Summer Term 2nd Half

Class 1 and 2 have had wonderful final half term on our topic ‘What an Adventure!’ We are very proud of how the children have built upon their knowledge and continue to impress us with their abilities to learn new skills and participate in new challenges.

Our half term began with the discovery of a mysterious satchel! The children investigated further and discovered that the satchel was from the story ‘The way back home’ by Oliver Jeffers. The children learned this finding story through “Talk for Writing” so that they could then retell and then innovate using their own ideas. We then moved on to another story by Oliver Jeffers called ‘How to catch a star.’ We used this as inspiration to help create a set of instructions where we focused on bossy verbs, and joining two ideas together using ‘and’/ ‘with.’ All the children then had a go at writing these instructions. The progress made by every single child is so clear to see; it has been a joy to read back their writing.

In maths, we consolidated our knowledge of the composition of numbers to 10, with regular subitising and grouping. We have been regularly practising one more and one less, as well as looking at doubling numbers and recalling those facts. This half term there has been a big focus on recording our maths learning, by drawing and writing number sentences on whiteboards, as well as practising number formation, to help prepare the children for Year One. Children have learned new vocabulary in maths related to weight and capacity and learned about what these words mean through real, hands on activities, as well as exploring and using shape and pattern in the environment.

In Music, we have been learning the Big Bear Funk using the Charanga music scheme, where children have had the opportunity to listen to and appraise a wide variety of musical genres from throughout the decades. Our music lessons also help children to develop their rhythm, pitch and understanding of musical concepts.

In Art, the children have used a marbling technique to help create a realistic effect of the surface of different planets for our space paintings.

The children have really been enjoying reading in class together during choosing time, as well as role-play in the outdoor area, where children have dressed up as astronauts following our learning about real life astronauts and their adventures! The hot weather has also inspired a surge in water and sand based activities in the outside area, where children have experimented with containers, pipes and ramps to transport different vehicles and balls, consolidating their capacity knowledge in maths, as well as this half term’s P.E learning which has been ball skills.

Our trip to Barker’s Park towards the end of the half-term became a joyous celebration of this half term’s topic with a wide variety of exciting activities for the children to take part in, such as stamp rockets, parachutes, kites, paper aeroplane modelling and face painting!

It has truly been a delight to see the children progress over this final half term and to grow in confidence. We wish them all every success as they embark upon the next part of their learning journey in Year 1!

Summer Term 1st Half.

Class 1 and 2 have had another wonderful half term on our topic ‘Flora and Fauna! We are very proud of how the children have developed their skills and continue to impress us with their abilities to learn new things and grow in confidence.

Our half term began with an exciting trip to Old Moor to look at minibeasts. The children enjoyed taking part in pond dipping activities, identifying pond creatures and exploring the RSPB area searching for insects and enjoying the natural environment looking for life. They were a pleasure to take and relished the experience of being outside all day!

This half term the children have looked closely at seeds in flowers and fruit linked to our maths learning. We have grown our own sunflower by taking part in a whole school Sunflower Challenge to see who can grow the biggest sunflower! Children have mastered many gardening skills to ensure they know what their plant needs to grow and enjoyed using maths to work out how many seeds each child will have by sharing the number of seeds in each packet. They enjoyed observing how the sunflowers grew using mathematical reasoning and problem solving and were all keen to water their plants!

Over the half term we have read a variety of books to the children linked to our topic. One of the children’s favourites was The Bad-Tempered Ladybird. The children took part in Talk for Writing to learn key facts about a ladybird. We were incredibly proud of what they found out and remembered! The children then learned new facts about snails and innovated their Talk for Writing facts on ladybirds to snails using sticky notes and pictures. We were blown away with their knowledge!

We have also had the opportunity to have more visitors in school. We learned all about David Attenborough and the importance of taking care of the world around us. One of David’s friends came into school to look at the children’s learning in an assembly. He was very impressed with what the children knew about ladybirds!

Also, children have enjoyed looking after real ladybirds in the classroom and learning all about the ladybird life cycle. They were amazed by how they transformed so much so that the children took an extra keen interest in the minibeasts outside our classroom and cared for them by making sure they had enough food and not to harm them. From our lovely ladybird work children produced some wonderful art work using paint and DT work using paper plates to create their very own ladybirds and snails using paper plates and metallic pastels for a swirl pattern. They also enjoyed creating their own minibeasts using clay and then painted them once dried. The clay work was very effective and life like!

In Music the children have enjoyed learning nursery rhymes and performing them in groups and as solos. We have had some wonderful performances in class and on the stage outside! In particular the children enjoyed singing Incy Wincy Spider and Baa Baa Black Sheep. They were taught how to use body percussion to tap the beat and rhythm and also started to grow in confidence using the percussion instruments and glockenspiel!

All PE lessons centred around minibeasts and the children enjoyed imagining that they were minibeasts themselves and thought with care about how they would move their bodies in different ways and to music using the imoves programme.

Outside the children have absolutely loved exploring the mud kitchen and making mud pies! They have used loose parts to make their own vehicles, buildings and walk ways and practiced balancing skills on the trim trail. A favourite has been the role play area where the children have imagined that they work at Old Moor in the gift shop, café and the Nature Reserve looking for birds using maps and binoculars.

In class we continue to use our new phonics programme called Little Wandle. The children have revisited their digraphs and trigraphs daily from previous half terms and new longer words to segment and chunk in order to learn to read. Children have continued to make progress and can read tricky words with much more confidence and learn a sentence to write independently on their whiteboards remembering capital letters, finger spaces and full stops including question marks and exclamation marks. In addition to this,

children continue to take home a phonics book every week and a library book to share with a grown-up. If children read three or more times each week they receive a stamp in their diary and the more stamps they receive the more book prizes they can choose!

Overall, the children have had another brilliant half term and continue to impress us with their concentration and memory recall of what has been taught over the whole year! We can’t wait to see what children achieve next half term in our final half term of the year!