Hello!

Another busy week in the Reception classroom has seen us spend lots of time in the hall singing our Christmas songs, telling some jokes and trying to record the children doing these things… This was easier said than done! At some point you will be sent a link to see this year’s Christmas Show … we hope you will enjoy it!  It will at the very least make you smile!

In the classroom we’ve done lots of work on letter formation and played rolling marbles around the letter shapes to help see where to start and finish each letter .

As we have powered through lots of sounds now we are playing lots of sound games – this one involved finding a word  and then deciding whether it was a real word or an alien/ fake word.

Our Christmas preparations continue – our advent calendar being very popular, along with the cutting and sticking of gifts they might like from catalogues! We have also written Christmas lists – if anyone would like to know what their child chose to write on their list just let me know!

We have been making story maps over the past few weeks – this week we chose Jack and the Beanstalk. Our circle time saw each child giving us a clue to what character they were from the story and the rest of us had to guess. This is such a good game for inference and understanding of story . For example ‘ I cut down the beanstalk with an axe. ‘ The children listen and think which character it might be – in this case Jack’s mother. They all really enjoy this activity and are getting better and better each time we play.

We also used Jack and the Beanstalk to help with our number work.

Our Christmas maths activity had the children collecting as many presents as they could in a 1 minute time. The record was 37 presents!!!

Our writers were back in full swing writing card after card and letter after letter for our role play post office.

Our good readers enjoyed reading and sequencing nursery rhymes.

We have our class Christmas tree up,  our nativity scene  and our Christmas books which all the children are enjoying next to the tree.

One week to go and your little one will have finished their very first term at big school! Well done for surviving! You have all done a great job! Don’t forget on Tuesday we will be having a class party – please bring in party clothes in a named bag along with some party snacks in a separate named disposable bag for your child. Some parents have given £1 for the party but this year we are not providing the food ( Covid 19) so if you have donated a £1, i can either return it to you ( please ask me)  or put it in the next school charity collection which I think will be the Lunch Bowl Project in Kibera which enables children to be fed a meal once a day in the Kibera slums.

Until next week, enjoy any Christmas preparations and have a relaxing weekend.

Thank you

Erin Bibby

Hello and sorry for the blog delay – I was away for the weekend and no access to our school apps.

Anyway here is a very brief overview of some of the highlights of last week!  We started moving our OUT and ABOUT topic from the wintry weather to actually getting out and about – we focused on trains. We had a class discussion about trains,  stations and everything you might find or need on a train or in a station. The children were brilliant and came up with over 30 ideas – including the yellow line that you shouldn’t cross on the platform ‘ to keep you safe from the train line.’ We tried to incorporate as many of the children’s ideas as we could into our train role play area. The children made most of the resources they needed.

Painting the wheels for the train.

Painting the train.

Cutting out the tickets.

Eventually we had our very own train station.

Our stories for the week were The Little Red Train series of books by Benedict Blathwayt. They have fantastic illustrations, the children adore the stories and they inspired some lovely writing.  I can highly recommend them.

Of course the train track was out and the classroom turned into a huge track with multiple children, building and playing, using some fantastic language too. A few children said they had never been on a train – please do take your children on a quick train ride – they travel for free – show them the buffers, the tracks, signals, point and of course the yellow line on the platform!

Our fine motor work had the children weaving pipe cleaners  through colanders.The y all really enjoyed this and it is great for strengthening the muscles in the hands for letter formation.

We had a timed water tray activity – washing cars … it became quite competitive – it won’t be long until you can ask them to wash the family car!

This term we are doing  gym and last week we learnt pencil rolls and balances.

Sorry it’s brief – next blog at the weekend!

Thanks Erin Bibby

This week, we wrote our amazing information pages all about whales. We made sure to include a short, snappy title and of course lots of interesting facts.

Next week is our ‘Book Week’ where we will participating in various exciting activities. Miss Luetchford has a mystery book that we will be using throughout the week to stimulate our writing. We look forward to the book being revealed on Monday.

In maths we have been learning how to double numbers. We have learnt that double 6 is the same as 6 + 6 or 6 x 2. We drew pictures to help us solve the equation and some of us began to use our knowledge of partitioning to help us double two-digit numbers.

E.g. Double 24:

Double 20 = 40

Double 4 = 8

40 + 8 = 48

We have started to learn about division and will continue this learning next week.

In art we have been learning about the artist Lowry and his seascape paintings. We used pastels to create our own Lowry inspired sea side picture.

In phonics we have been revising the following sounds:

• oa (goat, boat)
• oe (toe)
• o-e (phone, home)
• ow (blow, snow)

Attached is the link to the Spelling Shed for the children to be able to revise these sounds: https://play.spellingshed.com/#/login

This week we have enjoyed learning about Albie’s pokemon book, Grace’s dolls, Coco’s teddies, Ranga’s picture and Nicky’s teddies. Next week it is the turn of the shark table for Show and Tell (Ben, Lenny, Marcus, Caroline, Theo and Eliza).

Congratulations to Year 5 on their amazing assembly about the Victorians. We especially liked all of the songs.

We hope you have a lovely weekend,

The Year One Team

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