Lower School Weekly News
News from Lower School this week: 26th February 2024
Miss Stewart
Deputy Head of Lower School
The countdown to World Book Day has started! On Wednesday we welcomed the author Lou Kuenzler to Lower School. Lou spent the whole day with us, reading her amazing stories and running workshops with the children. Each year group had their own session, which they really enjoyed. Thank you to everyone who brought in books for Lou to sign. I am sure you will enjoy them. A big thank you to Mrs Shuttleworth for arranging this fantastic experience.
Next week, we will be welcoming another author, Toby Glover to school. Please see Mrs Shuttleworth’s letter for further details on this and also on the World Book Day celebrations next Friday.
Next week, Year 1 will be visiting the Postal Museum as part of their Creative Curriculum History learning. This is a new trip for Year 1 and we are looking forward to hearing all about it on their return. I know that the teachers and Y1 children are very excited as they prepare for this visit. Please see the Y1 Google Classroom for further information on this event.
Year 2 will be visiting the Senior School next week to meet with Ms Seguier. They will be learning more about Africa and having the opportunity to look around the Senior School too. Further information to follow from the Y2 team.
Finally, I am delighted to announce that Miss Patel, Reception - Mouse Class Teacher will be running the London Marathon this year. Miss Patel has written the following message below:
On 21st April 2024, I will be running the London Marathon for the charity ‘Starlight’. Starlight is a charity I believe to be very important, offering children the opportunity to continue their personal, social and emotional development even during the toughest of times and through the best means possible … play! They also offer support for siblings and families, helping them create memories that will last forever and much more! Please see below for a bit more information about this amazing charity.
Life in hospital isn’t easy, especially when you’re young. Suddenly you find yourself in a strange and lonely place full of unfamiliar sights and sounds. In donating to the London Marathon you are directly helping children to cope with serious illness by giving them tools to manage these times when they need it most. Not only this, but you're also helping to support their siblings and parents by providing vital funds to provide them with funding family breaks and away days, giving them a chance to make comforting, life-lasting memories together, no matter what the future may bring. From each and every one of them - THANK YOU!
Thank you for any donation, no matter how big or small. Wish me luck!
Here is the link to the donation page.
Wishing you a wonderful weekend
Nursery
This week we have been learning all about Jack and the Beanstalk. As a class we have acted out the story, made masks and played with little characters to help us build up an understanding of the story. We encouraged the children to join in with the refrain from the story repeating ‘Fee. Fi, Fo, Fum’ in their best Giant voice. We also began planting our very own beanstalks and talked all about the different parts of a plant. We will continue to build on this knowledge over the coming weeks as they grow.
In Maths, we have continued to explore recognising numbers around the classroom and have been using the phones and keyboards to ring our friends using the special phone book we have made in class. We have encouraged children to dial their friends' numbers using digits 123 only. They have loved ringing each other. We have also been looking at the concept of taller and shorter and encouraging the children to compare their towers/beanstalks as they build them. We will continue to explore this next week and encourage the children to compare their beanstalks as they begin to grow.
We have also been working hard to build up our fine motor skills. We have been busy threading Cheerios to make bracelets, using scissors to cut out masks and making shapes with playdough. These activities build up the muscles children need to draw and write later in our educational journey.
Next week we will continue to explore the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. We will look after our newly planted beans and make sure they get water, air and sunshine everyday. As it is World Book Day, we will be thinking about our favourite books and on Friday we will dress up as a book character.
Have a lovely weekend - Miss Molloy and the Nursery Team
Pre-Reception
We have had another fun-filled week in Pre-Reception this week. On Wednesday, we had a special visit from the author Lou Kuenzler. The children found this session very interesting and enjoyed meeting an author in real life. They listened intently to all of the lovely stories and some children even got their books signed.
Supertato has continued to be the main focus in our literacy sessions this week and the children have been enthused and engaged by this text. They have used our class story map to retell what happens in the story, and I hope this week’s speaking and listening topic has given you the opportunity to hear how fantastic they are at this too! We have also been focusing on using our expressive language to explain what is happening in specific scenes from the story. We encouraged the children to extend their language by using where, what and who discussion prompts.
The children have really enjoyed their mathematics sessions this week and their positive attitude to their learning during these lessons has been evident. We have been focusing on joining two amounts together. The children have learnt how to use the adding boards in class, putting objects in each section and swiping them to the end to find the total amount. The children have even challenged themselves to verbalise the number sentence independently, working hard to use the language ‘plus’ for ‘+’ and ‘is the same as’ for ‘=.’
Our journey through Phase 2 phonics has continued this week and the children have learnt the new ‘k’ sound. We discussed how this makes the same phoneme as ‘c’ but the grapheme is different. We also looked at our very first digraph and the children showed a good understanding that this is when two letters make one sound. We read a variety of different words with the ‘ck’ digraph in them to challenge our blending skills, using our robot arms to help us read some tricky words. We have also been recapping our Phase 2 tricky words to ensure that we are able to recognise them. The children especially enjoyed playing tricky word bingo!
We explored the artistic technique of printing during our art session this week. The children used a variety of different Numicon pieces and paint to make their own Supertato cities, and they cannot wait to add their own unique Supertato flying through the sky.
I would like to wish everyone a relaxing weekend - Miss Andrews and the Pre-Reception Team.
Reception
It has been a great week in Reception with a visiting author, junk modelling creations, alien puppets and lots of amazing learning! The children have shown fantastic kindness and teamwork this week, making their teachers very proud.
We have continued to show respect and kindness for the planet we live on as we think about reducing, reusing and recycling in Literacy. We enjoyed learning and reciting a poem all about looking after the world we live in. All the teachers were so impressed with how well we projected our voices and kept to the rhythm of the poem. In Phonics this week we have been challenging ourselves to write our tricky words as well as the digraphs ‘ai, ai, snail in the rain’ and ‘ee, ee, what can you see’. Next week we look forward to exploring the sounds ‘igh’ and ‘oa’.
In Maths this week we’ve been challenging ourselves to create and complete complex repeating patterns, focusing on shapes, sizes and colours. We couldn’t believe all the patterns we could see in the everyday objects around us. I wonder how many patterns you can spot in your home environment!
In Art this week we have been putting our beautiful watercolour skills into practice, creating colourful watercolour planets. We looked carefully at the variety of colours and tones on each planet and used small brush strokes and water to allow colours to bleed together.
Planet cupcakes were a hit this week as we worked as a team to read and follow the instructions, thinking about the different ingredients needed to make cupcakes. The chefs very kindly baked them for us and then we had the exciting job of deciding which planet to decorate our cupcakes like and what beautiful cupcakes they were!
This week we had a special visit from the author Lou Kuenzler. We loved listening to her funny stories about a zebra dressing up as different animals of the alphabet and a racoon collecting up rubbish. It was so exciting to meet an author and we even got to act out different animals for each letter of the alphabet.
Wishing you all an enjoyable and lovely weekend - The Reception Team.
Year 1
The children have enjoyed another busy and exciting week in Year 1!
In the run up to World Book day next week, Lower School are lucky enough to have visits from TWO authors! This week it was Lou Kuenzler. The children enjoyed listening to her stories, asking questions about how she gets her ideas and of course taking part in some drama too!
Our Creative Curriculum topic of ‘Terrific Tales’ has continued with the children showing an understanding of traditional tales during their English learning this week. We have thought carefully about stories we know well and the different ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters that are portrayed.
With this in mind, we helped out the 3 Little Pigs during Science to test the materials they used to build their houses. We are materials experts now and knew that straw, sticks and bricks would be good for some parts of the house and not others, so a new house was built using teamwork and a mixture of all 3 different materials!
Our role play Post Office is up and running to complement our learning about the postal system in History. This week we learnt about how letters were weighed and how much it cost to send letters in the past. We can’t wait to visit the Postal Museum next week to help us understand further!
Phonics and reading continues to progress brilliantly, with differentiated activities each week and with some children even starting to learn pre cursive handwriting - Bravo!
Wishing our families a lovely weekend - The Year 1 Team
Year 2
Year 2 children have become authors this week. Our visit from Lou Kuenzler inspired us to write some fantastic stories; we listened carefully to her planning and editing process, and then used her suggestions to produce our own innovated versions of The Sheep And The Goat. Just like Lou, we tapped into the power of our own imaginations, and thought carefully about how to use alliteration and similes to make our writing gripping. We already knew the story in-depth after reciting it and choreographing actions to it earlier in the week, and we’re pretty confident that our new versions are far more thrilling than the original.
In Phonics, we focused on the doubling rule for adding the -ing suffix to verbs with a short vowel sound. It was wonderful to see lots of children applying this learning in their extended writing as well as in their phonics lessons and spelling test.
Our inspirational woman we studied this week was Florence Nightingale. We were inspired by her endless determination to improve life for others.
In Maths, we consolidated our understanding of fractions. We used bar models to show thirds and quarters, and created our own fractions walls to compare the sizes of various fractions on it. Next week, we will focus on time, and will be using our fractions knowledge to help us.
In Science, we thought about migration, hibernation and adaptation; we already knew plenty about migration thanks to the script for our up-coming show, and some children even suggested editing the script to add further fascinating scientific facts!
Speaking of our show, we have been busy learning a few more dances this week, and are excited to wow the audience with our broad range of musical numbers. Haunting melodies, rousing harmonies, line dancing and jazz hands all combine in this unmissable spectacle!
Have a lovely weekend - From the Year 2 Team
