Spring Term: Week 8
The children celebrated World Book Day on Thursday but have been thinking about books all week! On Monday, they asked themselves, “Why do we have books? Are they all the same? How are they different? What was their favourite book and why? What do books bring us?” The general consensus is that we love books and gain so much from them, from learning how to look after your pet hamster to having an adventure in outer space.
Due to some children still being at home, whilst we held some World Book Day activities this week, we are holding further activities and the dressing up day next Thursday. Double the excitement!
Year 2 children have been discovering facts about the continents of the world. They also learned of the four countries in the United Kingdom and their corresponding capital cities. The children learnt that the Titanic was built in Belfast (and they had so many questions about the magnificent ship). The geography lessons turned into an interesting history session and all children were fascinated by the grand ship and its unfortunate fate.
Year 1 have enjoyed a variety of different stories and so enjoyed the build up to World Book Day, that it became Book Week! The children shared their favourite tales and thoroughly enjoyed their drama workshop on Teams with the story of the Gingerbread Man. They worked on their new phonic trigraph sound ‘igh’ and loved making and playing a game with their trigraph dice. All our subjects have taken on a Book Day theme, from cracking the code in maths to creating puppets and puppet theatre for drama. We have also been counting down the days until we are all back in class together.
Reception has been super creative this week in more ways than one. The children have been writing independently, using their phonic knowledge to write words which match their spoken sounds. They have also made their own shoe, following in the footsteps of the elves in the Elves and the Shoemaker story and they have been whittling in the forest! In maths they have been looking at the conservation of number and what numbers when added together make 5.
The Chaffinch and Kingfisher children have been looking at change and growth. They have talked about growing their own beanstalk and the children had to think about the best conditions for seeds to grow. All the children have planted their own beanstalks this week and they will measure them regularly to see how tall they grow. Wondering about the height of the beanstalk has generated an interest in measuring and the children have been using rulers and tape measures to see how tall everything is. They used a wooden ruler to see who in Kingfishers was the tallest and shortest.
In Forest School this week the Nightingale children started their session by saying, ‘Shall we go exploring.’? Miss Dadswell suggested they might like to do some tree rubbings and the children had tremendous fun looking for logs and trees with interesting textures and patterns to create some beautiful pictures. During their daily chat about the weather on Wednesday, the children showed their developing skills of observation by noticing a big change, exclaiming ‘It’s foggy’.
With the sun shining, the children in Robin class helped Mrs Guy remove soil and weeds in the garden. They expressed their creativity through painting with various tools and in circle time they have been learning the days of the week in French!
Spring is about to come and the Sparrow class enjoyed the nice weather in the garden. They had a lovely picnic at snack time and played nicely on the bikes and climbed up and down on the slide.
We are all so looking forward to seeing almost all the children back in school on Monday.
Armelle Wilkinson
Head of Pre-Prep and Nursery
