We can’t believe that it is the final week before half term, where has the time gone? The children have been fantastic at persevering and tackling challenges with increasing positivity and enthusiasm.
We started the week with a thought provoking worship led by our Wellbeing Champions in Red Kites. This week was Children’s Mental Health week and the Wellbeing Champions encouraged us to think about connection with others and thinking about how we make others feel and how they make us feel.
In Maths this week, Year 1 continued to explore place value within 20, exploring adding within 20, adding two 1-digit numbers together and then using this to recognise what happens when 10 is added to one of those numbers, for example;
4 + 5 = 9
14 + 5 = 19
15 + 4 = 19
Our Reception children focused on understand the language of more than and fewer than to make comparisons between groups of objects. The children are really developing their sight recognition of numbers and showed a good understanding of how we know which one has more than or fewer than the other. They even played a magical shopping bag game, where they got to select items from the bag and then compared the amount they had with their friends!
On Monday afternoon Year 1 continued to explore Aboriginal Art and wow what a fantastic lesson we had! We explore Aboriginal symbols, discussing which ones we could see within the pieces of artwork and learning what they meant. The children then designed their very own boomerang, using Aboriginal symbols to decorate, we even got the chance to listen to some traditional Aboriginal music which the children loved!
Whilst Year One were busy exploring artwork from the other side of the world, Reception became colour explorers, working out how they could make different shades of green. They created beautiful green colour strips, ranging from a very pale green to deep grass green!
In Jigsaw this week we discussed how sometimes we may face challenges because of unkind words that others may say to us and discussed how we can overcome these challenges. With the help of Paws, the children then created their own cats cradle, sharing something kind about one of the other children within Robins whilst still holding on to a piece of the string. Our cats cradle of kindness was created!
“I love playing with them because they always play nicely.”
“They helped me when I was feeling sad.”
With our scientific hats on we continued to explore the world of plants and got a chance to discuss how our bean plants are growing so far. Now despite us forgetting to water them as regularly as we should, some of our beans are beginning to turn into plants and we were able to see the different stages between being a seed, to a seedling and then to a plant! The children loved watching a video of a bean growing, and were able to come out with some fantastic scientific words for our word bank, here are just a few; roots, leaves and stem. The children then created their own life cycle of a bean, labelling so that they could discuss how the bean grows…great work Year One!
In Phonics throughout the week, Reception have been perfecting their letter formation in their phonics books, remembering to sit their letters on the line. Whilst Year 1 were trying out some sentence substitution - substituting one word in their sentence whilst still ensuring the sentence made sense!
After all the Phonics, Maths, Worship, Story Time, Mental Health ideas, Art, PSHE, PE, Yoga, Science, Computers, reading and so much more, I think we all need half term!
Year 1 have some spelling homework to complete (here is the example that we mentioned in their homework pack) as well as their Three Little Pigs story telling and everyone has the Matchbox challenge which they heard all about in a special worship this morning….they went into worship thinking that a matchbox is small and came out inspired as to how many items can actually fit in the box!
