Try a school dinner
Over this term, we’re offering the chance for you to have a school dinner with your child(ren).
This is open to all children: those who currently have a school dinner and those who’d like to try them.
The dates for these sessions are:
- Years 5 and 6: Friday 01 March, 12.20pm
- Years 1 and 2:Friday 08 March, 12 noon
- Reception: Friday 15 March, 12 noon
- Years 3 and 4: Friday 22 March, 12.20pm
The cost is £2.65 for an adult meal and £1.90 for children in Reception to Year 4 and £1.95 for children in Years 5 and 6. There is obviously no extra charge if they already have a school dinner.
If you would like to sample a school dinner please ask at the office to secure your place as they will be allocated on a first come, first served basis.
Baby dinosaurs!
Our dinosaur eggs have hatched! Now… how do we look after baby dinosaurs?
Have they hatched?
…Not yet, but we’re keeping a close eye on them.
Dinosaurs!
Dinosaur eggs have been found in the playground!
Reception class playing and learning in the snow!
“There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.” (John Ruskin)
The Rs for learning
The 7Rs for learning is an additional theme to our SEAL (social and emotional aspects of learning) coverage across the year. Throughout this theme children will explore seven key aspects of learning behaviour:
- Responsibility – know that you are in charge of your learning
- Risk – taking – having a go
- Resilience – keep trying, stay positive and persevere
- Resourcefulness – try a different way and find and use resources independently
- Responsive – respond in the right way to peers and adults
- Remembering – apply your learning in other lessons
- Reflection – think about what and how you’ve learnt and learn from your mistakes
Each of these aspects that help us to learn will be explored over this half term.
Characteristics of effective learning
A big part of education is to learn facts and rules (and then to use these in certain situations). At school, we learnt times tables, spellings and capitals of some countries, for example – these are useful facts that we now use as adults. But education at its core is not just about being able to learn and remember facts. It’s about the processes as well as the outcomes. We want our children to happy and healthy learners for life. If they have the characteristics of effective learners listed below, which we promote at school and which you can promote at home, they are more likely to be successful, life-long learners.
The characteristics can be broken down into three broad areas:
- playing and exploring (finding out, using what they know in their play, being willing to ‘have a go’)
- active learning (being involved and concentrating, keeping on trying, enjoying achieving what they set out to do)
- creating and thinking critically (having their own ideas, using what they already know to learn new things, choosing ways to do things and finding new ways)
Have a think about these. When does your child has the opportunity and encouragement to demonstrate and develop these characteristics?
Here are a ‘Top 20’ list of examples of questions which might prompt you to change the way you support your child at home.
- Does your child respond to first hand experiences in an exploratory way?
- How does your child demonstrate natural curiosity?
- Does your child notice patterns, changes, similarities and differences in or outside the home?
- Does your child initiate activities around his / her own interests?
- Does your child seek challenges and take risks in new experiences?
- Does your child learn from mistakes without becoming disheartened?
- To what extent does your child become completely focused in activities and experiences and not easily distracted?
- Does your child pursue a particular line of interest in an activity?
- Does your child demonstrate persistence in the face of difficulty or a challenge?
- Can your child refocus and re-plan to overcome difficulties, setbacks and disappointments?
- Does your child know how to seek appropriate help in terms of materials, tools and other people?
- Does your child become involved in activities and experiences which arise out of personal interest, curiosity and enquiry?
- Does your child demonstrate satisfaction when engaged in and completing activities?
- Does your child generate new ideas during activities?
- Does your child adapt, refine or make changes when previous ideas were unsuccessful or could be developed?
- Is your child inventive in solving problems, using knowledge and skills across areas of learning?
- Does your child talk about or explore the idea of cause and effect through actions?
- Does your child offer ideas of why things happen and how things work or show this in his / her exploratory play?
- Does your child explore ways of solving new problems including trial and error?
- Is your child able to plan and monitor what has been done?
(Much of the content of this article comes from the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum, but we believe apply at all stages of a learner’s life.)
Phonics phase 3
Phonics is the step up to word recognition. Automatic reading of all words, both tricky and decodable, is the ultimate goal! We’ve begun Phase 3 of our phonics programme. The purpose of this phase is to:
- teach more graphemes, most of which are made of two letters, for example, ‘oa’ as in boat and float
- practise blending and segmenting a wider set of CVC (consonant – vowel – consonant) words, for example, fizz, chip, sheep, light
- learn all letter names and begin to form them correctly
- read more tricky words and begin to spell some of them
- read and write words in phrases and sentences.
The following phonemes will be taught during Phase 3.
- v, w
- x, y, z, zz, qu
- sh, ch, th, ng
- ai, ee, igh, oa
- oo, oo, or, ar
- er, oi, ir, ur
- air, ear, ure
Here are some examples of words your children will be reading: tail, week, right, soap, food, park, burn, cord, town, soil.
The number of tricky words is growing. This term we will learn: he, she, we, me, be, was, my, you, her, they, all.
How you can help at home
- Sing an alphabet song together.
- Play ‘I spy’, using letter names as well as sounds.
- Continue to play with magnetic letters, using some of the two grapheme (letter) combinations:
r-ai-n = rain blending for reading | rain = r-ai-n – segmenting for spelling
b-oa-t = boat blending for reading | boat = b-oa-t – segmenting for spelling
h-ur-t = hurt blending for reading | hurt = h-ur-t – segmenting for spelling
- Praise your child for trying out words.
- Set a timer; call out one word at a time and get your child to spell it on a magic board or a small whiteboard, against the timer – remember, they can use magnetic letters.
- Play ‘Pairs’, turning over two words at a time trying to find a matching pair – this is especially helpful with the tricky words: the the, to to no no, go go. Don’t worry if they get some wrong! These are hard to remember – they need plenty of practice.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
We have reached the end of the children’s first, very busy, exciting term at Moortown Primary School! All of the children are settled and happy and are making excellent progress in all areas of their learning and development.
These are just some of the ways the children have impressed us this term:
- Isaac, Manpreet, Noorpreet and Sachpreet are blending and reading brilliantly
- Dylan and Isaiah have been keen to learn by always listening and trying
- Kai, Pia, Grace and Gabby have made excellent choices all term and shown they know how to learn
- Filip has impressed us by overcoming his shyness to communicate more confidently with children and adults
- Ishaan, Farai, Josh and Ismail have been constructing amazing buildings and models
- Nicky and Lori have taught us a lot about trucks
- Thomas, Albert and Ethan have shown great imagination in their play and story-telling
- Lewis and Phoebe have shown amazing creativity with their pattern-making and drawings
- Alex and Ripley have wowed us with their maths
- Ben, Martha, Humairah and Mia have been great members of the class by being kind and helpful to adults and other children
- Karam has been polite and caring
- Theo has made us laugh with his great sense of humour.
We hope all the children are back to full strength and ready to enjoy the last week of term and the Christmas party.
Have a great break and see you next year!
Building!
There was great excitement this week when our new building blocks arrived. We definitely have some budding engineers in our class! Take a look at some of the fantastic construction that went on.
Block play is beneficial in Reception for a variety of reasons including:
- exploring mathematical concepts such as shape, size, length, weight and symmetry.
- investigating science concepts, including gravity, balance, stability and cause and effect.
- language and vocabulary are increased.
- children’s confidence in decision making is enhanced.
- coordination develops so eyes and hands and small and large muscles work together. This prepares children for success in reading and writing.
And of course, it’s fun!
