Keeping active
As part of our commitment to being a happy and healthy school, we’re always looking at ways to increase our pupils’ physical activity both in and out of school.
The government’s childhood obesity plan has set out the ambition for all children to achieve 60 minutes, or more, of physical activity every day (30 minutes in school and 30 minutes outside of school).
In response to this aim, we’ve compiled a physical activity guide suggesting out-of-school physical activities available to families in our local area.
The information on the guide is correct as of November 2018. Keep an eye out on our news and class news pages where will promote any new activities throughout the year.
We’d love to hear feedback about any activities you or your child try based on this guide.
Living and Learning: manners
We always encourage and model good manners and each half term we have a different manners focus.
As we approach Christmas, and other celebrations, this is a time for giving and receiving presents so we thought about the importance of using these manners.
We also thought about other times to use please and thank you…
- In the dinner hall
- If someone opens the door for you
- If you are given something
- At mealtime
- If someone has helped you
- If you are given a compliment
Living and Learning: Identity
Over this half term, our Living and Learning theme has been Identity.
Firstly, we considered there were lots of things the same about each other but everyone is different too.
Nobody is exactly the same, everyone is unique.
Children were invited to bring in something to share with the class that made them special. We learnt lots about each other including the different religions the children follow (or in some cases don’t follow), speaking different languages, having different interests and achievements and hearing about their family including their origins (Eleanor is half Irish).
In our following lesson, we learnt about our roles and responsibilities at home and at school (also linking back to our 8 Rs for learning) and why it is important to take responsibility (including in the community around us).
We acted out some different roles and responsibilities and considered whether they are easy or difficult, which they do well or not so well and willingly or less willingly.
Our action plan was to think about one way to take responsibility.
‘I can take responsibility by practising my reading, maths and writing at home. ‘
‘I can take responsibility by tidying my bedroom.’
‘I can take responsibility by looking after my brother.’
‘I can take responsibility by taking care of my cat.’
‘I can take responsibility by helping with the cooking at home.’
The whole point of art!
Last week, we looked at famous artists and their work. First up was Georges Seurat who is most famous for his Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
Seurat invented a style of artwork – pointillism! This involves sometimes millions of tiny dots placed intricately in patterns to create an image.
First, we sketched some ideas. Once we’d chosen a final design, we drew out our scene.
Next came the whole point of the exercise – filling in the dots! It was quite time consuming but very strangely relaxing. We took it as an opportunity for some mindfulness and dotted away whilst listening to calming music.
The results were pretty astounding!
Wake up Shake up leaders
Thank you to our KS2 WuSu leaders who have led our daily WuSu physical activity this term and taught us lots of new routines.
Thank you to Mrs Charlesworth who has helped to run our WuSu after-school club where they have created all of the routines.
Next term, we will be running a KS1 and KS2 dance /WuSu club which will lead into a dance festival after Easter.
Happy Holidays!
We have reached the end of the first term in Reception and can’t believe how well the children have settled-and grown!
They have been so motivated to learn and kept us all on our toes! Every child has made fantastic progress, developed good friendships and are happy to join in and take part in all the activities.
Thank you for your help and support over the term.
We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Living and Learning: Creative cultural and spiritual homework
Wow – what fantastic creative homework based on the children’s cultural and spiritual experiences. We spent time looking at all the homework and the children were able to give stars to each other about what they liked. The homework gave a great insight into the identity (our current Living and learning theme) of the children in terms of what they celebrate or what they enjoy culturally.
We even heard about a festival for dogs, Dog Fest, and Jack had a great suggestion for a brand new festival to celebrate friendship.
All about levers
Our Science learning continued this week by exploring how levers work. Levers are a fantastic invention which require a smaller force to be applied to lift or move a load.
We used rulers and pencils to create our own levers and investigated what we needed to do to balance coins of different weights.
Grace made a great observation that the heavier coin needed to be nearer to the fulcrum (ask your child what that is) and the lighter coin should be further away. Once she made this suggestion, lots of us were successful in balancing two different coins.
We moved on to investigate this on a larger scale, finding out how far from the fulcrum different masses (900g, 800g… all the way to 100g) had to be to balance a 1kg mass.
100g had to be 79cm away from the fulcrum but it did balance with 1kg! Amazing.
See whether you can create your own lever at home and whether you can find some levers around the house. We started off our learning by realising just how useful a nut cracker is – it’s a lever you know!
Creative Homework
For this week’s homework, most children decided to share what they know about a religious festival. We learnt about Christmas, Diwali, Korean New Year, Eid and the Mexican Day of the Dead.
We enjoyed learning from each other…
Here are some piece of homework we really liked…
Humariah created a quiz about Christmas and The Day of Dead.
Martha wrote a letter to Stanley (the main character in our class novel)
Ben created information about Christmas using PowerPoint
Rohan learnt all about St Kitts (where members of his family come from)
Science: forces
We’ve been scientists this morning.
We predicted which of these cars rolled furthest. The result was that the car with the four big wheels rolled much further than the others.
After that, we thought about how we could make the car with the four small wheels roll further. We knew that we needed a smooth surface and we learned that this meant there would be less friction.
Jodie had the great idea to put whiteboards on the carpet and it worked as the car rolled further.
