Happy New Year

Welcome back and happy new year! We have had an extremely busy week, welcoming seven new children into the class. The children were very excited to meet Ona, Thais, Arlet, Tatiana, Arnau, Blanca and Sofia and they were keen to help them settle into the routines of our class. Now that we have sixteen children in the class, the children are now working in three groups to ensure that all of the different aged children are accessing activities which are most appropriate for their age. The children have enjoyed completing the activities and they are really happy that we now have Jo working with us for the whole morning. This week, we have started our ‘space’ topic. The youngest children (Ona, Kai, Luke and Sergi) have had a great time learning new space vocabulary. They have learnt about astronauts and have had lots of fun using the astronaut masks in the roleplay area. They have also enjoyed making their own alien masks and they loved having the opportunity to colour the faces in many different colours. The children were also very imaginative when using the plasticine and were able to create super aliens, using googly eyes and pipe cleaners to add lots of eyes, arms and legs. I was particularly impressed with Sergi’s design as he tried really hard to include all of the relevant features on the aliens’ face. They have been working hard to decorate our space area. There are now lots of shiny, glittery stars hanging within the dark night sky. The children also had fun learning about the different planets. We looked carefully at the eight planets in the solar system and then coloured in planet pictures, using the correct colours. Ona worked really hard at this and I was impressed with how well she was able to control the crayon when trying to colour inside the lines. The children then hung the planets up within the black background. They now look at the planets and try to remember the correct name for each one. The children have also had lots of fun creating rockets from a range of box modelling materials. At the beginning, they found it difficult to think of ideas of how to create the rocket but after a little help from Jo they were able to create some great designs. All of their rockets are now flying around in our space area. The KS1 children (Jordi, Arlet, Marcel, Noa, Thais and Joana) have been working very hard with Jo. This week we have focused lots on phonics, both learning the set one sounds and focusing on different objects which start with the letter ‘c’. The children have been really challenged this week to use the phonics they know to help them write words. They have had lots of fun learning ow to write lists when writing down the different presents they had for Christmas. They also continued to practise list writing when exploring the farm with Jo; writing down everything they could see in the farm. All of the children enjoyed this and were motivated to sound out and write down the things they could see. Thais and Arlet have been introduced to new set one sounds and Jo has been very impressed with how many sounds they already know. Unfortunately, Noa and Marcel have been too unwell to join us this week. We are looking forward to seeing them next week and continuing our challenge of sounding out and writing words. In maths, the children have been working hard to create lots of new number displays for our classroom. They have been colouring in rockets, with the numbers 0-20. They then needed to draw the correct number of stars to match each of the numbers. Joana worked very hard and was super concentrated when counting out how many stars she had drawn. They also worked on counting down from ten to zero. We ordered the numbers and then played a game of ‘blast off’, before working together to place the rockets in the correct order within the role play area. I was impressed to see how well Jordi could count backwards and he was able to select the correct number in the order every time. Finally, they all worked very hard to order the alien numbers from 0-20 and then match each numeral to its number word. This was a new concept for each of the children and they all tried really hard and were concentrated when trying to select the correct number word and stick it alongside the correct numeral. The KS2 children (Blanca, Sofia, Judit, Sara, Arnau and Tatiana) have been working very hard with me this week. We have been working a lot on their tablets and this has really motivated them in their reading comprehension tasks. When completing comprehension quizzes about recounts, past tense, first person and adjectives they were all keen to read the information and then answer the comprehension questions within the quiz. The children did a fantastic job of working in pairs to read and then answer the questions. Judit and Blanca did an excellent job and scored very highly on all of the BBC quizzes they completed. When learning about adjectives, Arnau and Tatiana were motivated by picture cues. They enjoyed looking at and drawing pictures of different objects. They then worked hard to think of relevant adjectives they could use to describe each of these objects. When researching different emotions words, Sara was very motivated to write a long list of words. She then worked hard to draw the corresponding face for each emotion. When working on our spellings, the children were very motivated to learn through a game, whereby they had to identify the correct spelling for many words, including plurals and past tense words. All of the children did very well and were able to complete the game. However, Sofia was especially confident and was keen to explain to the others how to play the game and find the correct spellings. In maths, we have been working on fractions. Blanca and Judit have been very perserverant when creating a fractions puzzle. They worked very well together to add up and subtract many fractions. They then had to be very organised when finding the answers and had to check their answers many times to ensure that they were joining the correct pieces, as they needed to form a rhombus when completing all of the fractions problems. Both girls found the organisational aspects of this activity difficult but by the end they were both confident to explain to me how to add or subtract two fractions. Sara and Sofia have been working on recipes. They have been provided with recipes for different foods. They then needed to work out how much of each ingredient they would need if cooking half, a quarter or three quarters of the original recipe. Both girls were extremely confident in finding out the answers and it was great to see them working together and supporting each other so well. Tatiana and Arnau have become very confident to find half, a quarter and a third of different amounts, using pictures to help them. Tatiana impressed me with how quickly she could work out half of the different two digit numbers, without the use of pictures. We have also been doing lots of fun activities altogether as a class. The children had a great time learning the difference between walking, jogging and running when playing the baked bean game and ‘red rover’. They all listened very carefully to the instructions and were able to change their movement dependent on the word I shouted out. When cooling down after our gym lesson, all of the children were able to suggest a way that we could ‘cool down’ and stretch out our muscles. Blanca was especially good when teaching the class different breathing exercises, we can use to calm our bodies. We also enjoyed our music lesson and had a great time creating rhythms, using different parts of our bodies, bells and maracas (which we made ourselves). The oldest children did a fantastic job of creating a musical performance, using the different instruments and they did a great job of continuing the rhythm, alongside their friends. Within our art lesson, the children enjoyed learning about the different sizes and colours of the planets in the solar system. They then worked really well in pairs to create their own planets by wrapping the correct coloured wool around their cardboard planet. All of the planets are now displayed within the role play area, using the correct order to show how close each planet is to the sun. We have had a great week and I look forward to doing lots more fun things next week.