Over the last few weeks, we have been watching the caterpillars in our class change, as they ate and ate, grew bigger and bigger, developed cocoons and then emerged from their chrysalises as beautiful butterflies. We even created a beautiful bee and butterfly garden in our outside area, which the insects will be able to visit when they need to collect nectar and drink. This week, we were overjoyed to let our butterflies go free – some fluttered away straight away, but some brave butterflies stayed close to us for ten minutes, so that we were able to get a really close look at them. Your challenge as you take a look through the photos is to Spot the butterfly!
This week, we planted up the herbs that came into school as part of the Coronation of Mary liturgy. They smell wonderful and we are looking forward to watching the bees and butterflies visit them once they start to flower through the summer. Take a look at our infant gardens as you pass through them to see what you can spot.
It’s been a busy week again in Year 1. We have really enjoyed being able to get outside in the glorious weather this week!
We started the week off by planting some flowers donated to the May altar in the hall. It was a great opportunity to learn how to plant and care for flowers (pictures to follow). We have also been taking it in turns to keep the plants watered throughout the week, another important learning opportunity.
As the weather gets warmer and the sun gets brighter, please ensure your child applies suncream before leaving for school in the mornings. Then bring in a roll on or spray suncream, labelled with your child’s name to be kept in the classroom so they can reapply it themselves throughout the day.
We also really enjoyed our swimming lesson this week too. We are becoming a lot quicker at changing and love our coach rides to and from the pool!
Our zoo trip is fast approaching, so if you have not made your contributions yet, please do so via Arbor.
The children absolutely love the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, often choosing the story at storytime. We are, therefore, exploring the story sequence in more detail and learning to retell the story.
They became fierce cheeky Jacks, very cross mums and fierce giants in our Giant’s Castle.
A great inspiration for making our own castles.
The children also retold the story using puppets.
We’ve planted beans and can’t wait to see the roots and shoots appear.
Year 3 has been very excited this week as they have all used the new listening post for the first time. I’ll will include some photos next week! This was bought with the proceeds from the cake sale, so many thanks for your generosity. This means that at the daily guided reading sessions a group of six children can listen to a good-quality text together. Currently we have a CD collection of Roald Dahl animal stories, of which “Esiotrot” is one of the current guided reading texts. The children have suggested which other stories they would like to. MORE Roald Dahl stories were suggested and they certainly are good-quality, creative texts which extend children’s vocabulary, imagination and make them laugh! David Walliams was also a popular suggestion.
The children are engrossed in the current “Light and Dark” Science topic and use the topic vocabulary confidently. We are still debating how the moon isn’t a source of light itself, but reflects the light from the sun. We have different resources, such as access to the excellent “Explorify” website which Miss Bannams, the Science lead, told us about, to explore important questions like this in a variety of ways. This week the children made their own “light reflectors” and investigated which was the most reflective material to make a safe coat for night-time use.
The children completed their versions of a mystery story day. The task of writing a mystery story was challenging and the class has used the opportunity to experiment with language, such as expanded “noun sound” phrases – eg the squeaking of the metal hinges. They have incorporated similes, long sentences to build suspense, short sentences for dramatic effect and dialogue in their writing this week. Year 3 spend their writing sessions focusing well with presentation in their books really improving. The excellent level of effort they are showing always leads to progress and they should feel proud of how their writing is improving, like I do.
We started our sewing task this week, re-aquainting ourselves with the pleasures and pain of threading needles. Again, focus and team-work was seen round the classroom. If you do have any pieces of lightweight fabric to use in this projects (as per the mail), I would be very grateful to receive it.
Thank you for the RE homework this week. The range of ideas and presentation are fantastic. If you finish yours over the weekend, please do send it on on Monday. Also, if your child has the “Bingo” homework grid, please email or send it in for housepoints (as per the other email). Well done on those children who completed the MyMaths homework. The spellings and MyMaths for this week are both on Google classroom.
Ribbit! Ribbit! Ribbit! This week we have been learning all about frogs!!! To begin with we read a fantastic rhyming story ‘Oi Frog’. I highly recommend this book and would be lovely, if you could spend some time sharing the book with your children. It is jam – packed with rhyming words and brilliantly funny too.
After reading the story, the children had to choose their favourite rhyming pairs and draw them on a paper. As always they did so so well. All of them made a massive progress and are now able to talk about their drawing really well.
Letters and sounds Under the sea, under the sea, under the sea what do I see? We were busy exploring what’s under the sea and we had to find the different objects by orally blending the sounds. Under the sea we found a C-A-R, a F-O-X, a P-E-N and lots more… The children were listening super carefully trying to blend the sounds into words.
Why is blending important? Blending is a crucial skill in learning to read since being able to mentally join speech sounds together to make words helps children to decode unfamiliar words using letter-sound patterns when reading. Difficulties with the ability to blend is a hallmark of the struggling reader. How can you support your child at home? There are so many ways to support your children at home too. For example while you are having breakfast instead of saying ‘Can you please pass me the jam’ , you can say ‘Can you please pass me the J-A-M’ . Or if you are reading a book instead of reading the CVC words you can segment them and your children will try to orally blend and say the word themselves.
Maths In Maths we did massive frog jumps, making sure we match the correct numerals to the correct lily pad and jumping 1,2,3,4 or 5 times only.
In the mornings we were practising our pre writing skills by making frog puppets. It was a very hard work as we had to cut the frogs all by ourselves.
In Music this week we have been learning the song ‘Five speckled frogs’. We were singing, dancing, feeling the rhythm by acting out the song. The children really enjoyed it, so we had to do it again and again, and again :).
Understanding of the world After being able to see a real hen life cycle, we decided to learn all about frog’s life cycle too. We watched interesting videos about frogs and how they lay their eggs, we learned new words like ‘tadpole’ and ‘metamorphosis’. The children had to think about what comes first, second, third and forth, and to cut and glue the different pictures into the correct order. I am so impressed with everyone….it was a massive challenge. Cutting is not an easy job, but cutting a small pictures is even harder… and then sticking them in the right order!!! Well done everyone! Of course, we had to proudly display our work too….
Religiouseducation A big thank you for sharing your good news with us. Birthday parties, new babies, exciting trips… it was such a pleasure to hear everyone’s good news.
The children have got through the weeks of SATs. They were magnificent in their positive attitudes. The children have worked so hard and have all done their very best. We are very proud of them all.
During the afternoons, we have had some time to do lots of writing activities. In RE, the children wrote radio scripts for an interviewer to interview St Stephen and investigate why and how he was so brave to stand up for his faith despite being persecuted and threatened with death. The children learned he was in fact the first martyr for the christian faith. The Holy Spirit gave him the courage to speak up for what he believed was right and to share his faith with the people who were attacking him.
The children used their scripts to role play their interviews. They displayed great knowledge and empathy for St Stephen.
Today, the children had a relaxed day having studied so hard for their SATs. Rounders and other games were played, the school provided an ice-lolly for each child and much fun was had by all.
Over the weekend, the children will be busy packing their suitcases for our residential trip to the Isle of Wight. We will endeavour to post pictures on this class page through the course of the week but priority will be given to ensuring all children and staff are safe.
Please pray for good weather, happy and healthy children and staff and safe journeys there and back.
During our May Day liturgy, the Chaplaincy Team led us as we gave thanks for Mary, the mother of Jesus. All the children created a poster that celebrated Mary’s role as Queen and these have been used as a prayer focus for all the classes. Thank you so much for all the amazing plant donations that have been used to really show how deep our thanks is to Mary. Our service ended with a tremendous May Pole dance by Year 4.
We are all overjoyed to finally receive our set of new reading books. Here we are, juggling with five books each – it was trickier than we thought to hold the books out and look at the camera at the same time! We shall enjoy reading them at home along with a library book that we choose from our Top 50 reads for Year 2. There are so many books to choose from!
In preparation for our May Day liturgy, we wrote prayers asking for help as we try to keep the peace in our own lives. Here are our beautiful Mary, Queen of Peace posters that we were very proud to show everyone in school. Thank you so much for contributing such wonderful plants for our floral display. We shall enjoy planting and caring for them and then watching them grow across the next few months.
The children are really enjoying their sharing books that we sent home this week. They were so enthusiastic and loved telling me about the stories they’ve read at home. It was wonderful to see the joy and excitement during our shared reading morning today. The reading mornings will continue every Tuesday and Friday morning from 8.40 – 9.00 am and everyone is welcome to join us.
Our story focus over the next couple of weeks is Jack and the Beanstalk. We have begun learning the story and retelling it during learning through play. More news Jack’s adventures next week. We would welcome any alternative versions that your child may wish to bring into school.
Thank you to all those parents who contributed plants to our Mary altar and were able to join our ‘Crowning of Mary’ service this week. Reception took part in a class worship during the week to honour Mary during this month of May.
Over the past two weeks the children have also been fascinated by our Living Eggs programme. We took delivery of the eggs last week and they were amazed at how quickly the chicks grew over that time.
Wow! We have been so busy singing Nursery rhymes, creating amazing display, rhyming and gardening. We also took part in Mary’s coronation assembly on Tuesday and we all did so well listening to Mrs Porter and singing the special songs. We also had to say goodbye to our super sweet chicks. We were very lucky to see them hatch… we have been busy recording how they change, clean after them, feed them and play with them.
This week we dedicated to Nursery rhymes and the children were super creative in making a lovely new display. They made some sheep and cupcakes, special clock and lots of flowers for Mary’s garden.
At the end of the week the children had to choose their favourite Nursery rhyme and then draw it. I am so impressed with children’s drawing skills. They were also able to talk about their drawings so well….fantastic job everyone. There you go some examples:
In Letters andSounds we continued developing our rhyming skills by finding out rhyming words in different nursery rhymes, but Humpty Dumpty was particularly helpful….
In Maths we’ve been singing ‘Roll, roll, roll your boat’ and had to subitise and think about one less while playing with the boats in the water tray.
Our Gardening project has been super successful and we are now growing all these different vegetables like carrots, onions, beans, tomatoes, strawberries and even sunflowers. We are all very, very excited and really hope that they will grow bigger and bigger each day.
We also planted some beautiful flowers in our hanging baskets and put the daffodils to sleep until next spring!!!
Religious education:
This week we continued talking about Good news and Pentecost. The children all went home with a special GOOD NEWS slip, so I would really appreciate it if you take a moment and fill it in. A good news could be their birthday, a visit from a family friend, or the prospect of an exciting trip. Thank you very much for your continued support!
