Over the last few weeks, we have had some very special tenants in our quiet room. Thanks to one of our lovely mums, we have had the chance to watch the quite incredible transformation of caterpillars into butterflies!

Naturally, as soon as our guests arrived, the first thing we did was re-read the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  Our caterpillars were ‘very hungry’ indeed and seemed to get fatter and fatter right before our eyes!

Perhaps thanks to the hot weather, it was no time at all before they decided it was time to wrap themselves up in their cocoons and, on Monday morning, we were amazed to discover that four of them had successfully emerged as beautiful butterflies!

We gave them orange slices and sugar water to feast on before setting them free a couple of days later.  The children were simply delighted as they watched them fly away and we managed to capture the moment on Seesaw (we have filed the video in everyone’s profile).

It was such a lovely thing to watch and we all want to say an enormous thank you to Mrs Moon who very kindly gifted us the butterfly kit!

This week, we have also spent some time thinking about the move to Year 1.  It is so hard to believe that there is only one week left until it will be time to say goodbye to Reception. We have been busy doing some writing to introduce ourselves to our new teacher who we will meet during the school day tomorrow (when the whole school takes part in a transition afternoon) and after school (during the open evening).

We finished the week with a Spencer house event to raise money for the charity Starlight. The children came to school with the most incredible crazy hairstyles – thank you once again parents and carers for such a fantastic effort! We read the story of Stephanie’s Ponytail, which seemed quite fitting given the amount of wacky ponytails and rainbow colours!

Many thanks to those of you who came to the meeting today.  I do hope you will now have a clearer understanding of the end of year report.

Here is the powerpoint from the meeting for those of you who were unable to attend.

parent reports meeting july 2017.ppt

Do ask if you have questions.

Ms C.

Last Friday you will have received an email from Mr Quinn inviting you to the school Open Evening which will be held next Monday (17th July) from 3.45pm until 6pm.

This is a lovely opportunity for you to visit the school with your child at anytime during the evening (appointments not necessary).

You are encouraged to visit both your child’s current classroom where you will be able to look at their work and then to visit your child’s new classroom where you will be able to meet their new teacher!

Seesaw will also be open and I am currently looking into how parents can download a zip file of their child’s work…details and instructions to follow at the end of term!

We hope to see many of you next Monday.

Parents & carers of children starting Reception in September 2017 are also most welcome to come to the Open Evening.

Dear Reception Parents/Carers

This Thursday (13th July) there will be a short meeting in the Hall to explain the end of year report format for the Early Years.  The meeting will start at 2.45pm and will be finished in time for a normal school pick-up.

I will post the powerpoint here on the blog on Thursday evening for those of you who are unable to attend the meeting.  If you have any questions after reading it please do come and find me.

Thank you

Ms Cronin

What a fantastic week we had celebrating the school’s 150th birthday! We spent some time finding out about what life would have been like when our school was first opened and our class was given the job of creating the 1867 collage for the whole school timeline. We also wondered what the school might be like in another 150 years and came up with some interesting ideas; including coming to school in a flying car and the school being on the moon!  Going backwards and forwards in time are both very tricky concepts for Reception-aged children and I was so impressed by how hard they all tried to understand and imagine these ideas.

On Friday, we really did go back in time as St. Matthew’s was transformed into a Victorian-era school.  The costumes were fantastic (thank you parents!) and the children did an incredible job of going along with it all!

Here are some photos from the day:

A very warm welcome to those parents and carers whose children will be joining us in our Reception class from September.  We hope you will find this blog to be a useful resource both before the start of term and during the school year.

Please bookmark our blog and/or set up email notifications for new posts so you can keep up-to-date with what is happening at school.

Here is the presentation from our Welcome to Reception meeting that was held yesterday.

meeting for new reception parents 2016

And here is the ‘Off to Reception’ powerpoint which you might like to share with you child before they start in September.

Off to Reception powerpoint

Please remember to hand in all starting school forms to the school office before 14th July.

Finally, if your child has any allergies or special dietary requirements – you must let Mrs Morgan in the school office know BEFORE 14th July.  

Thank you!

This week we thoroughly enjoyed reading two pirate stories that a couple of the children had brought into share with us.  They were The Pirates Next Door and The Pirate Cruncher.  Both worth a re-read if you happen to come across them!

We also spent some time looking carefully at the formation of the letter ‘e’ which is one letter many of the class find tricky.  If you have a moment, do encourage your child to practise the correct letter formation; they could write it with their finger on the carpet, or on your back or even with a stick in some mud!

Our star of the week did a fantastic job of filling his number bag with 12 items, all related to the number 12 and representing it in different ways.  I was especially impressed by his consideration of different ways of grouping the number 12 (e.g. 6+6 but also 4+3+5).

Weekend challenge: Can you find some different ways to make 12? How many different ways can you find? Write them down using the number signs + and =.

Our new number of the week has been chosen as the number:

Finally, we received a rather special message after our assembly last week.  A huge thank you to Year 6 and Mr Hunt who took the time to write to us and let us know what they liked about our assembly!

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We are all so very proud of just what a super job the children did on Friday morning!  They all spoke with great confidence, remembered exactly what to do when AND even managed to put some intonation and expressed into their lines!  I can honestly say I was so impressed by every single one of them!

A huge thank you to all the parents for supplying such fantastic costumes and for helping your children to learn their lines.  Thank you also for supporting us by coming along on the day.  When asked, many of the children said their favourite part of the assembly had been seeing you smiling, laughing and clapping.

Unfortunately, in all the excitement, I didn’t manage to take a photo of the entire Jolly Crew.  If anyone has one, taken at the end of the assembly, that they wouldn’t mind me posting here, I’d be most grateful if you could send it to me via the school office email. Thank you!

Many, many thanks to the Khan family for sending in this photo…what a jolly crew!

As you can imagine, most of our week was spent practising for our assembly! We did, however, find some time to read an old favourite – ‘Can’t You Sleep Little Bear’ – which tells the story of little bear, who can’t get to sleep because he is afraid of the dark.  His father, big bear, reassures him until he finally falls asleep.

We also wrote some father’s day messages for our own daddies, and printed some handprints to make a father’s day keepsake bookmark.  These were sent home on Friday and we hope they made their way to our daddies today.  Happy father’s day!

weeklyoverviewforblog.doc