Lower School Weekly News
News from Lower School this week: 11th March 2024
Miss Stewart
Deputy Head of Lower School
Lower School has enjoyed another busy and varied week this week!
On Monday, Year 2 went to the London Wetland Centre. They enjoyed a day of exploring the unique ecosystems and habitats, and observing the wide variety of wildlife. They had so much fun and their related learning throughout the rest of the week has been incredible!
I was delighted to join Mouse Class and Gruffalo Class on their visit to the Science Museum this week. We saw and experienced so many exciting exhibits relating to Space! The Reception children participated in a fantastic workshop all about working on an international space station. They even played space basketball! It was impressive to see the children’s exemplary behaviour during this visit. A very big thank you to the parent helpers who joined this trip, I hope you enjoyed it as much as the children did.
This week has also seen the Nursery children becoming Duckling Detectives! On Monday, there were a lot of feathers found in the school corridors between Duckling Class and the school entrance. Someone had taken their hen and golden egg! The children have been working hard to solve the mystery all week. For updates, see the Nursery Google Classroom and Tapestry.
Next week, we are delighted to be welcoming Garg and his many animals back to Lower School for an Animal Encounter workshop. We are so excited to meet the different animals and learn more about them.
The Year 2 show is also taking place next week. The Y2 children and staff along with Mr Davies have been working really hard to put this together and they are so excited to share this with the Year 2 families. Further information can be found on the Year 2 Google Classroom.
Wishing you an enjoyable weekend!
Nursery
Wow, what a week we have had in Duckling Class. On Monday our Hen and our Golden Egg were taken while we were at PE. Miss Molloy accidentally left the door open and when we came back there was nothing but feathers and footprints all over our classroom. We followed the trail of feathers up the stairs and found that it led to the front door. The children have been so excited and telling all the adults around the school what had happened and they have been searching for clues about who could have taken them. As a class, we all made posters to ask people to look out for the missing items and later in the week we decided it was the giant who took them and wrote to him to ask for them back. On Thursday we posted the letters and on Friday the Giant returned the Hen and the egg. It turned out he didn’t know they were ours and was walking past and heard the Hen making noise so he thought it was lonely. After he returned it we sent it back to Jack for safekeeping and we asked Jack to share it with the Giant as he had been so kind looking after the hen.
This week we have also been looking after our beanstalks. We have been ensuring they have water, sunlight and air so they can make their own food and grow nice and tall. We have talked about the different parts of the plant and what each part does. It is lovely to see how excited the children are each morning when they come in and they have grown a little! We will continue to look after them until Easter. We just hope that a Giant doesn’t climb down them in the meantime.
We have also been working on our phonics skills by listening to animal noises and trying to work out which animal made that noise. We have also been clapping the syllables in our name and trying hard to copy some of the phase 1 voice sounds. These are skills we are practising for the rest of the year so we are ready for reading in Pre-Reception.
Well done to Sina for winning the World Book Day art competition with his big bad wolf entry. Ms Shuttleworth, our Head of English was very impressed with all the entries and she had a very tough time choosing.
Next week we will be exploring the book ‘Commotion the Ocean’ by Giles Andreae. We will be selecting a few different poems to explore and focus on rhyming words in phonics. We will continue to focus on recognising numerals to 5 and counting out small amounts as we play together.
Have a lovely weekend - Miss Molloy and the Nursery Team
Pre-Reception
Giraffe Class have really enjoyed exploring a new book in our literacy sessions this week and ‘Superworm’ has provided lots of interesting learning opportunities for the children. They have been thinking about what they would do if they had a special superpower, and they even had a go at acting this out during our weekly drama session. We have also been working hard to remember the ‘Superworm’ chant in the book and made a whole class story map to help us learn it. We are excited to explore this book further next week!
Our journey through Phase 2 phonics has continued this week and it has been wonderful to see how motivated the children are by this area of the curriculum. They loved learning the new ‘u’ sound, using the song and action to help them familiarise themselves with it. We also focused on our blending for reading and worked hard to blend some CVC words with some help from our teachers. The children also took on an exciting challenge this week and had a go at segmenting the sounds in CVC words. As a class, we worked hard to segment the individual sounds in a range of CVC words and had a go at writing them together.
We have been working on our counting skills in maths this week, focusing on the importance of moving objects when we count them and double-checking the amount to ensure that we have been accurate with our counting. The children have shown a really good understanding of this and have engaged in a range of fun and exciting counting activities over the week.
The children created their own Superworm puppets in their art session this week. They carefully decorated their individual worms, thinking carefully about the colour and pattern they wanted their work to have.
Wishing you all a lovely weekend - Miss Andrews and the Pre-Reception Team
Reception
It has been a fun-packed week in Reception as we explored The Science Museum, created planets and experimented with balance scales.
Destination Space! This week in Literacy, we have enjoyed being super helpful to our teachers as we started the week writing a list of all the things that we needed to take with us when going on our school trip. We continued the week, thinking about all the exciting things we did during our trip to the Science Museum and challenged ourselves to draw our favourite part and write a sentence to go alongside. Our teachers were so proud of our careful writing. In Phonics this week we have explored the sounds long ‘oo’ and short ‘oo’ and used our great blending skills to identify which sound matched correctly, it can be tricky business sometimes! We also reviewed our tricky words and focused on the tricky word ‘be’. Next week we look forward to delving into the sounds ‘ar’ and ‘or’.
In Maths this week we have been exploring weight and enjoyed using balance scales to decide if objects are lighter or heavier than each other. We loved using all our everyday learning resources including dinosaurs, cars, blocks and lots more to predict which will be heavier. We applied some great mathematical language when telling our friends what we had discovered from our weighing investigation.
Our planets came to life in Art this week as we decided whether we wanted to create an existing planet or use our imagination to design and paint our own imaginary planet! We thought carefully about the different colours we wanted to use and put our colour-mixing skills into action. Our teachers were wowed by our amazing creations.
This week we went on a very exciting trip to the Science Museum. We immersed ourselves in everything space as we explored different rockets, astronaut costumes, planets and so much more. We took part in a workshop all about what it is like up in the international space station and went on a special mission to help fix a broken battery. We also got the chance to explore what it would be like to play basketball in space. We ended the trip with a visit to ‘The Garden’ where we experimented with water and used our strong muscles and great teamwork to move foam bricks around to make some great creations. We had such a fun time at the Science Museum!
Wishing you all an enjoyable and restful weekend - The Reception Team.
Year 1
After a fantastic World Book Day on Friday, the children were lucky enough to receive their gingerbread treats from the Gingerbread Man on Monday for all the exciting writing, reading, acting and investigating that the children did! This week during English the children have enjoyed retelling the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. We used a ‘Talk for Writing’ technique to retell the Traditional Tale, without even seeing the book or a picture. The children then worked in small groups using their imaginations to re-create a new ending to this well known story! After acting out what happens, the children then completed story maps and finally used their amazing wow words and excellent punctuation skills to finish their very own story - Bravo!
Phonics and Guided Reading continue with great success, with the children applying all of their knowledge and understanding across other curriculum areas. Year 1 continues to show a love of reading and sharing books, and we hope to have regular ‘reading buddies’ with Giraffe Class during the Summer Term to expand on this.
Capacity and volume has been our focus during Maths learning, with the children enjoying the water tray! Containers have been sorted according to which have a greater capacity as well as children showing understanding when it comes to volumes of liquid and measuring in millilitres.
As our History topic is nearly complete, we refreshed our understanding of chronology and timelines. The children learned about the development of Royal Mail and the Post Office and how sending letters and parcels became easier as transport and communication has improved.
Well Done Year 1, keep up the hard work!
Wishing our families a relaxing weekend, The Year 1 Team
Year 2
We began our week with an exciting trip to London Wetlands, where we learned more about habitats and microhabitats. We spotted an array of beautiful birds including noisy parakeets, tufted ducks and Egyptian geese, and took some time to become one with nature as we gazed at the beautiful lakes. We enjoyed a workshop about invertebrates, and collected a variety of live specimens to study. Insects, myriapods and molluscs were all carefully brushed into our trays and pots for careful scientific analysis. After a lovely day of exploring, we went to visit the adorable resident Asian otters, Honey and Todd.
We wrote some fantastic recounts of our Wetlands adventures during our English lessons, and focused on writing clear past tense sentences with accurate punctuation. Our spelling focus was negative prefixes and suffixes, so we were sure to include these words in our writing.
In Maths, we continued learning about time-telling, this week focusing on telling the time to 5 minutes, and measuring elapsed time. The children can now apply their time knowledge to our daily schedule, frequently reminding us how long is left until lunch-time!
In Religious Studies, we learned about the Sikh ceremony of Dastar Bandi, and compared it with similar ceremonies from other faiths. The children asked some very thoughtful questions, and remembered so much about Sikhism from our fantastic talk last term.
Our Music lessons were once again a flurry of fun activities, with recorders, djembes and acapella singing all coming together in our penultimate show rehearsal week.
Our Inspirational Woman of the Week was Rosa Parks, and we are certainly inspired by her values and bravery.
Next week is Show Week, so please excuse us if we seem a little dramatic; we are really working on “hamming it up” at the moment!
The Year 2 Team wishes everybody a lovely weekend.
