DT
We are currently in the middle of a DT project. The children are working in groups to design and make a prototype of a moving vehicle. In the pictures below, the children are measuring and then sawing the wood for the frame of the vehicle.
Learning about mood in literacy
In literacy, we’ve been learning about how authors create mood by describing how a character is feeling. We’ve been focussing on the things that a character’s body and face do which show their emotion.
In the pictures, the children are building a phrase bank of these things to use in their writing next week.
Class assembly
A quick reminder that it’s our class assembly on Thursday. We hope to see you at 2.40pm.
Learning to write
In Reception we are continuing to learn letters and sounds. As they learn each letter, the children will be shown how to write the ‘grapheme’ (a way of writing down a sound or phoneme; graphemes can be made up of one letter like ‘p’ and ‘s’, two letters like ‘sh’ and ‘th’, three letters like ‘tch’ in a word like ‘catch’ or four letters like ‘ough’ in ‘dough’ or ‘cough’, where the same grapheme is used to represent two different sounds). You can download a guide to how we form our letters in the Help Your Child section on this website.
Remember that children need lots of practice with different activities to develop the muscles necessary for writing. When the muscles of the hand are weak, or when the fingers have not learnt to work together well, the child often compensates by using a poor or faulty pencil grip.
Here are some fun things to try at home to help your child develop these essential muscles:
Using an egg box, have your child hold 6-10 beans in their hand, and place them into the container one by one. Write a number inside each hole and ask your child to add the correct number of beans. This is also a great way to reinforce the concept of number. You could also have a race to see who can put five beans into each hole in the fastest time! The important thing is to do it one bean at a time.
Give your child a few coins to hold and ask them to push them one at a time through the slot in a money box. Make sure the coins are placed with the tips of the fingers, not the sides of the fingers.
Using Play Dough is great exercise for the fingers – try squashing, rolling, pounding and moulding with the hands, without using any cutters or other traditional Play Dough toys.
Other activities may include cutting with scissors, doing up buttons, tearing paper and picking up the pieces. Let your child help with the washing up and wring out the dishcloth!
New SEAL theme – Getting on
The SEAL theme Getting On covers four main aspects:
- developing the social skills of friendship
- working well together in a group
- managing anger
- resolving conflict
Group work takes place across all lessons and even at lunchtime and playtimes. Some questions for children to consider are:
- Did everyone take turns?
- Did everyone listen to what other people thought?
- Did each person have chance to tell the group what they thought?
- If people had different ideas could the group reach a compromise?
The key areas of learning throughout this theme are empathy, managing feelings and social skills.
Within this theme is Antibullying Week, 19 November – 23 November.
Hobby Half Day
What a great way to finish a very long half term. All the children from Year 1 to Year 6 were mixed up into new groups and they went off to do one of many activities for the afternoon on Friday. There were all sorts going on: iJamming, drumming, candle making and glass painting to name just a few. As I went round, there was a great atmosphere and all the children were chatting and learning together. Thanks to Mrs Maver for organising it and thanks to all the staff who led a workshop.
Have a great half term!
Goodbye, Year 5
I was very nervous on 04 September (it seems a long time ago now) jumping from Year 1 to Year 5. I knew that the class were one of the most enthusiastic in school after teaching them four years ago but the trepidation – note the wow word, Y5 – was still setting in. At the end of the half-term, I can now say that I have enjoyed every minute of teaching this class again. The enthusiasm and fantastic learning behaviours made my decision so worthwhile and I would like to thank all of you for making my job so enjoyable and easy!!
Make sure you keep up the great start you have made for Mr Owen and I’ll be checking up on your progress after such a great start!
Enjoy your half term; you deserve a good rest. See you on Monday 05 November.
Outdoor maths
The children are learning to recognise and write numerals whilst playing skittles.
Bringing the past into the present
Our class novel “Street Child” is continuing to provide many opportunities for us to learn in different ways. A lot of the drama recently done in Y5 has looked at mood and feelings which will enable the children to include these aspects in their writing. Here is some of the drama being photographed by the children on our iPads. They then uploaded the photo into an app and annotated it with how they felt the characters felt.
Pieces of Art
Year 3 and Year 4 have been piecing together different sections of art. There are five paintings of art to put together and each child gets one piece of one painting.
They now have to find someone else who has a piece of their painting. However, they are not allowed to show it to anyone else. They must use their knowledge of colour, shape and other art techniques to describe what they see. After that, they have to assemble the pieces into the correct place.
Finally, we discuss the paintings and say how artists create subtle effects.
- “You can tell the motorbike is moving because of the blurry lines and the scarf is in the air.” (Sam, Year 3)
- “This painting has lots of action in. You can tell because the black lines show movement.” (Isra, Year 4)