Kindergarten
What a splendid week of sunshine it's been! The children relished garden play on Tuesday, a treehouse outing on Wednesday, an adventure at the adventure playground on Thursday, and Forest School on Friday. Indoors, they delved deeper into the theme of 'Underwater', exploring aquatic life in the water tray and crafting jellyfish, honing their cutting skills.
We welcomed Miss Amy Kavanagh on Wednesday. Amy will be based in the Elephant room and taking lead of the children in that group.
As it is getting warmer please ensure your child has a named water bottle in school. Please put sun cream on your child in the mornings. Please check that your child's school jumper is named, otherwise we end up with an abundance of Red jumpers! Next week we will be moving on to learning about 'In the garden'.
Dates to remember
- Tuesday 14th May - coffee and meet new nursery staff.
- Thursday 16th - Ian Taylor photography, taking individual pictures of your children at play. Children who are not in on a Thursday are welcome to come in for photos at 9.30am.
Transition
This week we have been enjoying the sunshine, let’s hope it continues! The children have had lots of fun playing in the garden, at the adventure playground, at forest school and on the treehouse. Everyone is getting so good at landing on their feet at the bottom of the very fast slide.
This week the children had great fun making a dinosaur land in the tuff tray, they used water beads for the lake and added stones, leaves, volcanos, dinosaurs, and eggs to finish it off.
Next week we have Miss Crane, one of the Reception teachers coming to tell us a story and have a play on Monday. These sessions allow the children to meet with the Reception teachers in their normal environment before visiting them in the Reception classrooms after half term. Please remember we have got Ian Taylor visiting on the 16th May for photos.
Reception
A short but jam-packed week in Reception! We have been very busy practising the lines, songs and poems for our class assembly this week. We have been trying our best to concentrate, project our voices and remember when to stand up and sit down! Alongside our assembly practices, we have been learning about the weather this week. We have looked at different types of weather that we experience in this country, and how the seasons effect the weather we see. Reception have been carefully observing the weather each morning and afternoon to compile a class weather chart; we have certainly seen a range of different weather over the week. To round off our work on weather we have made a giant rainbow collage, created beautiful suncatchers and made and flown our own kites!
In art this week, we have been studying the artwork of Andy Goldsworthy, who creates artwork outside in nature and in cities. We were inspired to create a beautiful spiral shape using natural materials we collected around school. Perhaps you saw it on your way into the Stable Yard at the end of this week? We also had great fun experimenting with bubbles in the Stable Yard; trying to make bubbles of different shapes, and to create the largest bubbles we could!
Next week, we will be looking at poems focusing on the outdoors; including the different places and activities we can take part in outside. We will practise identifying rhyming words, and use the beauty of our surroundings to think of new and exciting adjectives. In Maths, we will continue our work on addition and subtraction. Can you practise adding and taking away objects on a ten-frame at home over the weekend?
As the weather continues to improve, please don’t forget to have your sunhat and sun cream in school each day. Thank you!
Prep 1
This week we have been looking at recount writing in English, building on from instruction writing last week. We began by discussing some of the similarities (ordering events, use of time connectives and adverbials) and also the differences. In a recount of Helen Sharman's experience as the first British astronaut in space, we observed that it was written in the past tense, featured longer descriptive sentences, and utilised paragraphs. We then set about writing recounts of our own to detail how we made our glow jars last week. The children thoroughly impressed us with their writing, particularly with the quantity they are now recording and their proof-reading and editing skills. The week ended with an activity that challenged us to use our knowledge of following instructions in order to plant sunflowers. Thank you for the pots donated – it was a really fun exercise for the children to practise their skills.
Lots of fantastic measuring has taken place in Maths this week. The children have loved the practical activities that have required them to compare and measure the mass of objects using scales and balances and later in the week, explored the difference between capacity and volume. We picked a brilliant week for it, as much of the activities were able to take place outside in the sunshine (and our clothes were quick to dry when we became inevitably damp exploring capacity!) Please do look for everyday opportunities for the children to consolidate their understanding E.g. exploring the capacity of a juice carton and then measuring the remaining volume once some juice has been served.
In Topic this week, we learnt about the astronaut Tim Peake and his time aboard the International Space Station, including his infamous moon walk! The children held a fascinating debate about whether day was better than night and we were thoroughly impressed by the children’s respectful and confident deliveries of their ideas. The children also explored how the earth spins on its axis and how that impacts our weather and seasons. They particularly enjoyed sorting items of clothing into a Venn diagram based on which time of year the clothing was suitable for. Next week, we are looking forward to learning all about the extraordinary astronaut Mae Jemison.
Prep 2
Abracadabra, Ziggety Zog, I will turn Rapunzel into a frog!
Spells and making potions in the woods have been the theme for our English lessons this week! We read more of our Rapunzel story and spent a lesson in forest school looking for natural objects that the witch could use to write a spell about Rapunzel. We collected slabs of mud, sprinkles of ripped up leaves, dashes of bendy willow, pinches of nasty nettles to name a few! Prep 2 had great fun, creating and mixing up their potions in buckets and the vocabulary that they came up with back in the classroom was incredible. The children wrote their descriptions on stars which they stuck above the witch’s cauldron on their sheet and then wrote some simple instructions about how to conduct the spell and added a flap to reveal the outcome of the spell.
In our Maths lessons this week, we have explored the world of statistics, starting with learning how to make a tally and record this information in a table and then working out the total. We also challenged Prep 2 to interpret the data in their table and answer questions about it, such as 'Which ice cream flavour is most popular?' and 'How many more children like chocolate ice cream best than like vanilla ice cream best?'
To conclude our week, we enjoyed a Castle STEM day, where we rotated around 3 different activities: A Day in the life, Shields and building a 3D castle.
The children were interested to learn about the jobs that people carried out in a castle and listened to two different stories about a day in the life of a lord/lady and a day in the life of a cook – they were amazed to hear about banquets that could be six or seven courses! The children loved designing their own shields. We talked about how during a battle, it would have been difficult to tell who a knight in armour was, so they had shields that would be decorated with pictures and symbols, known as a coat of arms. These pictures and symbols were special to the knights and told other knights about their families and things that were important to them. The children loved thinking about people, places, objects and pets that were unique to them and incorporated these into their own shield designs. Finally, the children got creative with the cereal boxes they had brought in, and created their very own castle, with a fully working drawbridge mechanism!
Dates
Monday 20th May – P2 trip to Oxford Castle.
Mrs King's Book Recommendation
Voices in the Park by Anthony Browne
‘Voices in the Park’ is an engaging read both on a superficial and deeper level. It introduces complex themes such as perspective and empathy through its simple yet engaging narrative and the detailed, unique illustrations captivate young readers, encouraging them to explore the story's layers and meanings. A great book for fostering critical thinking and inspiring discussion about society.