3,4 Class News – Reading
This week, we have been reading the picture book, ‘Escape from Pompeii’ by Christina Balit. Our skills focus has been inference – exploring character feeling. Through a hot-seating activity the children were able to take on the role of the characters in the story and answer questions asked by other children.
Help at home by trying this idea. Which questions could you ask to explore how a character is feeling or why they are acting in a certain way?
Living and Learning: I know how to seek help
In our Living and learning session this week, we watched a video from the NSPCC which explored children’s worries and discussed areas of abuse.
Teachers were impressed by how open the children were when discussing their worries in a mature manner. They had plenty of ideas about who to go to to seek help.
Help at home: discuss the term ‘trusted adult’. Discuss who you turn to in order to find a solution to a problem.
Cross country competition
This week, we were lucky enough to enter some children in a local cross country competition. This took place at St Theresa’s Primary School. We entered some year 5’s and 6’s. The children performed absolutely fantastically and definitely showed determination and resilience. Some of the children have made it through to the next round at Temple Newsam in Februrary – well done! Thank you too to the parents for transporting the children to and from the event. If we didn’t have your support, the children wouldn’t get to take part in such events.
Well done to all our runners!
Science: we are physicists
This week, we’ve been continuing on with our Science learning about light. Following on from our planning lesson, we carried out our investigation. We were answering the question ” How does the distance of the light source affect the size of the shadow?”
Each group used a torch, an opaque object and ruler to cast a shadow onto a wall. They decided they would move the light source away from the object 10cm each time and measure the size of the shadow. The children collated their results and concluded that as the light source is moved away, the shadow gets smaller. During our discussions, we also talked about the inaccuracies of come measurements as some appeared to be anomalous.
Magnificent Maths!
Since the start of this term, Y3 and Y4 have been learning Maths together with their usual class teacher.
So far, this has gone really well and the Y4s have been great at furthering their learning and the Y3s have really benefitted from having supportive peers whilst learning to help push them further.
This half term, we’ve been learning about:
– measure (mm, cm, m and km)
– perimeter (of squares, rectangles and polygons)
– multiplication and scaling facts (I know that 5×4=20. So, I also know that 5×40=200)
Help at home: test your child’s knowledge of the areas of Maths we’ve covered so far. Can they tell you what perimeter is? Can they answer some scaled multiplication questions?
Help at home (part 2): Ensure your child goes on TTRS for at least 5 minutes per day in order to help improve their rapid recall of their multiplication facts. This will massively help with all areas of maths in Y3 and 4 and beyond! Plus, it’s awesome to win the inflatable guitar in assembly each week!
Mr Wain, Mrs Wadsworth and Miss Gilliland
Dinosaur Roar
It’s been great to see our new children becoming more familiar with Nursery routines and lots of them have now stayed for their first full day. Well done, yellow group!
Children continue to explore nursery and are independently choosing resources to enhance their play; we’ve created amazing constructions, working together and sharing ideas.
We have also enjoyed finding out about dinosaurs. Digging up dinosaur skeletons in the sand tray, finding out about dinosaurs in our small world area and learning their names.
In the sensory area, we loved playing with the slime in our dinosaur swamp! Ergh.. it’s very sticky!
Mark making always plays an important part of our learning in Nursery and this week the children have been practising their skills in many of our provision areas. In the paint, sand, message centre and making patterns on giant pieces of paper.
In group time, children in red, blue and green group helped Mrs Beesley with her shopping bags. One bag was very heavy and the other bag was quite light. We looked at the different items in each bag and compared them. Children had to find an item that was heavier or lighter than the tin of baked beans. You could try this at home.
Our sounds next week is Oo
Make your mouth into a round shape and say o.
Our Nursery Rhyme of the week next week is Row Row Row your Boat.
Can you sing the rhyme fast, slow, loud or quiet?
Have a happy and healthy weekend and thankyou as always for your continued support.
The Nursery Team.
Penguin Huddle
In our literacy lessons this week, we enjoyed reading Penguin Huddle by Ross Montgomery. In the story, the penguins huddled together during an icy storm but it was so cold that they got stuck together and couldn’t break free!
Our word of the week is: huddle. Ask your child to tell you what it means. Can they use it in a sentence?
Here is some of our super writing from this week.
We also watched a short clip from an episode of BBC Frozen planet to find out more about where penguins live. We located the UK and the Antarctic on a map and found their locations on a globe.
How is the Antarctic environment different to the United Kingdom? After watching the clip, we looked at some photographs of the Antarctic and compared them to the United Kingdom to find similarities and differences.
Focus Artist: Yayoi Kusama
This week, children loved exploring the art of Yayoi Kusama. We found out about her life and why her artwork incorporates so many polka dots! On Tuesday afternoon, we visited a special ‘pop-up’ Art Gallery in the Hub.
When looking at the artwork, we used sentence stems to talk about our opinions.
I like it because…
I don’t like it because…
I love this one because it’s like a domino. Cillian
This one is my favourite because the dots look like they are sparkling. Hugo
This one has lots of bright balls. I like it. Jazmin
After looking at the gallery, we took inspiration from some of the pictures to create our own Yayoi Kusama inspired artwork. We’ve also been exploring colour mixing to find out what happens when you mix two of the primary colours (red, blue and yellow) together.
Maths -composition
This week, children consolidated their understanding of the composition of 5 using the familiar rhyme ‘5 Little Speckled Frogs‘. By singing the rhyme and moving the frogs during each verse, children investigated part–part–whole relations, e.g. seeing that 5 can be made of 3 and 2.
There are five frogs on the log but when one frog jumps into the pool, we can see that there are four frogs on the log and one in the pool. 5 can be made of 4 and 1. When another frog jumps into the pool, there are 3 frogs on the log and 2 in the pool. 5 can be made of 3 and 2.
We also used our fingers to show this, first holding up 5 fingers and then putting one down each time.
Poetry Picnic
Our poetry sessions this week have been a little different as we learnt and recited a traditional nursery rhyme.
The children used gestures and expression to recite ‘Jack and Jill’.
Phonics
Spring 1 week 3 has focused on the digraphs ur, ow, oi and the trigraph ear.
We’ve learnt the tricky words; my, by, all. Tricky words are words that should be read by sight.
Help at home:
Each week, we’d like to give you an idea of a game you could play at home to make reading even more exciting.
This week’s game is: Tricky Word Splat
- Write a selection of tricky words on paper/sticky notes.
- Place around the room/floor.
- Say a tricky word for your child to splat. You might jump on the words, splat with a masher or create your own ideas.
PE – dance
Year 1 and 2 are doing dance and yoga in PE this half term. We have started with dance and have talked about moving at a low, medium and high level and using our bodies to make interesting shapes. We are listening to different types of music – from Kate Bush to The Planets by Holst. Dance is just another way of moving our bodies (to music) and we have really enjoyed it!
Watch us while we work 1,2B
We had a very full classroom yesterday. Thank you for coming to see what your children are learning and how you can support them at home.
Orally rehearsing (talking!) is so important and modelling how to make sentences and phrases interesting helps children to implement this in their writing.
Counting, grouping and partitioning everyday objects at home can also help consolidate their understanding of number and patterns.
Geography – Fieldwork
This week 2C went on a trip into the local area. We walked into Scholes village and surveyed 5 locations. Our first stop was the outside of School. We noticed it was very clean and felt safe.
There was no litter outside of school. We also visited the library, St Phillips church, the Peace flame and the village hall. The village hall had the most litter outside of it but there was not much. The litter we did spot, we picked up!
Thank you to our adult volunteers for coming along on this trip!
