Lower School Weekly News
News from Lower School this week: 26th January 2024
Miss Stewart
Deputy Head of Lower School
It has been another busy week at Lower School. I am delighted with how well the children have settled into their routine, especially those who joined us earlier this month.
Lower School Parents’ Evenings will take place on Monday 5th February and Wednesday 7th February from 4.00pm until 6.30pm and will all be held in person at the school. More information on this including how to book has been sent to you by email earlier this week. The booking system is now open and ready to take bookings. These appointments are an opportunity to speak to your child’s teacher and we hope that you find these sessions useful.
The Spring Term Curriculum Overviews for each year group have been shared on the Google Classrooms, we hope that you find them helpful.
This week, the Lower School had a visit from a Nutritionist arranged by the amazing catering team. The children learned about the different foods and how they help us to go, grow and glow! The children were delighted to try a wide range of fresh foods including fruits and vegetables. The children really enjoyed the tastes and textures and the opportunity to try new foods.
On Friday, we welcomed Eleanor and her guide dog Ava from Guide Dogs UK to our assembly. This charity, along with Celia Hammond Animal Trust, was chosen by the children as the charities they will support throughout this academic year. It has been great to learn more about our chosen charities through these visits.
Next week, Pre-Reception will be visiting the Fire Station and meeting some real life superheroes – firefighters! This visit will support their learning in their new topic of Superheroes!
Also, next week, Duckling Class will be going to the Forest School. This is a new experience for Duckling Class, however, the Forest School leaders were so impressed by the Duckling Class last term that they were delighted to welcome back again this term! I am sure they will have a fantastic experience.
As part of Children’s Mental Health (Monday 29th January to Friday 2nd February), we will be encouraging the children to ‘Dress to Express’ on Friday February 2nd, with more information on the full week and the dress up day to follow.
On 7th February, Y2 will be taking part in the Abercorn Inter House Cross Country Race. This will take part in their Games lesson. Mr Doyle and the PE department have sent further information to the Y2 parents this week. A huge thank you to the APA for providing hot chocolate for the children after the event!
As I have mentioned we have been delighted with how well the children have settled back into school this term. If you have any concerns about your child’s settling process please talk to the class teacher. Every child is different and we will support each child individually to ensure the smoothest transition into their class.
Wishing you a wonderful weekend!
Nursery
This week we have been exploring ‘Shark in the Park’ and we created a story map. We used the story map to retell the story in our own words. The children loved retelling the story, using their telescopes to look through. They remembered so many of the words from the story and we retold it both as a whole class and in small groups. The children have loved this story and we will be exploring the second book in the series next week.
This week we have also had a strong focus on the first letters of our name. We have developed our fine motor skills using sticky dots and carefully placed them on the letters to help us develop our understanding of the shape of the letter. We have also been tracing our letters and trying hard to order the letters in our name. This is something we will work on all year.
In maths we have worked on counting and joining in with number songs including recapping the song ‘One, Two, Three, Four, Five. Once I Caught a Fish Alive’. We have been counting things around the classroom and trying hard to say one number for each item. We have also continued to talk about shapes and have tried hard to make arrangements with them.
On Wednesday we were so lucky to be visited by a nutritionist from our amazing catering company. We got to try a range of healthy food and learnt some new vegetable names including mooli and edamame beans.
We have also been talking a lot this week about how to stay healthy and the importance of washing our hands and coughing into their sleeves and not their hands. We have been continuing to support children with using tissues themselves and talking about the importance of using soap and washing our hands after we use the bathroom, before we eat and after we sneeze. We have been singing the song ‘Wash, wash, wash your hands, wash the germs away. If you don’t you might get sick and that will spoil your day.’ (Sung to the tune of row, row, row your boat)
Next week we will be exploring the book ‘Shark in the Dark’. We will focus on rhyming words and trying hard to identify words that rhyme. We will also be exploring light and dark. We will make shadow puppets and talk about the shapes they make.
A quick reminder that we will be attending Forest School on Friday. All details can be found on Google Classroom.
Have a lovely weekend - Miss Molloy and the Nursery Team
Pre-Reception
The children in Giraffe Class have had another wonderful week in school and we have been especially impressed by their kindness, consideration and attitude towards each other. It has been incredible to see how much they are willing to help each other and those characteristics tie in very well with our topic of ‘Real Life Superheroes,’ showing that every child in the class is a hero in their own way!
We have continued to learn our Firefighter poem this week and the children have loved reciting this poem to their teachers, using their story maps for support. They especially enjoyed filling in the missing parts of our story map during their focus task activity, and I was amazed by how well each child knew the poem. Later in the week, we really thought about our speaking skills and made a collaborative scene of what we thought the poem looked like. We then used our comprehension skills to describe what was happening, challenging our expressive language skills!
Our Phase 2 phonics journey has continued to progress this week and the children have learnt another new sound. They were thrilled to learn the ‘d’ sound, letter name and letter formation rhyme. We even had a listen to the Jolly Phonics song and the children did a great job of banging on their pretend drums with the short ‘d,d,d’ sound. We have also worked very hard on our blending skills this week and have continued to develop a variety of techniques to help us with this. We have been using our robot arms to blend the sounds in CVC words and it has been wonderful to see the children use this technique when reading their individual reading books.
Maths has been another exciting area of the curriculum this week and the children have really enjoyed exploring odd (sad) and even (happy) numbers. We have used Numicon pieces to help us with this and have been sorting them based on their shape, realising that flat shapes are happy numbers and the ones that aren’t flat are sad numbers. The children especially enjoyed sorting these shapes into different groups and have shown a good initial understanding of these new concepts.
We explored the technique of collaging during our art session this week and the children worked hard to make their own ‘fires.’ They used a variety of yellow, orange and red tissue paper, arranging it to make a lovely creation. We also made some lovely cards for the firefighters that we are going to see during our visit to the fire station next week and we cannot wait to show them. We are also hoping to perform our poem to them, which would be incredibly exciting!
We wish you all a restful weekend - The Pre-Reception Team
Reception
3, 2, 1 Blast off! This week the children have loved exploring their new topic, making rockets and discovering new planets. The children have become astronauts in the role-play corner and flown spaceships around the universe.
We have been challenging ourselves in Literacy this week as we became authors and did our first innovation of a story! We used our creativity and imagination as we changed the character, setting or mode of transport in the story “The Way Back Home!” In phonics, we’ve been continuing to learn our Phase 3 sounds and have impressed our teachers with our great can-do attitude when sounding out and writing during our lessons, especially with those tricky letters! Next week, we look forward to exploring the digraph sounds, ‘zz’ and ‘qu’.
This week in Maths we began our addition journey as we explored the variety of different vocabulary that can be used when explaining an addition number sentence. We’ve done a great job at counting the stars fallen from space and adding them together. We are so excited to start working on writing our number sentences next week.
In Art this week we have applied our creative minds as we mixed and marbled colours together to create our own planets. We enjoyed using balloons to print our planets onto black card and even started to think about what features we might have on our new planets including chocolate rivers and purple trees!
Grow, go and glow! This week we had a visit from the nutritionist who taught us about the importance of a balanced plate. We even got to try some yummy new foods from each group. We now love spotting our grow, go and glow foods on our plates at lunchtime.
We ended our week with a visit from one of our charities ‘Guide Dogs’ and learned all about what our donations can do to help others. We really do have some very kind and caring friends in Reception!
The Reception team wishes everybody a lovely weekend.
Year 1
Year 1 had a delicious start to the week this week in English as the children followed a recipe to make flapjacks! They focused on those ‘bossy’ imperative verbs and made sure they followed in the correct order! The children then enjoyed innovating their own recipe by adding different ingredients or toppings. We were all very hungry by Friday!
During Maths, the children have compared two digit numbers, remembering to use their knowledge of tens and ones to figure out which numbers are greater than others.
Our new R.S topic of special books continued with a focus on the Torah. The children thought of some of their own special guidelines to live by and created their own Torah style scrolls.
The teachers have been very impressed with the children’s determination in tackling our David Hockney textiles project this week. They have taken to sewing well and have enjoyed choosing the different fabrics to create a piece inspired by ‘Garrowby Hill’.
A nutritionist came to visit the children to encourage them to try new foods and remind them how to keep our bodies healthy. It was quite a spread! A huge thanks to Holroyd Howe for organising!
As always, Computing, French, P.S.H.E and P.E have been a big hit, with the children learning new skills and vocabulary every week.
Wishing you a relaxing weekend! The Year 1 Team
Year 2
It has been another week of learning about Amazing Africa for Year 2. The countries of focus this week were Kenya, The Gambia and Nigeria. We read the story ‘Grace and Family’ to learn about different types of families, life in The Gambia, and African markets. We used ideas from this story to create posters to advertise our very own market stalls, and used persuasive language to encourage visitors to purchase our wares. We learned that currency in The Gambia has crocodiles on it, whilst Nigerian currency looks different. Indeed, we were lucky enough to see some real life Nigerian currency when Tega’s mum kindly visited us to share her experience of living in Nigeria. We were able to find out so many fascinating facts about the climate, food and animals there.
In Art, our weaving skills were once again on show as we constructed baskets for our African markets. Next week, we will be making fruit for them.
Speaking of fruit, we were lucky to sample a variety of delicious fruits, vegetables and interesting snacks when we were visited by Ellie the nutritionist on Wednesday. She taught us about creating a balanced plate, and we showed off our knowledge of foods which help us to “Go, Grow and Glow”.
In Maths, we have tackled the tricky topic of subtraction with exchange; there have been many trips to the bank to exchange tens for ones, and we have all nailed applying this knowledge to column subtraction.
Preparations for our Spring term show are underway; the children have all contributed ideas for their characters, and the recorder item is sounding fantastic!
The Year 2 team wishes you a very pleasant weekend.
