Lower School Weekly News
News from Lower School this week: 29th April 2024
Miss Stewart
Deputy Head of Lower School
This week has been a really fun and busy week. The caterpillars in Giraffe Class continue to grow and are being very well cared for! Nursery have been retelling the story of The Little Red Hen with amazing recall and using wonderful vocabulary. The Reception classes have been creating some wonderful models of London Landmarks. Year 1 have been working hard on the multiplication skills using arrays. In Year 2, the children have been working incredibly hard on planning and writing their Big Write Stories all about a new chocolate factory opening very close to Abercorn School. I cannot wait to read the finished pieces. In addition, everyone has been delighted to welcome the warmer weather! Please see below for more information on all of this and so much more.
As the weather gets warmer, the children should now start to wear the summer uniform. All children should bring a waterproof jacket in their bags during the Summer Term, even if it is sunny when they leave home in the mornings.
Lower School class photographs will take place on Wednesday 8th May, please ensure that all children are in their full summer uniform for their photographs. For further information on the photographs and for full uniform information, please see Mr. Hammond’s letter which was sent earlier this week.
The booking system for Reception, Pre-Reception and Nursery Parents’ Evening appointments is now open. Please book for an individual meeting with your child’s teacher if you would like to attend. The available dates are Monday 20th May and Wednesday 22nd May. If you have any problems with accessing the booking system, please contact our IT team on helpdesk@abercornschool.com.
I wish you an enjoyable long weekend and look forward to seeing everyone on Tuesday 7th May!
Nursery
This week in Duckling Class we have been reciting the story of The Little Red Hen. We worked on clear pronunciation and speaking slowly. Each child then happily sat and recited all the story with the actions on their own and I couldn’t be prouder of them.
In maths this week we have been having fun trying to count out different amounts of objects to match the corresponding numeral. Our little Ducklings are becoming so confident in counting and each week their accuracy increases a little more. We are very proud of how hard they have been working. We will continue counting and matching amounts until the end of the year so our little Ducklings are ready for Pre-Reception.
As next week is a short week we will not focus on a one book but instead we will focus on trying to find things that start with the sound our name begins with e.g. lion for Leon. We have begun this already and the children are becoming comfortable with finding words that not only start with their sound but also those at the start of the names of their friends.
We will also be focusing on building up our drawing and writing skill by drawing people in a step by step way and trying hard to write the first letter of our names.
On Monday 13th our chicks will arrive in school*. Over the two weeks before half term we will watch them grow and learn all about their life cycle. It is a wonderful two weeks and each year the children’s language and understanding of the life cycles of animals develops so much.
*please note the chicks come from a company that guarantees rehoming for all the chicks, please see Google Classroom for more details.
I wish you all a lovely weekend and we’ll see you all on Tuesday - Miss Molloy and the Nursery Team
Pre-Reception
Giraffe Class have really enjoyed watching their class caterpillars grow over the week. They have grown so much bigger and we have predicted that they will turn to chrysalises very soon!
We have been reading ‘Dear Zoo’ in our literacy sessions this week and the children have really enjoyed exploring this new text. We have been thinking about adjectives to describe different animals and the children thoroughly enjoyed making their own animal guessing cards; they drew their chosen animal on the inside and wrote a variety of adjectives on the outside, to see if people could guess the chosen animal.
We learnt another new sound in phonics this week and the children seem to have grasped a good understanding of the sound and letter formation rhyme for the grapheme ‘f.’ Together, we made a poster of different objects that started with ‘f’ and we also had a go at sorting objects by their initial sounds. As the week progressed, we focused on our blending and segmenting skills, something the children are becoming much more confident with.
Our maths sessions have focused on matching number to quantity and the children really enjoyed making different unifix towers, matching these to the correct numeral from 1-10. We also engaged in a variety of games and activities to support our number recognition.
We created our own beautiful butterflies in art this week, looking at symmetry and thinking about how we could make the butterfly look the same on each side. The children carefully painted one side of their butterfly and then folded it over to create a beautiful butterfly!
Wishing you all a lovely May bank holiday - Miss Andrews and The Pre-Reception Team!
Reception
It has been a great week in Reception, exploring different London Landmarks, The River Thames and so much more! The children have shown great teamwork, helping their friends and teachers throughout the school day.
Mouse Class and Gruffalo Class have been thinking about all the rules they would have in place if they were King or Queen as we continue exploring the story “If I Were King!” By Chelsea O’Byrne. We came up with some great ideas including wearing rainbow outfits, eating cake and playing with toys all day long! The teachers were so impressed with all the imaginative ideas for their kingdom rules. In Phonics we have been exploring the sounds “oi” and “ear” and challenging ourselves to think of and independently write small sentences or captions including words with our focus sounds in them. We cannot wait to learn our new trigraph sound “air” and tricky word “they” next week.
It’s been all about tens and ones in Maths this week as we have been focusing on our understanding of numbers between 11 and 20. We used our maths detective skills and Numicon to partition some 2 digit numbers and explain to our friends how many tens and ones are in each number. We also practised some number formation and enjoyed using rhymes to help us.
We have been showing our love for London this week in Art as we begin the first week of our London landmark project. We’ve picked our favourite London landmark and thought carefully about what junk modelling pieces we could use to create it, thinking about height, shape and size. We’ve covered our constructed junk modelling in brown paper ready for the painting and detailing to begin next week!
As the summer sun is starting to appear, we ended our week with an assembly all about keeping safe in the sun and discussed the importance of water, hats, sun cream and a lot of other ways to keep ourselves safe. The teachers were very impressed with how knowledgeable the Reception children already were on this!
Please see a few reminders below about the upcoming week:
Monday 6th May - Bank Holiday Wednesday 8th May - Class Photo Day - please can you ensure your child is in full summer uniform for this.
We hope you all have a lovely and hopefully nice weathered Bank Holiday weekend - The Reception Team
Year 1
Another fantastic week in Year 1!
Amazing arrays were the focus of maths learning this week. The children learned about columns and rows and how to count quickly in groups. They then made their own arrays from a total and wrote some amazing multiplication number sentences. Well done!
Our focus during English has been non- fiction texts, starting to look at the different features. The children have also been revising some grammar and punctuation, looking at capital letters for proper nouns and some children are even starting to learn about and apply commas and speech marks when reading and writing.
The tumultuous weather has really helped us with our Science learning recently! The children made a wind sock and learned how the change in air pressure affects wind. We look forward to testing our windsocks at home!
This week in Design and Technology, the children researched different food groups and how to be healthy. This will help us to eventually design our own yummy dips!
As always Music, Swimming, Computing and PE have all been fantastic with the children learning and applying new skills. Bravo!
Wishing our Year 1 families a restful Bank Holiday weekend - The Year 1 team
Year 2
Last week’s chocolate focus proved too delicious to leave behind, so this week we decided to take a trip to a chocolate factory in our English lessons! We planned and wrote stories about a school pet who escapes and visits a nearby chocolate factory. The children showed superb focus to deliver some action-packed stories filled with original ideas and literary flourishes.
Meanwhile, this week’s Maths focus was on place value and addition. We practised partitioning and exchanging using base 10, place value counters and straws. We were then able to apply our understanding to various written methods. We also became teachers and had a go at marking and correcting erroneous calculations, as well as writing our own word problems using equations we had solved. Next week, we will look at subtraction as the inverse operation of addition, and focus on missing number questions as well as word problems.
In Science we thought about the various uses of plants (other than chocolate), and set up a sunflower experiment in the classroom. We wondered whether a sunflower will grow if it is given a liquid other than water, and we decided on coffee! Some children have predicted that the coffee-fed flower will be brown, while others have predicted that the caffeine will cause the plant to be “lively! We are also testing whether a sunflower will grow with no water, and testing another which has water but no light.” We are observing the plants closely each morning. Our weekly trip to the park also allowed us to observe the changing plants and trees; we particularly love the blooms on show at this time of year.
For our Continents focus, we learned about some of North America’s famous landmarks. Our children are well-travelled, and many were able to share their own knowledge and experience. We are also very lucky to have Madame Constant sharing her knowledge of continents in our French lessons; we have learned about French-speaking countries around the world, and can now name many of them in French.
Of course, the approach of summer means that our outdoor games lessons are all about cricket, and we are really enjoying learning to bowl, bat and field.
The Year 2 team wishes everybody a very enjoyable long weekend!
