Dinosaur footprints
In the last week of half term, children continued to enjoy learning about dinosaurs.
We drew giant dinosaur footprints to jump/hop between outside and we made dinosaur footprints in paint and playdough.
Children loved using rollers to paint large dinosaurs from the story we’ve been reading, Dinosaur Roar. We talked about the features of the dinosaurs; some had long necks and tails and others had spikes and lumpy skin. When we were painting them, children noticed that some of the colours changed when they mixed together. Look out for our giant dinosaurs in the Sunshine Room, soon!
We hope that you all have a lovely half term break and look forward to seeing you on Monday 20 February.
Great Fairies of the World
Great Fairies of the World
This week, we’ve been reading Great Fairies of the World by Stephanie Moss. This rhyming story features fairy characters that have jobs that help others; architect fairy, doctor fairy and engineer fairy, to name just a few! We’ve been discussing how the author uses the most interesting descriptions/words that they can think of. We’ve been describing images and making words more adventurous. This has helped develop our oracy skills and helped us in our writing too.
In our writing, we’ve created our own fairy characters and written about the jobs that they do.
In provision, we’ve linked our fiction reading to non-fiction information about real-life heroes in the community.
We’ve also used the fairy theme in our classroom challenges.
Living and learning: Internet Safety
This week’s living and learning statement is: I know that people should treat others respectfully when online.
This has coincided with Safer Internet Day (Tuesday 7 February)
When asked what being ‘online’ means and what you can do online, the children said:
It’s something on your phone- Sonny…
Or your iPad- Harry…
Or your tablet- Orlah…
Or your computer- Daniel
You can buy things on the phone- Skyla
You can send money to people- Grace
On iPads you can call someone- Mollie
Alexa!-Bella
We spoke about some important uses for the internet, such as the way we use it for our learning- our eBooks. We discussed how we should limit our time online to keep our body and brain healthy and why we shouldn’t use electronic devices close to bed time.
In Reception, we’ve used the story The Adventures of Smartie the Penguin to talk about internet safety. Smartie receives a tablet for his birthday but encounters some problems such as adverts, websites that are too old for him and people saying unkind things online, during a game. He makes the right decisions and always asks Mummy and Daddy for help. There is a memorable song throughout the story:
before you tap and click… you need to stop and think… and TELL someone!
Ask your child what they can remember about keeping safe online.
Maths: Length and height
We’ve been developing our understanding of how to compare and measure length and height. We’ve been ordering by length and comparing the length of objects; saying which are shorter, longer, the shortest, the longest, the same (equal). We’ve been measuring objects using non-standard forms of measurement. We measured the length of our bodies using different objects.
We built towers to compare height; saying which are taller, shorter and equal. We’ve ordered ourselves by height and have estimated how many bricks tall we are.
Phonics
It’s assessment week in phonics. We’ve been reviewing and revisiting our Spring 1 learning. Your child will have come home with a grapheme mat and a tricky word mat. If any sounds are highlighted on the grapheme mat, these are those that your child is not yet secure on. Please keep practising these at home.
Tricky words can be just that-tricky! In Little Wandle phase 3, we learnt lots of new words. The children will continue to learn new tricky words fairly rapidly over the Spring 2 and Summer terms. We’ve previously introduced a few fun games you can play at home to practice tricky words. Here’s another you could try!
Musical tricky words
- Write the tricky words on individual pieces of paper, lay them out on the floor
- Play your child’s favourite song for them to dance around to
- When the music stops, your child should pick a word to quickly run to and stand on
- Your child reads the word they have landed on
- Remove that word and repeat until there are no words left!
Focus Artist: Yayoi Kusama
Over the last few weeks we’ve been exploring the art of Yayoi Kusama. We’ve been colour mixing and using the paint to make dot pictures, drawn spots onto pumpkin pictures and decorated a vegetable using playdough spots. We’ve also made our own artwork, inspired by the artist.
Poetry Picnic
Each week we will be learning a new poem. We will recite this poem each day. By saying the poem out loud, we can focus on the sounds and rhythm of each word or line. We talk to the children about how this can help us become better readers. This week’s poem is Furry, furry squirrel
We talk about how a poem sometimes has rhyming words and sometimes doesn’t. Can your child tell you the rhyming words in this week’s poem? We also talk about how a poem can have a fast rhythm or a slow rhythm. Can your child re-tell this week’s poem to you?
Fiddly fingers stay and play
Wow! Another fantastically busy stay and play last Friday. Thank you to parents and carers who were able to attend. The focus was on the development of fine motor skills and we aimed to demonstrate a range of activities that can be easily replicated at home. We hope you all enjoyed our Fiddly Fingers session!
Half-term sponsored maths challenge
Your child has brought home a tens-frame sponsored challenge, for over half-term. All sponsorship money will go towards classroom resources and this year’s chosen charity- Cancer Research UK.
Reminders
SWIMMING DATES- Spring 2
Rainbow Class- 22 Feb, 8 Mar, 22 Mar
Sunshine Class- 1 Mar, 15 Mar, 29 Mar
These dates are also stuck to your child’s classroom door or window to view whenever needed.
When not swimming, this half term’s PE focus will be developing ball skills and counter balancing in pairs.
World Book Day 2023: Stay and Read – Thursday 02 March Time and further details to follow.
Happy half term! Enjoy the break and we’ll see you again on Monday 20 February.
Maths – division
This week in 2C we have been practicing dividing by 2, 5 and 10. We have had lots of practice sharing cubes and other classroom objects into equal groups. We have also been practicing different equations on our whiteboards by grouping.
Help at home by practicing dividing objects into equal groups!
Living and Learning : Safer Internet Day
We worked really hard on Safer Internet Day to learn about how to stay safe online. We wrote about what we can do to stay safe online and read a story, Chicken Clicking, to help us understand this too.
Help at home by making sure your children know your rules about going on the internet at home.
Living and Learning – Internet Safety
Our theme in Living and Learning for Weeks 5 and 6 of term is being safe online.
Last week, we had a visitor from D:Side come to talk to us about making good choices online to keep ourselves safe, including why games are given certain age ratings and what things might be appropriate for us to see, as well as understanding that people might not be who they say they are online and the importance of only speaking to people we know.
This week, for Safer Internet Day (07.02), we learnt about fake news and how to spot it. We considered which sources are trustworthy and which aren’t. We also talked about what we mean by ‘personal data’, the importance of keeping it private, and how our data can be used by others.
Help at home by discussing these themes with your child and the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘personal data’. 
Class 5/6A News
What a busy week it has been in Class 5/6A this week. The half-term holiday is on the horizon and our pupils will be ready for their break after working so hard all week. Let’s see what they’ve been getting up to.
Year 6 pupils have had SATS exam practice this week across Maths, Spelling and Grammar. The results at this stage provide an indication as to how on track our pupils are to reaching Age Related Expectations (AREs) and beyond, and identify areas we can support them to help achieve these. Help at home: Continue supporting your child at home by working with them on learning of spellings, and ensuring they access Times Table Rockstars on a daily basis for around 10-15 minutes.
Year 5 Maths have come to the end of their work on multiplication, looking at 3-digit by 2-digit, and 4-digit by 2-digit calculations. Pupils have worked very hard this week to cement their understanding of how to tackle such questions. In Reading, we have looked at our class novel, The Nowhere Emporium, and explored how the author, Ross Mackenzie, builds up excitement through descriptive and emotive language in the prologue to help entice the reader to continue further into the book.
Towards the end of the week in Writing we finished the first draft of persuasive letters to Graham Stuart, UK Minister for Climate, in getting him and parliament to do more to combat climate change. We will be publishing these next week with a view to sending these onto Graham. Here’s hoping our superb writing can inspire Mr. Stuart to put our plans into action.
Finally, a huge well done to all of our certificate winners today. It has been lovely to see so many of the class nominating each other for a Positive Peer award, recognising ways that they make each other’s day happier and healthier in school.
I look forward to seeing you all at Parent’s Evening next week!
Mr. Robson
Living and Learning – Internet Safety
Our focus in Living and Learning at the moment is all about recognising how we can stay safe online. Class 5/6A were joined this week by Hazel from d:side, who are an education programme aimed at providing young people with the tools they need to skilfully manage sensitive situations with peers.
Hazel spoke to our group about the various forms of social media that exist, what people should be using these for, and how to make your profile safe and secure. We had a look at what we can do to ensure we only interact online with people we know and trust, spot suspicious profiles, and watched a video about the dangers of not posting securely online.
The pupils were full of good tips for how to recognise genuine profiles and connection requests, knew who to speak to if they were subjected to anything negative online, and understood age-appropriate content.
Help at home by talking to your child about how they use the internet at home, and how they can keep themselves safe. 
Supertato!
It has been another fun week exploring ‘Supertato’ by Sue Hendra & Paul Linnet. We have been creating WANTED posters for Evil Pea. The children were able to write sentences using tricky words and known phonics.
Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog (it’s along the play bar) and turn off auto play – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip.
Word of the week
Every week, we look at a new adventurous word. We call this our ‘word of the week’. This week our word of the week was ‘villain’ – linked to the story ‘Supertato’. We looked at the definition. ‘A villain is the bad guy.’, drew pictures to represent villain’s and used the word villain in our everyday speech.
Evil Pea is a villain because he is mean to others.
A villain is a baddy!
I don’t like villains!
Maths
This week, the children have been exploring weight. We have focused on using mathematical vocabulary to compare different items.
heavy heavier heaviest
light lighter lightest
Phonics
This week, the children have been reading longer words. We use the chunking method to read words with more that one syllable. We have also spotted words containing double letters (e.g. rabbit) – these are diagraphs too!
Ask your child to chunk and read these words.
sunset chicken carpet carrot
Poetry Picnic
Each week, we will be learning a new poem. We will recite this poem each day. By saying the poem out loud we can focus on the sounds and rhythm of each word or line. We talk to the children about how this can help us become better readers. This week’s poem is Mrs Bluebird
We talk about how a poem sometimes has rhyming words and sometimes doesn’t. Can your child tell you the rhyming words in this week’s poem? We also talk about how a poem can have a fast rhythm or a slow rhythm. Can your child re-tell this weeks poem to you?
Reminders
Early writing presentation – Don’t forget to watch the short presentation by Mrs Payne, one of our Sphere Federation Reception teachers. It has some ideas of things that you can try at home to support your child’s learning.
Dinosaur Roar
We’ve enjoyed listening to ‘Dinosaur Roar‘ during our story times in Nursery this week. We talked about the different parts of a book, including the front and back cover, the title and blurb. As we read the story, we identified the words on the page and followed them with our finger as we read from left to right.
Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog (it’s along the play bar) and turn off auto play – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip.
Dinosaur roar, dinosaur squeak. Dinosaur fierce, dinosaur meek. Dinosaur fast, dinosaur slow… We looked at the illustrations and talked about the meaning of the different words in the story. Children loved working together to add lumps, spikes and claws to a giant dinosaur.
In our maths area, children have been counting and sorting dinosaurs by type and colour.
We’re also learning about the number two. We found a domino that had one spot on one end, and one spot on the other. When we looked at the spots together, there were two. Children knew that they had 2 eyes, 2 ears and 2 feet. We jumped twice and counted two claps. Have a look at home – What can you find two of? You might see two wheels on your bike or 2 eggs left in the box. Can you spot any number twos on doors or number plates?
In the sensory area, we loved playing with the slime in our dinosaur swamp! Ergh.. it’s very sticky!
Outside, we talked about the changes in the weather. It was very, very windy on Wednesday and we could hear it blowing through the branches in the trees. Children enjoyed holding onto a piece of fabric to feel, and see it blowing in the wind.
Maths frame multiplication check
Today, our Y4 children have been practising their times tables using Mathsframe multiplication check. They all did really well! Thank you for all your hard work and effort helping them at home.
It’s good practice to use this version (rather than TTRS) as it resembles the test they will take in the summer.
If you would like extra practice with your child then you can find the website here.