Hundred Decker Bus
A fantastic trip to the Railway Museum!
On Monday, the children had a fantastic time at the Railway museum. They were very excited to go on their first ever school trip – especially travelling there by coach! A few members of the public commented on how well-behaved the children were. Well done, Reception class!
The children enjoyed looking at different trains and making comparisons of old and new. They had lots of fun watching the miniature railway and it led to lots of great discussions about trains, tunnels and transport. The children enjoyed sitting on the Japanese Bullet train – they particularly liked the fact it goes very fast (150-200mph).
To end our fantastic trip, we sat in the upper gallery and viewed the trains across the museum. We then sketched the trains we had seen – the children drew some fantastic sketches!
The Hundred Decker Bus
This week, we’ve been reading another ‘Hundred Decker’ story by Mike Smith. The Hundred Decker Bus
In this story, a driver who is bored of his daily routine decides to take himself and his passengers on a long ‘adventure’. As more people get on the bus, more decks need to be built!
Linked to the story, we’ve been comparing cities/towns to the countryside, discussing similarities and differences. Countryside is our ‘word of the week’.
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.
Computing
This week, we’ve been using Bee-bots. Bee-bots are an early coding resource. Children have to program the bee using directional and ‘GO’ buttons. They have to pre-plan the algorithm they need to enter, to successfully get the bee to its intended location.
Maths
In Maths, we’ve been comparing numbers and noticing whether change creates a number that is more or less than another.
In provision, we used the ‘bus stop’ number story to explore subtraction (creating less) and recorded our number stories.
Phonics
Spring 2 week 3 has been a review of phase 3 sounds, reading words with two or more digraphs (2 letters that make 1 sound). We review tricky words (a word you can’t sound out – you just have to know it) daily.
Tricky words can be just that-tricky! We’ve previously introduced a few fun games you can play at home to practice tricky words. Here’s another you could try…
Tricky word stick person (a modified version of the ‘hangman’ game)
We often play this game in class. Write the correct number of dashes for your chosen tricky word and let your child make guesses. Encourage your child to use letter names rather than sounds for spelling tricky words. Draw a part of the stick man for each incorrect guess- you can give extra chances by adding a hat, shoes, gloves etc. to the stick person!
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 the traditional nursery rhyme Pat-a-cake, Pat-a-cake.
We talk about how a poem sometimes has rhyming words and sometimes doesn’t. Can your child tell you the rhyming words in this week’s poem? We also talk about how a poem can have a fast rhythm or a slow rhythm.
Music
This week, the children have been listening to Gustav Holst – Mars. We switched off the lights, laid in the dark with our eyes closed and listened to the music. The children really enjoyed the time to stay still and reflect on the music they were listening to.
“It’s like a movie” Kitson.
“It’s like a storm” Sienna.
“When it was the end I was curling up because it sounded scary” Eli.
“It made me happy because of the little bits and loud bits together” Myla.
“The quiet bits made me tired” Liezah.
“I heard trumpets” Harry.
Reading reminder
Children should be reading fluently by the time their book is issued home on Thursday. Your child will have read their book at least 4 times at school – this is where the teaching of reading happens. The aim of reading sessions at home is to celebrate their reading. To showcase what they have learnt that week and for your child to recognise themselves as a ‘reader’.
If you believe your child is reading from memory you can ‘spot check’ particular words in a sentence or play games with the e-book (such as spotting tricky words).
Remember to encourage reading for pleasure through sharing library books, magazines and other texts at home.
Reminders and Dates
Reception’s Class Assembly- 14.03.23 2.45pm You are invited to our class assembly, where we’d love to share our learning with you.
Living and Learning
This week’s whole school Living and Learning statement is, ‘I know that friends and family are important.’
Our in-class learning objective however, has been ‘I know when my friends are happy.’
This week, KS1 have been discussing how important it is to have relationships with people we can trust, whether that is friends or family. This is not only for our own happiness, but if something goes wrong it means we always have someone we can talk to. Somebody we can trust.
It is therefore important that we know when we are feeling happy and in turn, when others are feeling happy. This can give us the social skills we need to help ourselves and others.
‘There has never been a stronger focus on the health and wellbeing of our young children as there is today and we have an important and valuable part to play in this.’
In class, we watched a clip about Elmer the elephant, a story by David McKee. In the story, Elmer became sad as other Elephants did not understand her.
We used the words from the story and looked at Elmers’ body language, to recognise why she was feeling sad.
We then discussed how the other Elephants could help Elmer and make her happy again. Then we spoke about how this can link to our own lives and situations in school.
Finally, the children designed their own Elmer the Elephant, using ‘happy’ and vibrant colours.
World Book Day
We LOVE reading in Nursery and we’re always excited to join in with celebrations for World Book Day.
Thank you for bringing some of your favourite stories for us to share together in Nursery.
Here are a few photos from today- Can you name the characters and match them to the book?
3,4A Class News
This week has looked a little different as we started rehearsing for our phase production, learning the songs and who says which bits from the script! Alongside this, we have been working hard across the curriculum and a highlight has been the fantastic narratives the class have written over the last few days about ‘The Dragon Slayer’. Please ask us about this at home! We have also enjoyed our learning about computing and creating our own ‘unplugged’ games, writing code for a sprite to follow.
For Word Book Day, we were treated to a show of our own – The Secret Garden. The children were a brilliant audience and seemed to thoroughly enjoy themselves.
We continue to focus on our times tables and are ‘going for gold’ with our times table facts, recalling them at speed.
Help at home by continuing to help your child access TT Rockstars and read regularly to you. Thank you for your continued support.
World Book Day in KS1
We had a fabulous World Book Day today.
The children looked fantastic as their book characters and we shared stories and talked about why we loved certain characters. Thank you for all the costumes!
Staff all dressed as a crayon from The Day The Crayons Quit.
We also watched a fantastic theatre performance of The Secret Garden by M&M Productions. We were mesmerised.
We just loved celebrating how much we love reading, poems and books!
Maths – divide
This week, Year 2 have been learning how to divide.
‘Divide means to share into equally groups.’
We are focussing on dividing by 2, 5 and 10. We know that divide is in the same fact family as multiply. This means that there is a link between the numbers we use in each equation.
Today, 2C focussed on dividing by 5.
10 divided by 2 = 5
10 divided by 5 = 2
2 x 5 = 10
5 x 2 = 10
See some of our fantastic work below!
PE – yoga
Tuesday saw 5,6B having a go at yoga. We began the session with some breathing exercises to some relaxing music. We then began to learn some yoga poses such as river and tree. These are based on stretching and balancing and were actually very tricky. We also did some poses that involved working with a partner and it was great to see the children working together. By the end of the session we were very relaxed and chilled!
PE in 1,2B – yoga
We have been learning some yoga poses in PE lessons. Focusing on breathing, balance, movement and coordination are all essential in yoga. Working with a partner was also rather fun!
Help at home by doing some yoga together. (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.)
3,4C Class News
This week, we have enjoyed starting out new computing topic. We have created algorithms for off line games. Next week, we will be designing our own games and writing algorithms to solve them.
We have successfully completed the ‘Sponsored Times Table Challenge’ on Wednesday to raise money for the PTA and our school charity, Children’s Heart Surgery Fund. The scores were amazing; the children did a great job maintaining or improving their own personal score. Thank you to everyone who has raised some money so far!
Exciting news… we have started to learn the songs for our Spring production. Next week, we will start to look at the scripts and rehearse.
Help at home by continuing to help your child read regularly and access TTRS and/or Numbots.
Have a great weekend.
All about me!
Children enjoyed learning about how they’ve grown and changed from being a baby. We looked at our baby and toddler photos in group time; thank you for emailing them to us. We talked about some of the things that children can do now, that they couldn’t do when they were a baby such as talking, riding a bike and eating food. In the Creative area, we looked at our faces in the mirrors and tried to draw a self portrait. It was quite tricky, but we used a circle shape for our face and then added two eyes, a nose and a mouth. Some children loved adding extra features including curly or spiky hair and long eye lashes!
To continue our learning about ‘growing up’, we helped to take care of the babies in the water tray, carefully giving them a bath and washing their hair. In the playdough area, we looked at the numerals on different birthday cards and put the correct number of candles on our chocolate playdough cakes.
As part of our ‘Understanding the World’ curriculum, we’re beginning to learn about different forces. Children loved exploring the magnets in the discovery area and taking them around Nursery to see what they were attracted to and which objects they would ‘stick’ to. During story time, we talked about pushing and pulling forces when Fix-it Duck got his truck stuck in the muck. (Can you tell that we’re reading rhyming stories, too!)
Reminders:
- It’s World Book Day on Thursday 07 March 2024. For more information, see previous communications.
Next week’s learning:
Next week, we’ll continue with our ‘growing theme’ and will listen to ‘Oliver’s Vegetables‘ by Vivian French. We’ll be talking about the different foods that we eat and where they come from.
Nursery rhyme of the week – I’m a Little Teapot
Sound of the week – ‘r’ for rainbow