Events
Monday 19 November: The children are going to Allerton Grange for a sport workshop. Please ensure PE kits are in school.
Tuesday 18 December and Wednesday 19 December
Key Stage 1 Christmas production
Information
It was lovely to meet you all properly at Parents’ Evening. Thank you for taking a strong interest in your child’s learning. Many parents were keen to help even more at home. I hope the reading, writing and maths document is helpful. Also, thank you for coming to see our assembly. I know the children loved showing you all what they have learned. The next Parents’ Evening will be held in the Spring term. In the meantime, do not hesitate to drop in if you have anything that you’d like to discuss.
SEAL
The SEAL topic for this half term is ‘Getting On’. We’ll encourage the children to think about ways in which we can get on with others in situations such as playtimes or group learning. We’ll discuss different friendship tokens that can be given such as a smile or a compliment. I’ve been really pleased so far with how well Year 2 generally get on well as a whole class.
DT
Today, we’ve made the frames for our vehicles. We’ve also glued on our axle mounts and most groups have constructed their axles and wheels.
What a busy week!
Year Six have made a great start to this half term with some awesome artwork, splendid spelling games and winning the Cool Class Cup!
Well done and keep it up!
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.