Our Classes – Page 4 – St Adrian's Catholic Primary School

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 lots of seeds in different conditions to see how well they grow. We have learned that in addition to water, sunlight and air, seeds also need heat to grow well.

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 – Safer internet day!

14.02.2025

Dear children, parents and carers
I can’t believe we are halfway through the Reception year! The time has flown by….
The children have made massive progress not only in their reading, writing and maths, but also in their social skills, interacting with peers and adults and understanding rules and expectations.
This week began by thinking about how to stay safe on internet and what to do if something doesn’t look right while using 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 learnt his internet safety song.

After listening to Smartie’s story we discussed all the ways to stay safe and created speech bubbles with lots of advice! We even modelled Smartie!

In Maths the children explored the composition of numbers to 8. They learnt how their skills of perceptual subitising and counting can be used to see and represent the composition of larger numbers in different ways.

The children were encouraged to name their representations of numbers up to 8 and prompted to match numerals to these quantities. To draw their attention we went on a minibeast hunt and counted how many legs each one had (no minibeasts were harmed in this activity :)) We counted 6 legs on the ant and 8 on the spider!

And finally but not least, congratulations for all your hard work and motivation! You truly deserve the awards, red sash and golden rosette!!!

Dates to remember:
Wednesday 26.02.25 – Parents consultations – 1:00 – 3:00 pm
Thursday 27.02.25 – Parents consultations – 4:00 – 7:00 pm
Tuesday 04.03.25 – Theatre trip to Alban Arena

Have a wonderful half term break!
Mrs Solakova

Wrapping up spring 1 in year 4

The children have concluded this half-term with some fantastic writing, particularly their diary entries based on “Cinnamon”. This book really sparked their imaginations and the children still managed to find new things in the book which I hadn’t noticed. ~They have all really enjoyed the netball sessions with some fantastic, fast passing. The Roman topic has been great fun I’ve reminded the children there is still more Roman learning to do in St Albans – for example, visiting the theatre, which I just found out today is the only one now in Britain!

Below are the children with the learning resources we have bought with the very generous cake sale money. Fortunately, the children have positioned all the components of the digestive system correctly! It’s very good to revisit learning from previous topics, to check that the knowledge and understanding have been embedded.

The children also have this model of the ear to help with their understanding of hearing.

The child-friendly map of the Roman Empire has helped the children understand its size and the countries it ruled over.

I have also ordered some more Thesauruses so there is one between two for whenever the children choose to refer to them.

Altogether, these selection of learning resources will help the children learn independently and are things they enjoy using.

Standing with Year Six

As we come to the end of the first spring half-term (and the half-way point of year six!), we have concluded our learning relating to Catholic social teaching on Solidarity and peace.

In geography, we have learnt about the factors that affect migration, both nationally and globally. We have learnt about the challenges faced by migrants and the impact on host countries. Using geographic data, we learnt that climate change might make migrants of us all and considered our own response.

We explored these ideas further as we read Armin Greder’s book, ‘The Island’. We used this as a starting point for our own writing, changing the setting to an island where the inhabitants welcomed new arrivals.

Finally, we explored ideas around our own agency and our power to make a difference through Amanda Gorman’s fantastic, ‘Change Sings’. We wrote our own verses on the theme of change using the meter and rhythm of Amanda Gorman’s poem.

As part of Safer Internet Week, we learnt about the danger of scams: the children certainly raised some interesting issues and it would be worth continuing the conversation at home.

Have a happy and safe break from school: I will see you for the downhill stretch later this month!

February 12th 2025

As part of our learning about Toys, we have made a few of our own in DT

We found some odd socks at home and stuffed them with fluff. Then we decorated them with elastic bands and pipe cleaners. We gave them eyes and some other features and thought about the different characters they might be.

Now they hang in the classroom like a line of brightly coloured hanging pupae!

Reception – Children’s Mental Health week!

07.02.25

Hello children, parents and carers
It’s been a lovely week of thinking about feelings, emotions, mental health and wellbeing. We played games and enjoyed our time together, we learnt how to help each other by sharing our emotions and express ourselves. We read 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 also did wonderful writing thinking about our likes and dislikes. Here are some of the examples for you to enjoy 🙂

On the making table the children created lovely human faces with lots of emotions. They did great job describing how they feel and why they feel that way 🙂

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 blue 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 developed the skill of perceptual subitising. This form of subitising refers to instantly recognising the number of objects in a group without needing to count them. The concept of subitising zero and up to five items was introduced in small steps. We did dot plates and used them in our PE lesson to do jumps, hops, star jumps and much more:

What a crazy ‘Crazy hair day’ it has been! The children had amazing hairstyles, fun and very creative!

And finally but not least, congratulations for all your hard work and motivation! You truly deserve the awards, red sash and golden rosette!!!

Have a lovely weekend.
Looking forward seeing you all on Monday.
Mrs Solakova

Week of 3rd February in year 4

There were some quiet sessions in year 4 this week, with the choir members at Young Voices. We had lots of fun outside on a bright Wednesday afternoon, with just about half the class playing netball. The passing was fast and accurate!

The children played a dice game to practise their times tables, as the choir children arrived on Thursday morning.

children are really enjoying our current book “Cinnamon”. During the hot-seating on Thursday, they thought of excellent questions such as “How did you feel when the tiger ate your aunty?” and “Before you felt the emotions with the tiger, had you experienced them before?” and “Why did you go into the jungle?”. The question “Why didn’t you talk?” was answered with, “Because I didn’t have anything to talk about”, which was a thoughtful answer considering the context of the book.

As part of understanding the Eucharist, the children “interviewed” Mrs Gallaher about how going to mass helps her. The children were keen to understand what part of mass she enjoyed most and Mrs Gallaher talked about how she liked to try and apply something from the homily into her daily routine the next week.

The children looked great with crazy hair today!

Year 2 in Solidarity

This half term, our Catholic Social Teaching theme focuses on Solidarity and Peace. The children reflected on their inspiring ‘Give Racism the Red Card’ posters to show how they understand that God’s world is for everyone and all people should have equal access to everything.

We also thought about how we can act as peacemakers in our everyday friendships in the classroom or outside. We wrote our peacemaker promises onto doves of peace and decorated them to make a great display.

Nursery – 07.02.2025

In RHE this week we talked about Jesus and the things that he did to help others. We learnt about how he washed the feet of his disciples. We role played this.

Photos this week

Important Dates

Friday 14th February – Reading morning 08.45 – 09.00.

Monday 17th February – Friday 21st – Half term

Have a lovely weekend

Miss Taylor

Reception – Pets as Therapy

31.01.25

Welcome to our blog! We hope you’ve had a fun week like us. We’ve enjoyed lots of activities, but the best part was the Pets as Therapy Day on Friday. All children came to school dressed in all sort of animals, from little creatures to scary tigers… and they all looked amazing!

Lexa and Polka even visited our classroom and the children made them feel very welcomed. They gave them lots of cuddles and read their favourite stories to them.
Have a look yourself!

Well done for taking part in our Pets as Therapy art competition and congratulations to the winners! Your posters look amazing!

In Little Wandle we’ve learnt the last digraph and trigraph from phase 3 sounds and from now until Summer term we will concentrate on reading longer words like puppet, bigger, hammer using all phase 2 and phase 3 sounds.

We were also busy learning 3 new tricky words: are, sure and pure. The last two proved to be extra tricky, so please make sure you practice them at home too!

In Maths we talked about 4 side shapes and practiced describing the properties of the squares and rectangle. The children learnt that the square has 4 equal sides and the rectangle 2 short and 2 long sides! We went on a hunt around the school and looked for 4 side shapes in the environment. We were lucky to spot lots of square windows, rectangle benches and much more:

In RE we talked about how Jesus wants all children to be his friends and when his disciples tried to push the little children away Jesus said: “Let the children come to me, and do not stop them,” Jesus said. “The kingdom of heaven belongs to these little ones.”

And finally but not least, congratulations for all your hard work and motivation! You truly deserve the awards, red sash and golden rosette!!!

Have a lovely weekend.
Looking forward seeing you all on Monday.
Mrs Solakova