Foundation 2 – Summer 1.

Class 1 and 2 have had another wonderful half term on our topic ‘Creepy Critters! 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. 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. We were blown away with their knowledge!

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 clay to create their own mini beasts. The clay work was very effective and life like!

In Music the children have enjoyed taking part in our Mini Melody sessions.

They have been taught the meaning of the words forte(loud) and piano(quiet) and enjoyed singing new songs loudly and quietly. The children were taught how to use body percussion to tap the beat and rhythm and also started to grow in confidence using the percussion instruments. 

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!