. We will be using story props to retell the story. The Three Little Pigs
Reminders
- Don’t forget to let us know your child’s current interests for our “What makes me tick” board.
- We need your child’s All about me sheet brining back to nursery, it’s not too late.
1,2B are conker crazy!
We’ve started a little conker collection and it has grown rather large.
We have used the conkers for careful counting in Year 1 and counting in tens in Year 2.
We did a whole class count where everyone counted baskets of 10 until we counted the all – all 680 of them!
PE – ball skills and football
All Year 1 and 2 classes are focusing on ball skills and football this half term.
We’ve worked on keepy uppy and keeping close control of the ball as well as having free play with balls for extra fun!
Living and learning : manners
We have been talking about manners this week in our Living and Learning lessons, but we are always referring to good manners. Manners cost nothing but make a big difference and make our school a happy and healthy place to be!
This included talking about interrupting when someone else is speaking. We need to given everyone a chance to be heard.
Help at home by reinforcing and reminding about good manners.
Phase 3,4 Reading
Well done to everyone who has been reading regularly at home by accessing the e-books.
The work completed in the Reading Records looks great! Here are some good examples below.
Keep reading regularly at home and please contact us if you have any questions.
Thanks,
Team 3,4
1A class reward
Over the past few weeks, 1A have been working really hard on following our school rules and remembering 3-2-1-STOP.
3 – silent voices
2 – empty hands
1 – eyes on the speaker
Our class focus has been everyone having ’empty hands’ when an adult in the classroom says ‘3-2-1-STOP’. Today we managed to all do that for the tenth time, so we had some time on the adventure playground as a treat. We had a fantastic time and the children were very responsible and safe.
Well done 1A!
Writing: survivor diary
Chidren in Year 5/6 have been reading Survivors by David Long. We have been inspired to write as if we are survivors writing in our diary.
Help at home: discuss which of the 8Rs it takes to be a survivor:
- being ready
- being responsive
- being reflective
- being resourceful
- remembering
- risk-taking
- being resilient
- being responsible
Tackling Tenths in Maths!
This week in Year 5, we’ve been exploring tenths in both decimal and fraction form – and what a fantastic job the children have done! They’ve been learning how to add and subtract tenths, including how tenths can be combined to make numbers greater than one whole, or subtracted to go below one whole.
We’ve also been investigating the relationship between decimals and fractions – discovering how these two number forms can be equivalent. The children have impressed us with their growing confidence, clear explanations, and their use of models and number lines to support their thinking.
It’s been a brilliant week full of lightbulb moments and mathematical curiosity!
Help at Home: Ask your child to explain how 0.7 is the same as 7/10 – or challenge them to add 2.6 and 1.4!