Lower School Weekly News
News from Lower School this week: 19th January 2024
Miss Stewart
Deputy Head of Lower School
Welcome back to the first Lower School Newsletter of the Spring Term! On behalf of everyone at Abercorn School, I would like to wish the whole school community a very Happy New Year. We simply cannot wait to get going with our new topics this term!
I am so impressed with how well the Lower School children have settled back into school, it is such a pleasure to see them and hear all about their holiday adventures! We also have some of our Nursery children extending their days to full time and it is wonderful to see how well our Ducklings have adapted to the longer week.
We have welcomed several new families to Lower School over the past week, the children have settled in so well and we hope that you will all be very happy here. We always love to welcome new friends to the school and it has been so impressive how well the children have taken school life in their stride. If you do have any concerns about how your child has settled during the day, please do not hesitate to call the school office. Miss Sekeresova and I are very happy to go and check on your child and let you know how they are getting on. We hope that our new families are finding the Google Classrooms helpful. These have been set up with the intention of providing information in one place for parents. On your child’s Google Classroom you will find reminders from staff, weekly information/updates, timetables for the class etc. Please let your class teacher know if you have any problems with accessing this information.
This week, we recommenced our Forest School visits. Year 1 attended Forest School on Wednesday morning with Year 2 going on Wednesday afternoon. Although it has been a cold week, we were so lucky that it was dry and the children had the opportunity to explore the forest area again in a very different season.
Thank you to all the parents who have accessed and used Tapestry, either last term or our new families logging on more recently, we hope that you are now able to access and input to your child’s Learning Journal. Tapestry plays such an important role in supporting young children’s education, allowing key learning moments from both home and school to be shared. It has been wonderful to see the photographs and videos of the children’s holidays, so a huge thank you to everyone for using this so successfully.
It has been such a pleasure coming back to school and starting the Spring Term. A huge ‘Well done!’ to all our Lower School children for settling back so quickly. I know we are going to have a very busy, exciting and productive term.
Wishing you a lovely weekend!
Nursery
What a wonderful first full week we have had back in Duckling Class. We have welcomed our two new friends and our new adult and made them feel very welcome in our Class. Miss Goodwin joins us from Pre-Reception and has had many years working in Nursery previously and it is so wonderful to have her back in the team. Miss Klimkova has moved to Pre-Reception but has popped in many times already to say hello to the Ducklings. We are so excited for the term ahead. Before the holidays we asked the children what they would like to learn about and they voted for ‘Fish and Under the Sea’. We have planned lots of fun activities and are very excited for the term ahead.
We started our topic with one of the children’s favourite books ‘Shark in the Park’. It is a fantastic book about a little boy who goes looking for a shark with his new telescope. As we share the book together we always ask children to help us predict the next word based on the rhyming pattern. Rhyming is a very tricky concept to master and will continue to work on it when we share books and when we explore the classroom together as well as in our directed phonics time. This week to support our understanding of the story we acted out various parts and then created a story map together. We then created telescopes to help look for sharks. We used them all around the school but luckily we didn’t find any. We will continue to explore this book next week with a focus on rhyming and continuing longer rhyming strings e.g. shark, park, dark.
In maths this week we explored 2D shapes and created fish and other sea creatures using familiar shapes. We worked on naming these shapes and looking for them around the classroom as we explore. We have also been singing counting songs and have been learning the poem/song ‘One two three four five once I caught a fish alive!’ We will continue to learn this over the coming weeks and will video it just before half term.
We have also been learning the names of different sea creatures and talking about what they look like and their different features. Alongside this we have continued to build on our sharing skills, our independence and fine motor skills.
Thank you again for all your support, have a lovely weekend - Miss Molloy and the Nursery Team
Pre-Reception
Our first full week back has been very enjoyable and the children seem to have settled back into their classroom environment very well. It is evident how comfortable they are in Abercorn School, which is wonderful to see.
Phonics has been a very exciting area of the curriculum this week as we learnt a new phonics sound. The children loved learning the new ‘m’ sound, action and letter formation rhyme. We also had a listen to the Jolly Phonics song for this sound and the children loved joining in, rubbing their stomachs and saying ‘mmmmm’ very loudly. We also sorted some objects based on their initial sounds and continued to work on our oral blending and segmenting, containing the Phase 2 sounds we have covered so far.
In maths our main focus has been 1-1 correspondence, we have been working hard on counting our objects very slowly. The children have also challenged themselves by counting objects that cannot be moved, which is a much more difficult concept. We also had a look at the numbers 6 and 7 in more depth. The children really enjoyed challenging themselves by identifying different representations for these numbers.
Our literacy focus has been in line with our new topic ‘Real Life Superheroes.’ The children have really enjoyed learning about different types of real life heroes, such as, police, firefighters, doctors, nurses and many more. We have started to explore a poem all about firefighters this week and have been really focusing on how they help keep us safe. We will continue to explore this poem over the next few weeks, using story maps to help us recite it.
Colour mixing was the main focus during our art session this week and the children really loved seeing what different colours they could make!
We wish you all a relaxing weekend - Miss Andrews and the Pre-Reception Team
Reception
What a great start to the spring term it’s been, we’ve loved having the children back and hearing all about their fun-packed winter breaks. This term we move on to our new and exciting topic of “To Infinity and Beyond!” Where we will become astronauts and explore all the planets, galaxies and much more that space has to offer!
‘The Way Back Home’ by Oliver Jeffers has been a great hit this week in Literacy. We have loved showing our creativity skills when making our own story maps and have enjoyed retelling the story to our friends. All the children in Reception have shown such great inference skills as they thought about what different characters may be thinking and why. This week we began exploring our Phase 3 Phonic sounds and the children have all shown such a determined nature when writing words and sentences with these sounds, they really have wowed their teachers!
It’s been all about the ‘teen’ numbers this week in Maths. The children have been so enthusiastic to challenge themselves when delving into these bigger numbers. We have explored ordering, writing and making quantities of all the numbers between 10 and 15. We also began our exploration of addition using a part - part - whole model and all the children are so excited to challenge themselves next week when exploring number sentences.
Up, up and away! In Art this week we enjoyed creating spaceships. We have been applying and developing our knowledge of joining different materials and we thought creatively about the best material to use when making a window. We wonder what adventures our spaceships will take us on!
It has been quite a chilly week this week so we would like to thank you for making sure the children have got their black school coats, hats, scarves and gloves, it helped to keep them lovely and toasty so they can enjoy their school day.
Wishing you all a lovely and enjoyable weekend! - The Reception Team.
Year 1
The children have returned to Year One this term with a positive learning attitude, growth mindset and much taller!
During English this week we have enjoyed exploring instructions! We used ‘bossy’ imperative verbs to write instruction sentences and found out what a good set of instructions needs.
Our topic of Brilliant Britain started during Geography this week, starting to learn the names of the four countries of the UK and think about what we already know and what we are going to learn. The children’s speaking and listening about places in the UK they have visited will be a great help to deepen their understanding and relate the topic to what they have experienced.
We have been Science detectives, finding objects made of different materials around the classroom. The children enjoyed discussing why certain items were made of particular materials and imagined having wooden windows and metal clothes!
During Maths, the children have taken on the challenge of estimating using a number line and solidifying their understanding of place value and teen numbers - Bravo!
Our Art topic of British artists was a hit, with a focus on our very own John O’Connor. We were inspired by his London cityscapes and used watercolours to paint some of our own.
Year 1 also enjoyed a FREEZING Forest School!! They explored different adjectives within the forest, played a paired trust exercise, played with the ‘log dogs’ and built a campfire!
Have a super weekend! The Year 1 team
Year 2
Year 2 have thrown themselves into their new topic of Amazing Africa with a plethora of exciting activities. We used our map skills to identify various countries and famous landmarks throughout the continent. We have enjoyed playing in our African market where fruits and fabrics are sold, allowing plenty of opportunities for counting change.
We have used the story of Handa’s Surprise to practise writing lists of fruits and animals, and are always sure to include our listing commas to avoid over-using “and”. The story also inspired some children to experiment with fresh oranges to make a refreshing, vitamin-filled morning beverage.
In Maths, we have focused on addition. We have been using practical resources to combine totals, and have practised exchanging to help with our column addition.
In Art, we created stunning African sunsets with silhouettes of African animals. We thought carefully about which colours to use, and how we could merge them together to create a spectrum. We also categorised different types of animals, and made fact-files about our favourite ones. We have particularly enjoyed finding out the collective nouns for various animals; our current favourites are a bloat of hippos and a confusion of giraffes.
This week also saw our first Forest School visit of 2024. We cooperated with our friends to go on a blind-folded walk, warmed ourselves up around the cam-fire, and even had some hot Ribena.
The Year 2 team wishes you a great weekend!
