Logic and nonsense in year 4 for the week before half-term

Both were studied this week – logic in the form of data which the children saved using data loggers, when they worked well in small groups. They were also inspired by Lewis Carroll in “The Jabberwocky” and wrote their own fantastic versions of the nonsense poem which will be made into an anthology. They also made good progress with multiplication, moving onto formal multiplication. It’s been a packed five weeks and I hope everyone has a really good break and rest. I look forward to seeing everyone after the half-term break.

Read All About It with Year Six!

Over the past few weeks, we have been fascinated to learn about the fight for women’s suffrage in David Roberts’ excellent book, ‘Suffragette – The Battle for Equality’.

The children have hotseated key figures, watched the Epsom Derby, cheered on their favourite horse – even watched Eliza Doolittle encouraging Dover to come home – to help immerse them in the events of the 1913 Epsom Derby and write their own newspaper report of the fate of Emily Wilding Davison. This was great writing that the children enjoyed publishing as their own front page.

Wednesday marked the beginning of the Church season of Lent and we joined the parish community at St Bart’s for the Ash Wednesday service. This penitential season calls us to live closer to God through prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Our Lenten promises set out our private intentions for the season ahead.

Nursery 16.02.24

This week we read Mr Wolf’s Pancakes. Mr Wolf went to his neighbours to ask for help but they weren’t very helpful. In the end he had a go and ended up making delicious pancakes that the whole neighbourhood could smell. His neighbours decided they wanted to try the pancakes, but did Mr Wolf let them have any?

In Nursery we decided to make our own pancakes. We helped to pour in and stir the mixture together. We waited very patiently while they were cooking, the pancakes were described as ‘awesome’.

In RE this week we looked at how a family gathers at Church for Sunday Mass. We talked about the Bible, the hymn books and even looked at something called a Stoup. We learnt that this is filled with Holy Water for people to bless themselves when entering a Church. We role played entering Church for a service and used the Holy Water to bless ourselves.

In maths this week we continued our work on number 4. We took part in some activities to support this such as frogs on logs, spots on a ladybird and we joined in with Number 4’s sports day by throwing bean bags into a hoop.

Other photos this week:

Important Dates

Parent Consultations – Tuesday 27th and Thursday 29th February.

Reading Morning – Join us every Friday for reading morning in the Nursery classroom, 8:45 – 09:00am.

There will be no reading morning on Friday 8th as we will be attending Mothers Day Assembly. Parents are welcome.

Friday 22nd March – EYFS Cake sale after school.

School finishes at 11:45am/ 13:30pm on Thursday 28th March.

Have a lovely half term break.

Miss Taylor

Year 2 care for the environment

Ten years ago, a number of trees were planted around the school grounds by children who are now at least sixteen and these trees are growing really strongly and are much taller than anyone at school! To continue this legacy, an avenue of trees has been planted at the top of the junior playground. They may look small now, but in ten years time, imagine how tall they will have grown!

Year 2 are sculptors

We all love Art and Design here in Year 2 and we have been exploring the artwork of the amazing artist Charles McGee over the last half term. We shared our wonderful sculptures in our class assembly and we are very pleased to present them here, displayed as if they were in an art exhibition!

Year 2 focus on their wellbeing

We all performed brilliantly in our class assembly this week and we are very proud of ourselves. As part of Children’s Mental Health Week, we shared our top tips for how to boost wellbeing and cheer ourselves up when we are feeling down.

Here are our top tips for good wellbeing:

First of all, connect with the people around you. We created a paperchain to show all the things we do that connect us together.

Don’t forget to Be Active: we start each day with a song and dance and we love to run laps around the playground to keep extra fit.

Remember to Give: small acts of kindness are a great way to give to one another. We look out for our friends in the playground and give our clothes to charity to help to raise money.

Take notice: we love to spend time in the great outdoors and we have planted some young trees in the field outside. Over our time at St Adrian’s we will look after these trees and we look forward to seeing them grow.

Finally, don’t forget to Keep Learning. There are so many wonderful things to find out and each day, we love to learn something new!

Reception – Children’s Mental Health week

09.02.24

Hello children, parents and carers
It’s been a lovely week of thinking about feelings, emotions, mental health and wellbeing. Lots of the activities that took place were closely linked with this year’s theme ‘My voice matters’. We played games and enjoyed our time together on the carpet to help the children build a bank of ideas on how they can express themselves.

‘Are you listening carefully?’ This was the question we’ve asked the children. We played ‘The whisper game’ where everyone had to pass the message around the circle from child to child. We made string telephones working in pairs and noticed that when the string gets loose we can’t hear that well.
We also talked about how important eye contact is and played the ‘Eye signaled game’.

In PE this week we danced and did yoga and the children truly enjoyed both activities. They all commented on how well and refreshed they are feeling after the dancing and how calm and content after the yoga:

We also did wonderful writing thinking about our likes and dislikes. Here are some of the examples for you to enjoy 🙂

And finally we began reading a wonderful book called ‘Ruby’s worry’. We all learnt from Ruby. She’s a perfectly happy little girl, until she discovers a worry. The worry – depicted as a scribbly yellow shape – is hardly noticeable at first, but starts to grow and soon it’s with her all the time, stopping her from doing the things she loved.

We made a chart of how Ruby was feeling before the worry and how she was feeling after the worry and discussed the importance of sharing your worry with someone you can trust. That can be your friend, teacher or family, anyone you feel comfortable with. Next week we will create our worry box and the children will be able to draw or write their worry and share it with the rest of us. We all know that if we do that the worry will just disappear :)!

On Tuesday we talked about how to stay safe while using the internet. Smartie the Penguin was very supportive and he helped us understand the importance of never clicking on websites we are not sure of. We watched his story and created posters to take home. We also learnt his internet safety song.

In Little Wandle we started reading very, very long words like picnic and magnet, and even longer ones like bedroom and carpark. We’ve been revisiting phase 2 and phase 3 digraphs and some of the tricky words. In your orange books this week you will find your first longer words. Please practice them at home for building confidence and fluency. In class, when we read the longer words, we use the term ‘chunk’. For example the word bedroom can be chunked into two smaller words ‘bed’ and ‘room’. That really helps the children hear all the sounds in those very challenging phase 4 words.

In Maths the children were introduced to the concept of doubling and they learnt that this means ‘twice as many’. We had plenty of opportunities and the children had to answer very tricky questions like: ‘What does double mean?‘ or ‘Where can you see a double?‘.
We also practiced physically making doubles, using manipulatives and mark making.

In RE we created a wonderful ‘Mary and Joseph are taking baby Jesus to the Temple’ drawings. We also practiced tricky words and ‘igh’ trigraph by writing ‘He is the light!’ Have a look at our wonderful display. No doubt that you will love it 🙂

We are very excited to show you our wonderful Still Art paintings. They are now complete and the water colors look lovely. We all all very proud!

Have a lovely weekend.
Looking forward seeing you all on Monday for another fun filled week.
Mrs Solakova

Children’s Mental Health Week in Year 3

This week has been bustling with activities centered around children’s mental health and Safer Internet Day. To kick off our week, we delved into the theme ‘My voice matters’ in class, exploring ways to use our voice to share what matters to us. We took part in a dance and yoga session to help us focus on our physical well being. 

For Safer Internet Day, we immersed ourselves in various activities aimed at enhancing our online safety awareness.

On the move with Year 6

This has been another busy and exciting week as we have looked for ways to care for our well being, including keeping ourselves safe online. We have learnt about the positive and negative affects of influencers, enjoyed a taster of street dance and found a moment of calm through yoga. As we have gone along, we have taken time to reflect on the golden moments in our day too.

As we have thought about ourselves, we have also thought of our place in the global family and learnt about the pushes and pulls of migration. Our posters bring together our personal views, together with what we have learnt about the benefits and disadvantages to source and host countries from migration and our persuasive writing skills.

Feeling good on and off line

.. has been the theme of this week. Some of what we have done is in the bulletin. On Thursday, the children also thought of an achievement they are proud of and shared this with their table. Also key to good mental health is a healthy outdoor environment and the Eco Councillors and other children planted some saplings on the field which will hopefully grow to provide shade and a home for birds and other animals.

The children are really enjoying “The Firework Maker’s Daughter” which is a beautifully written story of bravery and adventure, laced with plenty of humour.

Reading rich, varied and creative literature is a key aspect of good learning and the children are also loving exploring nonsense poetry, specifically “The Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll.

They have been learning about data – what it is, the pitfalls of collecting what seems to be straightforward data, and how well-suited computers are to gathering and processing it. They used data loggers, which are borrowed from a local computer hub.

Here is the display of the children’s writing about the (imitation) Roman artefacts we have here and their excellent accompanying sketches the children took great care in drawing.

The children used data loggers for the first time today. They recorded the levels of light and noise and the temperature in different parts of the classroom. Some children went to great lengths to ensure different readings!

Wishing you a relaxing, happy weekend.