Join-in Afternoon 05 March 2018
Today, Year 3/4 N enjoyed our parent join-in afternoon. Thank you to all the parents that came to help support the children’s learning this afternoon.
Without your help, we wouldn’t have been able to enjoy such ‘hands-on’ activities. The children have produced some fantastic work all linked to our Life Forces topic. We enjoyed weaving, aboriginal animal painting, food chain art and learning facts about endangered animals through a game of Top Trumps.
Home Link – World Book Day and Snow
World Book Day – Week beginning 05 March
We’re going to celebrate World Book Day on Monday as we were unable to take part on Thursday 01 March.
- What is your child’s favourite story?
- Who is their favourite character?
Please bring in your favourite stories for us to read at group time (don’t forget to write names in!).
You could also:
- Visit the library or a book shop
- Read your favourite story together
- Draw/paint/collage a picture of the story or a character
- Re-tell the story using props
If you’ve already completed this, we’d love to see some snowy paintings or photographs. Let us know what your child thought of the snow.
Did you talk about freezing/melting? Could they put their own shoes and coat on? Could they fasten the zip themselves?
A chilly week!
We hope that you enjoyed some extra family time this week and had lots of fun in the snow. On Friday, we wrapped up warm and ventured outside to complete a ‘snow hunt checklist’ and, of course, we just had to make a snowman!
As a result of the adverse weather, we’ve rearranged our World Book Day celebrations for Monday 05 March. Unfortunately, some children that were due to be in nursery on Thursday won’t attend on Monday and some children that were going to miss it, will be in nursery! If you haven’t got a costume prepared, don’t worry, children don’t need to dress up. If your child was going to take part, but won’t be in nursery on Monday, they can still wear their costume when they next visit. Please remember to make sure that children can easily play inside and outside whilst wearing their costume and we’d prefer superheroes to stay at home!
Parents and carers are still invited to join us for our ‘Stay and Read’ session from 8.30-9.10 on Monday 05 March. There will be different story-telling activities in nursery for you to take part in with your child including re-telling the story of ‘What the Ladybird Heard’, making gingerbread men in the playdough and mixing porridge for the three bears in our sensory area.
Have you heard about the eggs in nursery? Children (and some parents) are very excited about the eggs that we have in the incubator. For the next three weeks, we’ll be looking after them and we’ll hopefully be able to watch the chicks hatching just before we break up for the Easter holidays. We’ll learn all about the life cycle of a hen over the next few weeks.
On the days that we were at nursery this week, we enjoyed… Building a den frame, transporting objects on a sledge, building a snowman, looking for very long worms and ordering numbers on the whiteboard.
Week 3 – What are we learning this week?
We’re sure that the World Book Day celebrations will provide us with lots of new interests next week – we’ll be watching to see what the children are really excited about and will adapt our nursery provision accordingly. In our maths area, we’ll learn to name and describe basic 2D shapes (circle, triangle, square and rectangle). Children will take part in lots of shape activities over the next few weeks, so you could begin to spot shapes in the environment when you are out and about.
In our group times, children are continuing to listen for the initial sounds in words and some children will be learning to ‘robot talk’ words. This involves them breaking up/segmenting the word into each sound. For example, s-u-n and p-i-g. We’ll use ‘pure sounds’ to do this; if you’d like to listen to the correct pronunciation for each sound, please follow this link to see the Foundation 2 teachers, Mrs Flynn and Miss Eckersley, demonstrating how to pronounce each letter with the corresponding Jolly Phonics action!
We love reading!
Even though World Book Day was snowed off at school yesterday, some Y1,2 and Y3,4 children enjoyed sharing their favourite books today. For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been pairing children up to read for pleasure. It has been really successful. It encourages the Y3,4 children to develop their fluency and intonation, while the Y1,2 children have support with their decoding and understanding.
Play dough!
The children are really enjoying the self-serve play dough area where they can follow a recipe and make their own play dough! A few children have asked to take their play dough home so here is a recipe if you’d like to make it at home:
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup water
- 1/4 cup salt
- 2 cups flour
- food colouring
Method
Mix together the ingredients – simple!
Play dough is a fantastic way to support your child’s fine motor skill development and also for imaginative play.
World book day
I’m sure many children were disappointed today when they couldn’t come to school in their book day costumes! Therefore, we have decided to re-schedule World Book Day to Monday 05 March. Your child can come to school as their favourite book character – just as was planned for today. We’d also like to invite parents to stay and read with their child at school drop off from 8.50-9.20am.
If your child is swimming on Monday, please bring some clothes that will be easier for them to change into after swimming.
Snow!
We hope your child is enjoying the snow outside. Extreme weather changes like this can initiate interesting conversations about the world around us. It would be great to hear what your child has been talking about whilst playing in the snow. This would be a fantastic opportunity for us to gain a holistic view of your child’s understanding of the world around them. Photos and your child’s direct quotes can be emailed to: scholesf2@spherefederation.org. Please don’t worry if they’re not grammatically correct – we want to hear what your child has said.
We’re looking forward to hearing what your child has been up to in all of the snow! Have fun!
Marvellous Maths
We’ve been working really hard counting in multiples of 2, 5 and 10. This is an important first step in learning all our multiplication and division facts (the expectation is for all facts up to 12 x 12 to be known by the end of Year 4).
Help your child at home by looking for arrays, equal groups of things, counting in different ways, reciting times tables facts or using one of the BBC Supermovers multiplication dance songs.
We use concrete examples, pictorial representations and abstract calculations. Some examples can be seen below.
Littering
A child in Foundation class found a piece of rubbish on the floor whilst in the playground. We were very impressed when he chose to pick it up and put it in the bin. This started a class conversation about littering and how to look after our environment. We talked about why we need to put rubbish in the bin.
- “Someone could slip on it and break their bones.”
- “The animals might eat it and be sick. The animals might give it to babies and then they could eat it and die.”
We talked about what to do with our own rubbish and what we could do if we saw rubbish on the floor.
- “Put it in the bin!”
- “Pick it up!”
We also talked about keeping ourselves safe if we did see rubbish on the floor. The children decided they could ask an adult if it was safe to pick up litter and put it in the bin.
After talking about littering, we decided to write posters to remind people to put rubbish in the bin.
We then went to speak to other classes in the school to share what we had discussed and give each class a poster to remind people to put rubbish in the bin.
We were very impressed with Foundation’s mature understanding of how to look after our environment!
World Book Day
This afternoon, the Y6 children visited F2 to share stories. The children were put into pairs and then chose a story to read together. First the F2 children listened to a story read by the Year 6 children and then the F2 children read one of our Biff, Chip and Kipper stories to them. The F2 children enjoyed reading to the older children.
We are looking forward to welcoming parents/carers to our third stay and play session (stay and read) on Thursday 01 March 8.50am – 9.20am or 2.45pm – 3.15pm.
The children are very excited about coming to school dressed as their favourite story book character. We (the Foundation 2 staff) will also be dressing up as characters from a storybook.