Lower School Weekly News
News from Lower School this week: 22nd April 2024
Miss Stewart
Deputy Head of Lower School
Welcome back to the Summer Term and welcome to Abercorn to the families joining us this term. It is wonderful to see how well the children have settled into school life and how caring and helpful the Abercorn children are as they help their new friends settle into their classes. We are looking forward to an extremely busy final term of the academic year. Please check your child’s year group post each week along with the Google Classroom for events and we will also keep you updated with any additional events and dates.
Thank you to all the families who have updated Tapestry over the holidays and also at weekends. It is wonderful to see all the things that the children have been learning/ doing/ enjoying at home with their families and it is really helpful and useful information for their teachers.
As we begin the final term of the year, we are excited to share the Parent Overviews of the topics being taught this term. These can be found on the Google Classrooms and we hope that the children will be excited and inspired by their learning this term.
It has been fantastic to see the children back and embracing their learning with such enthusiasm. Some of the highlights have included: In Nursery the Ducklings have been working on the story of The Little Red Hen and this week, just like the little Red Hen, they made some delicious bread. They were delighted to eat their bread after all their hard work making it. Giraffe Class have welcomed some caterpillars to the class this week. They are being very gentle and careful as they look after their baby caterpillars. We cannot wait to watch them grow and change! As it was Earth Day this week, Reception have been thinking about recycling and they created a very fun and colourful skittles game for the garden by recycling and reusing bottles and containers. It has been a very popular game in the garden and has been played and enjoyed by all of the classes in the Lower School - thank you Mouse Class and Gruffalo Class! Further information about these activities and many more can be found in the posts from each year group below.
Wishing you an enjoyable and restful weekend!
Nursery
What a fun-filled first week we have had in Duckling Class. This week we have been studying the book ‘The Little Red Hen’ and on Monday we decided to bake bread just like the hen did in the book. We looked up the recipe in our book and carefully measured out all the ingredients before mixing them together. We then kneaded the dough before rolling it out and making little bread rolls with it. We left the dough to rise and then the very kind kitchen staff put it in the oven for us. The bread we produced was so good even The Little Red Hen would have been proud.
This activity has gone on to inspire us to learn the story of The Little Red Hen and the children have loved joining in with the repeated language and actions for each part of the story. We also acted it out in our drama lesson and loved playing all the different characters. We will continue to explore this story next week and encourage children to use our class story map to recite the story using key phrases from the book.
We have also been really focusing on our initial sounds as part of our phonics journey. We have been not only looking for letters as we see them in books but also trying to match the initial sounds of objects e.g. O-O-O Olivia, o-o-o orange. The children have loved doing this and even though it is difficult they are making excellent progress in this area. We will continue to work on this until the end of the year so they have all the skills needed to continue their reading journey in Pre-Reception.
Another focus this week has been number recognition and we have been playing bingo and snap games with numerals. The children are becoming so confident in recognising numbers 1 to 5 out of sequence. We are also playing simple board games that involve rolling a dice and moving their pieces to the corresponding number of places. We will continue to play these games every week to not only build up our maths skills but also our turn-taking and social skills.
Next week we will be continuing to explore the book The Little Red Hen and sequence the pictures in the story to help us remember what happened. We will also be focusing a lot on writing the first letters of our names on our work. To support this we will continue to do lots of work on our fine motor skills.
I hope you all have a lovely weekend. See you on Monday - Miss Molloy and the Nursery Team
Pre-Reception
Giraffe Class have enjoyed their first full week back in school, engaging in our new topic with excitement and enthusiasm. On Wednesday, our class caterpillars arrived and we were tasked with the job of looking after them. We will carefully observe the caterpillars as they grow and change, eventually turning into beautiful butterflies.
We have focused on the book ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ during our Literacy sessions this week. This book is a great introduction to a variety of different animals and the children really enjoyed recognising them throughout the book. We talked about some features of these animals and showed our outstanding acting skills, pretending to be different animals. The children were then introduced to a poem that was written in line with the book. We have spent the week slowly learning this, making a class story map and adding unique actions to support us.
Our Maths sessions have focused on number recognition this week, and the children have really enjoyed engaging in a range of different activities to support and develop their ability to recognise numbers from 1-10. We also had a go at writing some numbers, focusing specifically on 1-5. We will continue to work on our ability to write different numbers as the term progresses.
The children have thoroughly enjoyed learning another new sound in phonics this week. We learnt the sound, action and Jolly Phonics song for ‘b.’ We played I-spy with a variety of different objects, encouraging the children to think about the initial sounds and recognise which started with ‘b.’ We also worked on our oral blending and enjoyed being investigators, finding different objects after they were sounded out e.g. c-a-t and the children found the cat.
We made our own self-portraits during art this week, thinking carefully about the colour of our hair, eyes, skin etc. The children also thought about the length and style of their hair.
We hope you all have a relaxing weekend - Miss Andrews and The Pre-Reception Team
Reception
Summer Term has begun and we have delved straight into our new topic of “My Super City!” We’ve started exploring all the different landmarks around London and recognising places we’ve been before. We cannot wait to continue learning all about the beautiful city we live in.
In Literacy this week we started our new book called “If I Were King!” By Chelsea O’Byrne. We’ve loved looking at how fun it would be if we were King or Queen. We challenged ourselves to start looking at adjectives and thought of exciting ways to describe all the amazing things you would find in a castle full of Kings and Queens including giant animals, sparkling crowns and red robes. In Phonics we have been looking at the digraph sounds ‘ur’ and ‘ow’ and tricky word ‘was’. We did a great job when thinking of all the different words with these sounds and didn’t give up when writing them into a tricky sentence. Next week we look forward to exploring the sounds “oi” and “ear”.
Subtract, minus and take away have been our keywords in Maths this week. We have enjoyed using practical resources including beans, playdough and egg boxes to work out some subtraction number sentences and wowed our teachers when writing out our number sentences so neatly, carefully thinking about our number formation.
The Reception children have turned into Kings and Queens in Art this week as we have been creating self-portraits as a King or Queen. We used our cutting skills to make a shiny crown and then carefully used a pencil to draw our faces and applied our great colour-mixing skills when painting our faces. What beautiful kings and queens we are!
This week we learnt all about World Earth Day and the importance of looking after the environment we live in today. We listened to stories and enjoyed songs all about keeping the earth clean and discussed how we could make the world a better place.
It has been a great start to the Summer Term and we are so proud of all the hard work the children are already putting in. We are all so excited to continue exploring our new topic and all our learning in the upcoming Term.
We hope you all have a restful weekend - The Reception Team
Year 1
Welcome back to the Summer Term!
The children have returned to school with enthusiasm ready to take on our new topic of ‘Castle Chaos!’ for this half term.
We wish our families Eid Mubarak for those who celebrated during the holidays! We were lucky enough to start our new R.S. learning about Muslim celebrations with Mrs Quershi sharing her knowledge and experience of Ramadan and Eid. The children enjoyed exploring prayer mats and traditional dress as well as tasting a date! Thank you so much Mrs Quershi!
The Year 1 children have enjoyed some challenges during Maths this week, starting to tackle multiplication and division. We thought about how to make and add equal groups and started to write some multiplication number sentences - amazing!
For Science this week the children reviewed their knowledge of weather and the seasons, ready to explore different types of weather in more depth. We look forward to making windsocks next week!
The children showed excellent understanding using non-fiction books to find out about castles! They were challenged to draw their own castle, including battlements, a portcullis and a moat, with amazing results!
The children enjoyed the story of ‘On the Way Home’ by Jill Murphy with the character Claire recounting how she got her bad knee, and telling some fibs! Year 1 used their amazing imaginations to create a new fib for Claire to tell. We look forward to writing our innovative pages next week!
Bravo Year 1, your teachers are very proud!
Year 2
We are learning about the uses of plants this term, so we decided to use Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers as inspiration for our own flowery paintings in our Art lesson. The children really took on the challenge of painting to express themselves, producing some emotive pieces, all sprinkled with artistic nods to Van Gogh.
We also learned about our favourite use of plants - chocolate! We studied its South American origins in our Creative Curriculum lesson and then experimented with melting dark and white chocolate in Science. We wondered which would melt faster, and designed an experiment to find out. We produced a complete scientific report, including predictions, method instructions, results and diagrams. It was fantastic to see the children making decisions about how to conduct the experiment to ensure a fair test, as well as some excellent investigative work to make informed predictions.
We turned ourselves Inside Out in our English lessons this week, writing poems from the perspective of various personified emotions. We collected some very impressive vocabulary, mixed it together with some super similes, added a dash of alliteration, and eventually produced some elaborate and thought-provoking poems in the form of riddles.
Maths was also riddled with riddles, as we used them to explore the properties of shapes. We built on our solid knowledge of 3D shapes, and also learned to draw and recognise both regular and irregular 2D shapes. We also explored symmetry, creating patterns and exploring lines of symmetry in capital letters.
In Religious Studies, we learned about the Hindu creation story, having studied the Christian creation story last week. We love finding out about stories from other cultures, and look forward to studying an Islamic creation story next week.
Have a lovely weekend, From the Year 2 team
