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Hatherop Messenger 19th April 2024

Boarding News

On Sunday we welcomed our boarders back to the castle. It has been a slightly quieter first week, which has been perfect in order to resettle everyone back into the rhythm of boarding and school life. We have welcomed a few additional members to the boarding community, including international, flexi and ad-hoc boarders. What has been lovely is the lighter evenings. We have made a conscious effort to get out and enjoy some good weather, with many of the girls and boys using the cricket nets and enjoying a little frisbee on the back lawn after supper.

Nursery

Transition

Welcome back! We hope you all had a lovely Easter holiday, this term we welcome Charlie and George to Transition. The children have been very excited to get stuck into our new topic of Dinosaurs they have had great fun playing in the dinosaur den and creating dinosaur crafts.

As it’s the summer term and we are doing everything to make the transition between nursery and school as easy for the children as possible. We will be joining the Pre-Prep children for Lunch time play every afternoon, this is a fantastic opportunity for the children to play with the older children, see their siblings at school and to meet the Pre-Prep staff.

This week we have refreshed our minds of all the sounds we have learnt so far and our new sound of the week has been ‘Ff’ Next week we will be concentrating on the sound ‘Ll’

Pre-Prep

Reception

A very wet and windy start to the Trinity term, but thankfully we have enjoyed some sunshine since then! This week we have started our ‘Powerful Poetry’ topic, and the children have been introduced to our anthology of poems, ‘Here’s a Little Rhyme’. We read the poem ‘Recipe for Green’ by Jane Yolen, and discussed the vocabulary used, and what the poem told us about growing plants. We then had a go on our own – we have sown cress seeds, and we are all very excited to watch them grow! We have ordered instructions to help others when growing cress, and we made sensible predictions about what our cress plants will look like when they are fully grown.

In Maths we have been identifying 3D shapes and discussing their properties. We have looked at their ‘faces’, and we noticed that some faces are 2D shapes; for example, a cube has 6 square faces. We worked hard in groups to build towers using these shapes, and discussed the problems with using cones and spheres in our towers. Rafer said that they won’t work “because they roll, and the bottom of the tower needs to be stable”.

We have loved being back at Forest School this week, and we had a fantastic time climbing trees, digging holes and observing all the changes in the environment around us.

Next week we will be growing beans and making our own bean diary to record the changes. We will be focusing on Jack and the Beanstalk alongside other poems from the anthology. In Maths, we will be moving on to numbers to 20 and beyond.

Prep 1

What a start to our final term in Prep 1 - we are all loving our new Space topic! It has been wonderful to see the children so engrossed in learning about the Solar System and we have been very impressed with the independent research they have been conducting into the different planets. The children used their new found knowledge to first create posters and then class fact files on each of the planets, using headings, subheadings, diagrams, bullet points, captions and labels. Next week we will be introducing our class text, a fiction book about a boy called Lazlo who has a fear of the dark…

In Maths this week, we have been looking early division; recognising and making equal groups and looking at arrays. An array is formed by arranging a set of objects into rows and columns. Each column must contain the same number of objects as the other columns, and each row must have the same number as the other rows.

We been using our knowledge of counting in 2s, 5s and 10s to support us; please do keep practising this skill at home regularly so that your child is really confident in their knowledge!

In Topic lessons this week, we have been learning about Yuri Gagari, the first cosmonaut in Space. Each week we will be learning about significant people in Space and plotting key events on our class timeline. Next week we will be learning about Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong and their moon landing.

The week ended with a fantastic morning of Space Art. The children created a wonderful range of artwork; sewing constellations, creating chalk galaxies, collaging Earth canvases, using painting techniques to represent the sky through a telescope and experimenting with tuff trays of galaxy playdough and wonderfully confusing moon sand – is it a solid if it can shift its shape to fill a container?! Thank you SO much to our wonderful parent helpers – we loved having you!

Prep 2

Welcome back! Prep 2 have thrown themselves into their new topic about Castles and our new book “Rapunzel’ this week. To start, we analysed the image on the front cover of the book and recorded our initial observations on who we thought the character could be and what the story might be about. After the ‘big reveal’ of the front cover, we then talked about the traditional tale of Rapunzel and compared it to our new book. We created a gallery of Rapunzel’s, all of which look fantastic and will be displayed in our classrooms.

To launch our topic lessons about castles, we shared what we already knew about castles and then thought of something that we would like to find out over the coming weeks in our lessons. When the king of England, Edward the Confessor, died, four men claimed they should be King next. One of the men was Harold of Wessex, who was crowned King, another one of them was William, Duke of Normandy. After a long battle, known as ‘The Battle of Hastings’, William won and was made King and was known as ‘William the Conqueror’. We completed a pictorial timeline to show this story and can’t wait to find out what castles were built next week!

In Maths this week, we have learnt about fractions. We started off by recognising equal and unequal parts of shapes and part-whole models, e.g. which of these parts made up a whole ice cream.

We then quickly moved onto the composition of shapes and explored how a circle, using the analogy of a pizza can be divided into different fractions and identified ¼ and ½ of different 2D shapes. Next week, we move onto recognising thirds of shapes and fractions of different numbers, such as What is ½ of 6? What is ¼ of 8?

Whizz Pop Bang

Prep 2 Whizz Pop Bang is back this term and it has been fantastic to see the children so excited to learn kitchen science to try at home. This week, we discussed states of matter and then got very messy creating moon sand! Using just baby oil and cornflour, we created this confusing material that feels both silky and sandy and moist but dry! Freddie was our star scientist this week, using the word 'agitate' when describing the process of making the moon sand. We're looking forward to next week's experiment already!

Mrs King's Book Recommendation

I loved this wonderful book that depicts a Princess in dungarees, declaring that waiting around in towers to be rescued is boring and therefore rescuing herself. Other female characters follow suit, going against the fairy tale tradition and to make their own choices and follow their own inclinations.

Fencers of the week

Margaux

Margaux has carried on from where she left off last term - a determined fencer keen to learn as much as she can. Very well done

Tobias

Tobias had an excellent session - leading our movement warm up, dedicated footwork and neat blade strokes. Go Tobias!

Bertie

Prep 2 graduated to plastic swords today before they move to small metal swords by the end of term. Bertie demonstrated how to hit with the point and also how to make blocking actions smaller. Brilliant Bertie!