Lower School Weekly News

News from Lower School this week: 4th March 2024

Miss Stewart

Deputy Head of Lower School

We had a wonderful day celebrating World Book Day! It was great to see so many children and staff dressed up as book characters or wearing their pyjamas to school! We started our day with the Lower School assembly, which was really fun and enabled us to see all the different costumes chosen by everyone. This week, every child has taken home a World Book Day book too! We hope you enjoy them.

On Wednesday, we welcomed the author Toby Glover to Lower School. He read us some of his books and we had so much fun learning about the different characters in the exciting books he has written. A very big thank you to Miss Sekeresova for arranging this visit and a huge thank you to Mrs Shuttleworth for arranging so many activities and events to celebrate World Book Day over the past few weeks.

This week has seen Class Y1M visit the Postal Museum and what a fun-filled day they had! They spent the day exploring the fascinating world of mail! They took part in a workshop, learnt about secret tunnels beneath London, went on a train ride and took part in an adventure in the play space. They had an amazing day and learnt so much! More information can be found in the Y1 section of the newsletter.

Next week, Reception will be visiting the Science Museum to discover even more about Space as part of their topic. I am sure that they will have a wonderful and interactive experience, and I look forward to hearing all about it! More information on this visit will follow on the Reception Google Classroom.

Year 2 will also be going on another educational visit next week when they visit the Wetlands Centre as part of their Science topic - habitats. They will be mini-beast hunting along with lots of other exciting activities. Further information can be found on the Year 2 Google Classroom.

Finally, the APA are organising a Quiz Night for staff and parents on Thursday 21st March from 6.00 pm to 9.00 pm. This is always a fun event and if you would like to attend then more information is available from the APA. Tickets include dinner (curry) and drinks (beer, wine and soft drinks) as well as the quiz. Summer used uniforms will also be available to buy. Parents can buy individual tickets and the APA will assign them to a team, or they can form a team of 4-8 people and register all together. Please contact your class rep for further details or scan the QR code on the posters at school.

Wishing you a lovely weekend!

Nursery

What an exciting world week we have had in Duckling Class. On Monday we received a package and upon opening it we found a Hen and a Golden Egg. In the enclosed letter, Jack explained that he wanted us to look after them in case the Giant came to take them back. All week we have been building walls and setting traps to stop the Giant from coming to take them back. The children have been so excited and it is wonderful to see them talking to each other and working together to protect the hen and the egg. They have been drawing the giant and making posters to tell the older children what happened. We will continue to build on this next week and we hope the hen and the egg don’t get taken by the Giant!

As Sunday is Mother’s Day we have been thinking a lot about our mums and what they do for us. We made cards for them and made sure we did our best drawing. It is fantastic to see how children’s fine motor skills have developed and how much they enjoy drawing and trying to write their names.

We have also been continuing to work on our number recognition and trying really hard to count out objects by pointing to each one and saying a number. We will continue to model this daily and build children’s confidence in this area. They love exploring numbers and we encourage them to use money in the role-play area, weigh out different types of food and look at the numbers on the phone when they are calling their friends.

On Friday we had so much fun dressing up to celebrate our favourite books. It was lovely to see all the children’s costumes and we loved sharing stories with them.

Next week we will continue with our story and if the hen and the egg get stolen we will try our best to investigate and get the Giant to bring them back.

Have a lovely weekend - The Nursery team

Pre-Reception

Everyone knows what a pea is, but have you ever heard of an Evil Pea? Well, there is an Evil Pea on the loose in Abercorn School and on Monday we discovered the cheeky pea had stuck vegetables to the wall in our classroom. Giraffe Class made sure that the vegetables were safe by placing them in a safe hiding place in our classroom. We have also been working hard to try and locate the Evil Pea’s whereabouts and the children created some wonderful posters to try, using their drawing skills and phonics knowledge to share some important information.

Our phonics journey has continued this week and the children learnt the sound, action and letter formation rhyme for ‘e.’ We worked hard to read some CVC words with this sound in them and the children were encouraged to use their robot arms to help them blend the sounds in words. We also engaged in lots of different oral blending games and the children showed a specific interest in the I SPY game. They listened carefully to the sounds and then found the correct picture by blending them together, for example, c-a-t and they selected the cat picture. We have also been recapping all of our Phase 2 tricky words through exciting games, like bingo and dominoes.

2D shapes have been the main focus in maths this week and the children have shown a good understanding of the 4 common 2D shapes. They really enjoyed matching different shapes to the correct number, for example, a triangle linked to 3 because it has that many sides and points. We rounded off the week with a game of 2D shape bingo and it really showed how confident the children are with these shapes and their names.

Mother’s Day is around the corner and the main focus during our art sessions was to make a card to mark this special occasion. The children worked hard to draw a lovely picture for the middle of their card and they used paints to create something spectacular on the front.

As part of World Book Day, we met a real-life author. On Wednesday, Toby Glover came in and read some of his books to the children. They all really enjoyed listening to these stories and they were excited to meet an author in real life.

Have a lovely weekend - Miss Andrews and the Pre-Reception team

Reception

It’s been a very busy and exciting week in Reception with spaceship crashes, another visiting author and lots of creative costumes to end the week.

A loud crash was heard from the garden on Monday as we had an unexpected visitor join us at Abercorn this week! In literacy, we’ve been on a mission to help the newest member of Reception, ‘Beegu’ find her family and her way back home. We worked hard to create ‘found posters’ to let everyone know what had happened and also to write some kind letters for Beegu to take home with her. Well done Mouse Class and Gruffalo Class for getting Beegu back home! In Phonics this week we have been learning the trigraph ‘igh’ and digraph ‘oa’ and practised writing these sounds in words to help create sentences. Next week we look forward to exploring the sounds long ‘oo’ and short ‘oo’.

In Maths this week we’ve been exploring the concept of sharing and making sure each part is equal. We have loved using practical objects in the classroom to show our learning and even solved some tricky problems our teachers were having when sharing equally.

It all got a bit messy this week as we began the first stages of creating our paper mache planets during our Art lesson. We worked as a team to mix together the glue and water to make the paste and used our strong muscles to tear some paper strips. We were very careful when placing each strip on the balloon, making sure it didn’t pop. We cannot wait to get painting next week and bring our planets to life!

A shark in a park and a giraffe in a bath, things you never expect to see, but this was not the case in the books of the visiting author this week, Toby Glover. We loved hearing his hilariously written books with some animals in some very strange places and joined in to tell the shark to get out of the park! It was so much fun listening to an author read his own stories!

We ended the week with Reception looking a little different as we celebrated World Book Day. We dressed up in some very creative and imaginative costumes and loved sharing our favourite books and characters with our friends and teachers. We even got a special book to take home with us to share with our families. What a fantastic way to wrap up a great week.

Wishing you all an enjoyable and lovely weekend - The Reception Team.

Year 1

What an eventful week in Year 1!

On Monday there was some shocking news, there had been an invasion caught on camera in our classroom! The Gingerbread Man and his friends had run right through, leaving no trace - so it was time to investigate! First the children reported the incident by giving a detailed recount and then decided to write a letter to The Gingerbread Man to ask some questions!

The children then used their creativity to write a fun poem using similes - he certainly was ‘as fast as a cheetah!’.

Luckily, The Gingerbread Man wrote back, and gave us a little treat on Friday, just in time for World Book Day!

Author Toby Glover came to visit us on Wednesday and shared his fantastic books and characters. The children enjoyed joining in with the stories and getting their books signed.

Of course, we have had a great dress up day for World Book Day - we look forward to sharing some of these pictures next week!

Another highlight was a fun packed day at The Postal Museum for our History learning. We went on the Mail Rail and enjoyed the interactive exhibitions. We had a lovely Jolly Postman workshop and went to explore the rest of the Museum. Finally we enjoyed being Postal Workers in the play space. What a fun day!

During Design and Technology, the children made mock ups of levers and sliders as well as designing their own Spring celebration cards, we can’t wait to make them over the next few weeks!

The children experimented with weight and mass during Maths this week, showing understanding of heavier and lighter as well as comparing different mass.

Well done for a super week!

Wishing our families a lovely weekend - The Year 1 Team

Year 2

World Book Week has been filled with magic for Year 2. Bella Broomstick, a hapless young witch from Lou Kuenzler’s book series, left us an array of intriguing potions. She had accidentally burned her spell book to a crisp, and it was our job to work out what each potion did. We used our imaginations to decide on the potions’ purposes and their accompanying incantations, and produced some fantastic writing based on this. We wrote letters to Bella and even made her a spell book to help her get back into Magic School. We also enjoyed a visit from Toby Glover, who introduced us to his fantastic Mark Sark series. He has certainly inspired us to write lots more stories and poems of our own. Of course, we ended the week with World Book Day, and dressed up fantastically for the occasion.

Amidst all the World Book Week activities, we also managed to delve into our other learning areas. We were lucky to visit Senior School on Monday to learn about Kenya from Mrs Séguier. In Maths, we applied our fractions knowledge to time-telling. We can now tell the time to the quarter hour, and are ready to move onto telling the time to five minutes.

In Religious Studies, we learned about christenings and baptisms, and compared them with the Muslim celebration of Akikah.

In French, we have practised expressing our physical feelings of hunger and thirst, and how we resolve them. We loved learning a song with Madame Constant to remember all the phrases!

In Outdoor Games, we continued with cricket; our batting, bowling and fielding skills are developing well, as is our sense of sportsmanship.