Goldilocks

This week, lots of us were feeling a little under the weather with a cold. We missed Katie, Julien, Noa, Diego and even Dionne and Ronita throughout the week on various days. However, this didn't stop us from having a lovely week. 

This week in English, we learnt about Goldilocks; we wrote invitations for a teddy bears' picnic for next Friday and thought and wrote about what each character might say. 

In Maths, we have been learning to say one more and one less than a given amount. We used conkers from the playground to help us. We ordered numbers from 1 - 10 and some of us focused on our counting skills. 

In the afternoons, we learnt about minibeasts; we played pairs, hide the minibeast and practised repeating the vocabulary. Next week, with the older children, we will create paper mache minibeasts and go on a minibeasts hunt! 

So far in phonics, we know: 

s, a, t, p, i, n, m, d, n, g, o, c, k 

Please help your child to practise writing these at home. 

For our Golden Time, we enjoyed making and eating crepes and we watched part of The Gruffalo film. We have read this book in class before and were captivated by the film!

The older children have had a very productive week. We have been researching more about the Ancient Greeks on the Internet for our History lessons. The children were excited to discover some interesting facts about how the Greeks lived, such as how one of their favourite meals was Black Soup; a broth made up of pig's blood, salt and vinegar! 

In Maths we have been using different strategies to solve column subtraction problems, which also helped us solidify our knowledge of number place value. 

In Art and Design we have been creating leaf crowns and gold, silver and bronze medals for our upcoming Olympic Games event. 

The class have had fun learning about more Greek legends. This week we have read the story of Medusa, the woman with snakes for hair and who turns people to stone if they look at her. In Literacy, we created Wanted posters for Medusa, focusing on using powerful adjectives in our descriptive writing. 

Finally, all the children in the school benefited from taking a break from class to read to each other in the garden. It was very peaceful and enjoyable.

Life in Ancient Greece

Another exciting week at school where the children continued their number work, learning or consolidating their knowledge of numbers. We played a number of games where the children had to recognise numbers, learn the formation of numbers and use vocabulary such as 'more than', 'less than', 'fewer' etc. Jordi very kindly brought us some conkers from his home because he knew we were waiting for the ones at Can Lletres to fall from the tree to use in our work at school! Thank you Jordi! 

In English, we continued learning about the Gingerbread Man and made wanted posters to help us to catch the sly fox! Some of us were able to write sentences to describe the fox, whilst others used their speaking skills to tell me about what they had drawn. 

We have been learning more sounds; so far we know: s, a, t, p, i, n, m, d, o and g 

Please encourage your child to say and write the sounds at home. 

If you need help pronouncing the sounds, please use the following link to help you: 

https://youtu.be/h8m6YFr0gig 

On Thursday afternoon, we took a walk around our local area to find out more about it; we had been learning about transport and places in our community and were able to use some vocabulary to talk about what we saw. We stopped off at the local park and had fun playing together; some of the older children were particularly good at looking after the younger ones! We loved it so much, we have decided we will come back and do some more learning here next week! Perhaps we could hide some numbers in the sand to help us with our recognition of numbers or practise writing letters in the sand! 

Some of the games we have been playing have helped us with our speaking and listening skills as well as counting. We played duck, duck, goose which helps younger children to say a word whilst touching one object (which will help them with counting) and we played 'What's the time Mr Wolf?' which helped us to count our steps (using the squares in the playground) and work on our speaking and listening skills. 

As mentioned in the last blog post, please always encourage your child to hold their pencil properly and to have a good grasp when they write at home. 

Some home learning has been given to help you understand your individual child's needs at this point in the year. It would be much appreciated if you could work on this together at home. Home learning will be given every few weeks and will be personalised for your child.

In Key Stage 2 and 3 we have enjoyed discovering more about life in Ancient Greece. We researched the origins of the Olympic Games and how some of the traditions of the games have endured through to the modern era. In Literacy, we developed our vocabulary by using thesauruses' to generate more powerful verbs for our retelling of the Greek legend of Icarus. In Art, we experimented with colour to create vibrant paintings depicting Icarus flying perilously close to the sun. Playing cards have been important in our Numeracy lessons as we have been using them to generate different numbers whilst looking at place value. Finally, we had an exciting first visit to the local Sports Centre where we developed our passing and shooting skills in Basketball.

Welcome to the new school

What a fantastic first week at school we have all had! We were all excited to see the new school and start the new academic year. Throughout the week, we have been learning phonics; for some of us, this is new learning so the more experienced children have been helping out. We have been learning about our local area and discussing the things we might see and next week we will go for a walk to find out about the area. 

In English, we have been learning about fairy tales; listening to a number of familiar stories, retelling them in our own words, sequencing the story and writing about our favourite parts. 

In Maths, we have been learning to count forwards and backwards up to 10. We played a game where we had to roll a dice then count forwards and backwards from that number. We also went outside and practised counting Autumnal objects in the playground. 

It's really important at the start of the year that we learn to write our names, hold our pens properly and form letters correctly so we have been working on our fine motor skills and we all completed a cutting activity about Autumn where we had to cut curved and straight lines. Please encourage your child to practise writing their names and the letters that we have been learning (this week, we learnt s, a, t and p). 

It's been an exciting week, not dampened by the drizzly weather, and we are looking forward to next week and the adventures that await us!

In Key Stage 2, we have had a productive and enjoyable week. The children have begun learning about Ancient Greece. In History, we have highlighted areas of Ancient Greek life that we want to learn more about, and have looked at and discussed artefacts that would have been used by an Ancient Greek soldier. In English, we have been reading and discussing Greek myths and legends, beginning with the story of Pandora's Box. In Art, we had fun creating our own Greek pattern drawings which we have used to help decorate our Topic display wall. We ended the week on a high note by making delicious crepes during our Golden Time on Friday afternoon.