I don’t know about you but I always love this time of year, I love the warm September / October days, I love seeing the leaves changing colour and I love everything that is Harvest.
This week…..
We celebrated our Harvest Festival in school and what a celebration it was! We celebrated the fruits of our support globally, closer to home - Newbury, as well as celebrating, quite literally, our ‘home grown’ school efforts…….
We discussed our support of our chosen global charity Christian Aid and how the money we raised will go towards helping buy fruit trees and cocoa saplings. Children were presented with certificates, trophies, rosettes etc which had been awarded to them and their families in the recent Newbury and District Agricultural Society Ploughing Match and finally, each class contributed to the festival by performing their class item and were treated to a Harvest feast of food grown from our own vegetable garden.
certificates……
Leaves are Falling poetry recital by Robins class……
rosettes…….
the taste of Harvest
Every morning we have a focussed phonics and maths session led by an adult as well as our continuous ‘free flow’ activities where children lead their own learning and follow their own ideas. It is during these free flow moments that some of the most exciting learning takes place.
Every day the children get to use and expand their imaginations and this week we saw it in abundance, the writing wall was being used creatively, a map was drawn along with a little bird and the children made up a story about a bird who could not fly and had to walk all the way to bird school! The junk modelling table was a hub of imagination with all manner of creations and models being designed, cut, measured, decorated – there was no hint of less is more. The building blocks became a city and the dinosaurs were entering the city and a wall needed to be built in time to keep the dinosaurs out and protect the people! As parents, you have often commented to us that you would love to be a fly on the wall and see and hear what happens in the classroom, I hope these pages give you some idea of the most wondeful learning that happens!
Another conversation I heard this week made me smile. We were fortunate enough to have a visit from the Newbury Astronomical Society on Tuesday, everyone had a turn at looking through the powerful telescope – some said they could not see much but some had a rather imaginative experience… “I saw the moon – me too, and I did…….well I saw loads of aliens, me too and I did…… one of the aliens waved at me, and me, and me…….well one of them has been to my house (all went quiet) ….after a few second someone said - is it home time yet?” Normality was restored but imagination remains a most wonderful tool.
This week we have also been on a leaf hunt around the school grounds, had more wonderful show and tell moments, learnt about Harriett Tubman as part of our Black History Month, chose a book from the school library to take home for the week and received our first set of reading books! Thank you to all of you who were able to attend our first phonics workshop – we are looking forward to getting our reading off to a great start! Just a reminder that please do ask us any questions. You may also find the video below useful too.
Next week…….
We will be consolidating all our phonics sounds learnt so far – s, a, t, i, p, n, orally blending and segmenting words using these sounds, we will continue with our sorting, matching and comparing amounts in Maths, visit Wantage Museum, participate in Pantomimus (Tuesday) Show and Tell (Thursday), change our library books (Thursday) and just incase you needed a reminder – we need to fit all this into four days as Friday is an INSET day and therefore no children will be in school.
Have a wonderful weekend and see you all on Monday.