Hamstel Infant School & Nursery Weekly News week ending 16th february 2024

Dear Parents and Carers,

It seems hard to believe that we are already at the half-way point of this academic year but I must say that my first 6 months at Hamstel Infants have been an absolute pleasure and it’s been great getting to know everyone in our school community.

Since September, the children have been a credit to themselves and to you and this last half term has been no different, with all children making progress in their own way and producing some great work.

This week it was a delight to welcome our reception family members to an afternoon tea party, complete with cucumber sticks, sandwiches and cakes. We hope you really enjoyed sharing this lovely family time with your children.

Just a reminder that children should wear the correct PE Kit for our PE lessons in school or sporting competitions at other venues. This includes a gold PE t-shirt, maroon PE shorts and plain coloured trainers. If the weather is cold, tracksuit style bottoms can also be worn. If we can offer any support supplying uniform of any kind, please speak to us and we will do all we can to help. Thank you for your assistance with this.

After half term we have an extremely short build up towards the Easter holidays, with just 4 weeks and 4 days in school. However, in typical Hamstel style we have a jam-packed schedule for our second part of the spring term.

During the first week back our Year 1 children will be visiting The Hive for some outdoor learning before then heading off to the library the following week. We have our Book Week to look forward to from 4th to 8th March, which also includes our dressing up day on Thursday 7th March.

We then have our Teacher Parent meetings on 12th and 13th March. The booking system will go live on 26th February to book your timeslots with the teachers, so please look out for this when we return after half term!

Also coming up in March we have the Infant Music Festival, Science Day, Easter Crafts, Bunny Hop Discos and of course our Year 1 Spring Show so never a dull moment and always lots for our children to look forward to at Hamstel Infants.

I hope you have a relaxing half term and we look forward to welcoming you back on Monday 26th February.

Best regards,

Scott Roche

Principal

Nursery

This week we have been reading the story ‘The Magic Porridge Pot’. This has linked nicely to our Maths as we have been learning about capacity and had fun filling our pots with oats and describing if our pot was full, empty or nearly full. We have enjoyed making our own pots. We have also been learning about Shrove Tuesday and enjoyed tasting pancakes and talking about our favourite toppings!!

In Outdoor Learning we enjoyed looking for signs of Spring and planted some bulbs.

We hope that you all have a lovely half term.

Letters sent home this week

• Whole School - World Book Day - 12.02.2024

Rainbow & Starlight

Rainbow

This week Rainbow Room has been looking at Feelings and Emotions. We have looked at different emotions that we may feel and how we can control them. The children have been great at getting involved and enjoyed group activities concentrating on fine motor skills, Literacy and Maths.

They completed focus activities and made faces out of playdough depicting feelings. The children have been getting involved in lots of dancing and singing, and have collaborated and played functionally in the garden, tidied up the classroom and have become more independent in the environment together. It has been a great week for Rainbow Room, wishing everyone a lovely half term.

Starlight

This week Starlight have been learning the traditional story of ‘The Enormous Turnip.’ We have ordered the story, made face masks and wrote CVC words to match pictures of the characters.

The children have all engaged well with the Attention Autism sessions (‘the bucket’) showing anticipation and waiting for their turn to take part when named.

The children have continued to try new foods at lunchtimes, having a ‘tasting plate’ of the food on the menu for that day. We are very proud of them!

Thank you for your support again this half term. We hope you have a lovely break.

Letters sent home this week

• Whole School - World Book Day - 12.02.2024

Reception Year

What a fantastic end to the half-term, welcoming relatives into school for our afternoon tea to celebrate special people. The children have all enjoyed sharing their learning with their special relative and enjoyed the special sandwiches as well!

In Outdoor Learning this week we have been learning about winter and seasonal changes, we have been on a seasonal walk to observe all the signs of winter.

In Maths we have continued to learn about shapes with 4 sides, investigating different ways squares and rectangles can be made from smaller shapes.

In English we have been reading the story ‘The Enormous Turnip’ and been learning to write words and sentences about the book.

In PE we have completed out gymnastic unit and learnt to travel with confidence over, under and through equipment. We have all enjoyed exploring moving in different ways and how to jump and land safely.

How to help at home

Reading:

• Continue to listen to your child read at least 5 times a week.
• Watch the virtual classroom videos.

Handwriting:

REMINDER: Next half-term we will be looking at castles. If any families visit a castle over half term would you kindly share it on Tapestry for us to share and discuss with the rest of the class in our lessons. Thank you.

Letters sent home this week

• Whole School - World Book Day - 12.02.2024
• Reception - National Child Measurement Programme - 12.02.2024

Year One

This week we have been writing winter poetry! We were introduced to what a verb was and have tried to include some of these words in our work. We have worked really hard to up-level our vocabulary to make our poetry more exciting. We made a collaborative word bank and used this to help us in our writing.

In Maths we have been consolidating our knowledge of numbers to 40 and our understanding of tens and ones. We have been working practically with dienes to support our written work. We have also been practising counting in 10s to 100!

In Design & Technology we have been finalising our projects. We used our plan to make a space background design and then created our moving parts including sliders, levers and wheels. To finish we evaluated our design and thought about what we could improve next time.

How to help at home

Reading:

• Continue to listen to your child read at least 5 times a week.
• Watch the following virtual classroom videos, encouraging your child to join in:

Letters sent home this week

• KS1 - Infant Music Festival - 14.02.2024
• Year 1 - Southchurch Library Visit - 12.02.2024
• Whole School - World Book Day - 12.02.2024
• Year 1 - The Hive Visit - 08.02.2024

Year Two

It’s only been a 4-day week for the children, but it’s still been super busy! The children have really enjoyed getting creative with their writing this week and have written some lovely penguin poetry. We thought about how the penguins move and the kind of things they do.

In Maths we have started our unit on Money, recognising coins and notes, adding notes and coins together to find totals. We had to look very closely at the different values of the coins and use our knowledge of number to count on.

We have been comparing special places of 2 different religions. We compared the Church and the Mosque. We found out that both religions pray but the praying routines can look slightly different. We also discovered that Muslims and Christians have similar celebrations and festivals such as Weddings, but the way they carry this out may have some differences too.

Letters sent home this week

• KS1 - Infant Music Festival - 14.02.2024
• Whole School - World Book Day - 12.02.2024

Online Safety

Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, with over 1 billion users worldwide. The platform allows users to upload images and videos to their feed, create interactive ‘stories’, share live videos, exchange private messages or search, explore and follow other accounts they like – whilst at the same time continuously updating and adding new features to meet the needs of its users.

We have added all of our parent guides to the school website which can be found on at the button below;