All through the year, the Year 2 children have been caring for the plants growing in the raised beds next door to the classroom.
We have thoroughly enjoyed watching the different insects using the Bee and Butterfly Garden that we created and having grown them from seed, all of our vegetables, including onions, peas and courgettes are busy growing. This week was very exciting as we were finally able to harvest our strawberries and we used them to make milkshakes. They were very delicious!
Every plant was filled with ripe, red strawberries.
Look at that huge strawberry!
What a massive harvest!
We washed the strawberries before we could eat them.
We used the bridge cut when cutting the strawberries.
We poured the strawberries into the jug
Next we added the strawberries, ready to blend them. Unfortunately, the camera stopped working after that, but the milkshakes were very delicious!
What a varied week we’ve had in Year 1 this week. We started the week by focusing on volume and capacity. We really enjoyed experimenting with different containers and lots of coloured water, describing and comparing the capacity of each container using words such as ’empty’, ‘full’, ‘half full’, ‘less than’ and ‘more than’. Keep a close eye out for different containers around your house, describing and comparing their capacity.
We ended the week by learning about Judaism. We had a special workshop to learn about Moses and the Exodus. We also carried on the learning back in the classroom to understand how Moses became the leader of the Israelites. To understand the Exodus story, we also got to try some unleavened bread and dress up like Moses and the Israelites.
The Year 2 children have had a wonderful trip to Ashridge. They were blessed with warm, but not too hot weather and thoroughly enjoyed exploring the habitats there, learning to identify and name a number of trees including sweet chestnut, holly, hawthorn, oak and beech. The children enjoyed exploring the habitat below the logs and leaves and found many minibeasts including centipedes, harvestman spiders and rove beetles. It was a very exciting day and the children were superb, with one parent commenting ‘I am absolutely blown away at how well behaved and engaged the children were today. They are an absolute credit to the school’. We are very grateful to the parents who were able to accompany us to Ashridge, without whom we could not have run the trip.
This week we’re having temperatures to understand what it would have been like in Ancient Egypt. The children enjoyed drawing their plans for the Egyptian death masks they will make. While they did that, they also examined some beautiful replica artefacts – a winged scarab, ushawbti figure which the Egyptians believed would do the work for the deceased in the afterlife and an eye of horus. The children handled them very carefully and were fascinated by the Egyptian beliefs – for example, that the scarab beetle pushed the sun across the sky.
In RHE, the children are learning about living with each other and this week they were working in groups to consider actions which make you feel cared for by others.
I hope you were as proud of the children this morning as I was. They learnt the many words to a complicated song very well, performed the actions clearly and performed everything with the enthusiasm. They did have pictures they’d carefully drawn – of parts of the song, or to show their feelings for their own Dad or God the Father – but we forgot to show them this morning. Here is a photo of them all holding all the drawings.
The class is loving reading and writing rhyming couplets about children who get up to dastardly deeds and come to sticky ends. We’ll finish them next week and start a new book. The learning about fractions has moved into the area of equivalence which is quite tricky but the children listened and reasoned really well in our first session of this.
Well done for coming to school with suntan cream and for those children with caps. Please keep remembering the water. Have a great weekend.
Too hot or too cool to join in with my Dad-dancing in today’s assembly, the children were less reserved in Thursday’s rehearsal and threw some amazing shapes. Relive the magic this weekend with our video…
We are looking forward to our class trip on Tuesday to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. The forecast is currently for sunny intervals and a high of 23 – much more bearable than today’s temperatures, but the children will still need to dress for the weather – sun screen and school caps are a must, as well as comfortable shoes or trainers for all the walking we will do. The children should wear school uniform.
It would be a good idea to pack an extra drink or two for our trip in addition to that included as part of our packed lunch. A small, draw-string style backpack would be a handy way to carry this around, if you already have one.
Please make sure that you have given your child any medication needed – such as travel or hay fever – in plenty of time to ensure that they enjoy the day. Our journey to Kew will take about an hour.
I hope the sun continues to shine over the weekend and that you all have a Happy Father’s Day.
This week, we have made preparations to celebrate our fathers and male role models in our families.
The children have made some lovely Father’s Day cards.
In addition, after a week of practising a song with actions called Thank you Dad, Year 6 enjoyed taking part in the whole school Father’s Day assembly.
Year 6 completed their science topic of electricity by planning and conducting an experiment to discover if the length or number of wires would affect the brightness of a lightbulb in a series circuit. The children worked well together with a partner and showed independence and scientific thinking in their work.
We have begun to work on the summer concert so watch out for that in the coming weeks.
It’s been scorching in Year 1 this week and our learning has been on fire too!
We are really enjoying our new book in English, Iggy Peck Architect. We have had fun creating our own structures out of objects around the classroom, just like Iggy! We’re looking forward to continuing the story next week.
In Maths, we have been focusing on money. We have been learning to recognise notes and coins. In an increasingly cashless society, please make sure you remind and show the children these coins and notes regularly. It was great to hear so many of the children had a money box or a piggy bank too.
We ended the week by taking part in the Father’s Day assembly. We really enjoyed performing our class song and taking part in the whole school singing. We also made some ‘tie-rrific’ cards for our dads/male caregivers too.
We’ve had another busy week together in Year 4 and the children have enjoyed the start of our new design and technology topic, learning about structures and designing pavilions. We’re looking forward to getting some ideas for our own designs when we visit the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in the coming weeks. In the meantime, here are some photos of our first investigation of structures where we experimented with the strength of different shapes.
We are also hoping that our trip to Kew will provide inspiration for our new art topic where we are learning about the art and landscapes of Henri Rousseau. Watch this space in the weeks ahead to see our evolving artwork.
Finally, you can forget the jubilee concert: Year 4 have shown themselves to be true rockstars as they have worked so hard to improve their rapid recall of multiplication tables facts. They will get the chance to try out this knowledge next week when we take part in the national multiplication tables check.
Year 3 has a whole new collection of topics for this last half-term. We are reading tales with warnings or morals and will be focusing on “Jim – A Cautionary Tale”. Written in rhyming couplets, it is a great opportunity to experiment with rhyme, rhythm and metre.
In English, we are also focusing on becoming absolutely clear on the definitions of word classes, and to be able to talk about grammatical features confidently. This means knowing the difference between an adjective and adverb, for example; and between a noun and a proper noun, amongst other things. We’re doing lots of practise in “early morning work” to embed this knowledge. Here’s a link to this learning if you’d like to do some recapping at home.
We’ve started learning about the Ancient Egyptians, with much enthusiasm and interest shown by the children. The only issue is going to be how to cover enough of the topic to do it justice and to listen to all the contributions and ideas of the children. Here is our collaborative timeline; and below is the children’s initial list of thoughtful questions.
We started outdoor athletics activities this week; and the children energetically jumped and ran across the field in different ways. I’ll post photos over the coming weeks.
Homework is on the Google drive. The spellings are tricky this week. We will have another session exploring ways to remember them and practise them again on Monday. I look forward to seeing all the children’s reading books on Thursday. Their reading has progressed well so far this year. Let’s make the most of day of every week left of this academic year. At the same time, the weather surely will stay nice and warm for lots of fun outside and the traditional, exciting end-of-term activities we’re all delighted to see back. I also look forward to seeing lots you at next Friday’s Father’s Day assembly. Our class song is one which reflects on God, the Father as well as Dads. The children have made a good start learning the words. Please keep practising over the weekend. Have a good few days off.
As always, it’s been a busy first week back from the half term break. Well done to all the children for taking part in Phonic Screening Check. They did a great job and really enjoyed show casing their phonics learning. The children’s scores will be issued in their end of year report.
In Maths this week, we have been looking at time, focusing on o’clock and half past. If your child isn’t already, please encourage them to wear an analogue watch to school everyday. This will help the children get used to reading the time regularly and becoming more familiar with the directions clockwise and anti-clockwise.
Don’t forget our RE homework about our new topic ‘Being Sorry’. Please complete the sheet below (which can also be downloaded from the Google classroom too) and return it by Friday 17th June 2022.
