Class News

Toys, ice and shapes.

Children were keen to return to Nursery after the Christmas holidays; some were so excited they came running through the door! We loved hearing about your adventures and seeing lots of the photos that you kindly sent in.

This week, we read ‘Kipper’s Toy Box’ and talked about the different toys that we got for Christmas.  The new Toy Shop role play area was popular and children especially enjoyed navigating the remote controlled cars around a track. It was quite tricky to use the controls to make the cars turn and go straight through the tunnel but the children helped each other and kept trying until they got the cars to the finish line.

Outside, on one of the chillier mornings, we found some ice. Children were really excited and keen to touch it and find out how it got there.

In group times, we learnt about simple 2D shapes. Some children continued their learning outside independently; they spotted some shapes in our outdoor area. Towards the end of the week, we began to make our own shapes, a bit like the ones that we watched on the Mr Maker shape song (CBeebies). We’ll continue learning about shapes next week. Please complete the Home Link shape activity and return it to Nursery.

Fantastic beasts and Y5/6 made them

This week, in our writing lessons, we’ve made up our own Star Wars inspired beasts. After recapping some previous learning earlier in the week (determiners, parenthesis, expanded noun phrases – ask your child to explain each of these terms) we worked in pairs to write a short descriptive paragraph about an animal from a book about Star Wars characters, which was really cool!

Then, we created – using some images from the book as a prompt – our own beasts!

Next week, we’re going to write a non-chronological report based on our beastly creations.

Ask your child about their creature – what could they write about?

Challenge your child by asking them to identify the relative clauses in this news post.

Thursday’s PE blast

What a sporty day we had today!

We had brilliant basketball sessions today with Leeds Becket Basketball Coach. We learned a range of new skills: stance, dribble, pass and bounce.

Learning new skills is sometimes frustrating because we want to be able to do it all straight away. We learned how to be resilient and try our best.

We also had super skipping sessions with Jodi, who showed us many new tricks to take to our play times and PE lessons.                                                                                       

This was fun and in contrast to the basketball skills we also learned today.

We will certainly need a rest tonight.

Well done everybody for trying your best and having a go!

Learning letter sounds – Ssss

This week, our older children have started to learn about the sounds that letters make. We listened to the Jolly Phonics ‘s’ song and learnt the action (weave hand in an s /snake shape and say ‘ssss’).

To begin with, children are learning to recognise the letter  and say the sound.  We learn to say the pure sounds that letters make, so for ‘s’, we say ‘sssssss’ rather than ‘suh’.

Children are learning to hear the initial sounds in words by playing eye-spy type games. Some children may try to write the letter, but at this stage in Nursery, our main focus will be learning to hear the sounds in words. Phonics learning in Foundation 2 will have a greater focus on writing and letter formation.

Science – materials and their properties

We have a started a Science based mini-topic called What’s the matter? We are learning about different materials and their properties. Help at home by talking about what different household objects are made of.

• Why are some chairs wooden but others are plastic or metal?
• Why is the bath plastic but the sink is ceramic in the bathroom but metal in the kitchen?
• Do you have carpet, laminate, wood, lino or tile floors? Why are different floor coverings chosen in different rooms?

Christmas party

We all enjoyed our Christmas party before the holidays. The ‘dance-off’ was brilliant fun!

Science: grouping and comparing materials

Today, in our topic lesson, we progressed our materials (what’s the matter?) learning by testing different every day materials to find out if they are opaque, magnetic and can conduct electricity. We worked scientifically to carry out the investigation, recording our results as we went.

Next, we’ll record our results using a 3 way Venn diagram.

Topic: properties of materials (science)

This afternoon, we started learning about our new mini topic: What’s the matter? In this topic, we’ll be learning lots of new science knowledge as well as progressing our working scientifically skills.

For our first lesson, we focussed on different everyday materials and their properties. We thought about what would happen if everyday objects were made from different materials…

To help keep our conversations focussed and scientific we tried to use key vocabulary:

• transparent
• translucent
• opaque
• rigid
• strong
• conductive
• magnetic

Ask your child if they can explain what each of these terms means!

To show how much we learnt, at the start of the lesson we said everything we knew about a 2p coin (first thoughts). Before repeating this again at the end of our learning – you’ll notice that our second thoughts are much more scientific.

Swimming dates (January-February)

Please see below your child’s swimming dates.

PE – gymnastics

Today in our PE lesson we started to learn about gymnastics. Our learning today was all about jumping. Ask your child if they can tell you, or show you, what our key learning points were.

Can your child name the jumps in the above images? For a challenge, can they tell you something that’s good about the technique and something that could be improved?

Over the next few weeks we’ll progress our learning into balancing, rolling, creating sequences of movements and using apparatus safely.