Category: Our Classes

Happy New Year to you all! I hope you had a lovely and peaceful Christmas. Mrs Ruffell and I would like to say a huge thank you for your extremely generous End of Term Gifts. Autumn Term was a fabulous term, jam packed with lots of learning opportunities. Here is some of the fun we got up to during the last week.

Year 1 Home Learning shall be uploaded onto Google Classroom www.classroom.google.com . I shall be emailing you all today with the log in details for this and other platforms we may use during Remote Learning.

The classroom that we shall be using is titled ‘Year 1 20-21’

You can find a helpful guide here:

For today’s learning, can your child/ren complete the following:

Write a thank you letter to Father Christmas. Remember to include the correct punctuation, capital letters, full stops and finger spaces. Try to use adjectives in your writing to give more detail.

Draw a portrait of someone who is special to you and write why.

Write 3 sentences to describe the weather.

Year Two have had a tremendous end to their first term in the class. The children enjoyed singing along to their performances during the KS1 nativity play and were justifiably proud of the way in which they spoke their lines so clearly. They also had great fun during our Christmas party (attended by Father Christmas!), which followed a delicious Christmas lunch.

The week ended with a much more thoughtful Friday, during which the children celebrated mass with Father Francis, prayed for family and friends as they finished decorating the class Christmas tree and described what was so special about their kriskringle while exchanging gifts. A final fun experience to end the week was watching a music concert called The Night Before Christmas that has been streamed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and it was a joy to see the children soaking up this music and giggling at the antics of the Elf presenter. If you would like to rewatch the concert together, a link can be found on our Google Classroom.

Mrs Brunt and I are so very grateful for the smashing gifts and cards that we received at the end of term and would like to thank you for your continued support as we all work together to teach your wonderful children.

Have a very happy, healthy and holy Christmas and I look forward to seeing everyone again in 2021.

The children have been enjoying the story of ‘How to catch Santa’ this week and have worked hard on their writing as part of this teaching sequence, in particular thinking about writing sentences with conjunctions such as but, because, so, and as well as punctuating question sentences correctly. Having focussed on learning how to accurately draw the hands onto a clock face, in maths, we are learning how to subtract within 100, using manipulatives, 100 squares and place value strategies that explore how to subtract from the tens and ones.

As part of our art topic on Leaves, the children also created some beautiful artwork inspired by poinsettias. The children all worked so hard on this paper collage learning and if you sneak a (socially distanced) peak through the classroom window, you will be able to see their artwork, which is making us all smile.

Thank you for working with your children to write some lovely Advent prayers, which the children have been reading as part of our daily prayers.

The recordings for our Christmas play were completed on Monday and the final video with all the pieces edited together is wonderful. We are all looking forward to sharing this with you on Tuesday at 7pm. Further details on how to access this video will be sent to you early in the week.

To allow for the recommended quarantine period, the final ‘posting’ day for class Christmas cards is Tuesday, so that all the cards can be delivered on Friday, along with the exchange of our KK gifts, which should also be brought to school by Tuesday. We are all looking forward to our Christmas lunch on Thursday and the children are invited to wear a Christmas jumper and bring in Christmas hats on Thursday.

Once again, thank you for your continued patience and support as we ensure that everyone stays safe inside their own classroom bubble and close to their families at the start and end of the day.

Have a lovely, lovely weekend.

What beautiful Advent wreaths the children have created. Thank you for putting so much time and effort into them.

The children worked so hard finishing our English text Mr Big. The sequence finished by writing a letter from the perspective of Mr Big, focusing on joining two single clause sentences with ‘and’. I have noticed a huge improvement in everyone’s handwriting and the pride they are taking in their work.

We have been focusing again on Adding Numbers to 20 following Maths No Problem. We have been using the method of grouping 10 then adding the remainder. To support their understanding I demonstrated how to show Dienes to show Tens and Ones.

My phonics group have started to learn the five split digraphs. This week we have been learning ‘a_e’ and ‘e_e’. We have been noticing which spelling patterns we can use to support our spellings.

Mrs Ruffell’s group have been practising, ‘oo'(book), ‘oo'(moon) ‘ai’. The emphasis has been on writing words using these sounds.

Next weeks challenges are:

After Christmas, I shall be adding another challenge to support the children’s learning further.

Have a relaxing weekend.

Miss Perry

The children have had great fun this week, learning their lines as well as the actions and songs to lots of cracking nativity songs. We have recorded groups of children in their roles and they all look wonderful in their costumes. We look forward to sharing the completed play when it goes live during the last week of term.

In a whole school competition, the children refined their speed stacking skills and it was lovely to see how their times came down as they practised more and more. This activity was done as part of our maths topic on Time and it would be great if you could continue to help your child to tell the time using an analogue clock, reading half past, quarter to and quarter past times first and leading on to reading times to five minutes.

As part of our English learning, we have started to read the book ‘How to catch Santa’. This is a great read and the children had lots of questions to ask Father Christmas, so we used their ideas to write letters to Father Christmas. I was very impressed with how the children remembered to punctuate all their sentences beautifully when they were writing to Santa!

To mark the first week of Advent, we lit the first candle on our Advent wreath and decorated our Christmas tree. The children have set each other Advent Challenges such as ‘Share a friend’ and ‘Help Mum and Dad’ and we open one of these challenges each day as part of our school journey through Advent.

As we go through Advent, one of my favourite activities is to walk around my village each Sunday afternoon as it begins to get dark and look to see how the houses are being decorated. As the weeks go by, there are more and more lights and this is a wonderful way to see just how important Jesus’s birth is in the lives of so many people around us. I wonder what the Christmas lights are like down your street? Maybe you could take a walk and find out.

Have a wonderful weekend everyone.

As ever, we continue to be very busy in Year 2, combining a focus on Maths and English with many other areas of the curriculum.

As part of our topic focussing on People who Care, past and present, the children learned about Florence Nightingale and Saint Teresa of Calcutta as well as nurses who care for us so well today. Next, we will learn about other nurses, such as Mary Seacole.

The children had great fun creating a sculpture of a modern day nurse and we linked this to our Design and Technology topic on Structures. The children explored what makes a structure stable and the classroom is now filled with paper rollercoasters, 3D shapes made out of construction kits as well as playdough sphere structures. Following their investigations, the children concluded that a structure needs a flat and wide base in order to be both stable and strong. They are using this information well this week as we hold our Speed Stacking Competition along with the rest of the school.

We are all looking forward to enjoying Advent together and today, we will start making our classroom look much more Christmassy! Please do read our RE home learning page to find out more about what we are learning in RE between now and Christmas.

In English this week, we have been getting stuck into our new book ‘Mini Rabbit Not Lost’. We have enjoyed reading a little more of the book each day and writing out versions of the story alongside it. We have also started to focus on using inverted commas (speech marks) to introduce dialogue to our stories.

In Maths, we have focused on the 3, 4 and 8 times tables. We have looked closely at the relationship between the 4 and 8 times tables and mental strategies we can use to find the answers quickly. We will also be focusing on division soon so a secure times table knowledge is a must!

In RE, we have started to learn our carols for the Christmas school production and will start practicing our scene next week. We have also started our learning about visitors and why they are important at this time of year. Don’t forget to check our class RE blog for more details about our RE learning this half term.

Don’t forget to check the Google classrooms for this week’s homework.

Have a restful weekend,

Miss Battams 🙂