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Autumn Term: Week 8

We hope you all had a super half term with your children. This next half term promises to be as busy as ever and packed full of exciting activities. It was lovely to welcome the children back on Monday morning; they were all refreshed and raring to go. It was great to hear of their half term ventures.
 
Super Andro’s Learning Power focus this week has been adaptability. The children started by looking at different chameleons and learned about the reasons these animals need to be adaptable. The children then thought about whether they themselves were adaptable. They were quite surprised to realise that even losing teeth leads them to being adaptable. How else can you bite into an apple when you have no front teeth? We talked about how they had all shown amazing adaptability last spring and summer terms due to the lockdown and talked about how the up-coming lockdown may affect their lives. The children then thought about how the Learning Power of adaptability could be used in their school work. They came up with many good suggestions as to how they already do this without thinking. They worked out new strategies and will now make sure they use this Learning Power more effectively. It was super to hear of their successes in the Celebration Assembly later in the week.
 
This week, Year 2 have started their topic on Remembrance Day. They learned of the bravery of the many soldiers in The Great War and how everyone showed great adaptability when their lives changed during the war that was thought to be ‘over by Christmas’. The children have also thought about the similarities and differences that people have and how we should respect and celebrate these.
 
One of the Year 1 phonics lessons this week proved a little more challenging than they anticipated. They were learning the ‘ee’ phoneme, trying to find as many words as they could, only to find that some used ‘ea’ spellings instead! Then one little girl said ‘me’ has the same sound ‘but I’m sure it’s going to be another tricky one!’ In history, their topic this half term is about Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot. They have really enjoyed learning about this. They then looked at onomatopoeic words relating to describing firework displays. They watched a display on the whiteboard to make up for missing the school’s annual display that has sadly had to be cancelled. In the design technology lesson, they made moving pictures using a wheel with a split pin. They worked hard and adapted their picture to ensure the wolf appeared from the place they wanted.

The Reception class have been learning all about the celebration of Bonfire Night. The children have made their own rockets, designed their own fireworks and made sausage and apple pinwheels in cooking. It smelled delicious as they cooked. In maths they have moved on to looking at numbers to twenty. One of the phonics lessons involved the children tasting banana and yogurt, in line with the Jolly Phonics song for ‘y’. They had to decide if it tasted ‘yucky’ or ‘yummy’. The children have been very adaptable this week, as the routine changed slightly to incorporate the start of their Nativity rehearsals. They have lines to learn and actions and songs to remember and have all made a great start.

This week the Chaffinch and Kingfisher classes have been busy getting involved in a variety of exciting activities. The children are learning lots of new skills rapidly and are developing their powers of adaptability. In circle time they told their friends all about what they got up to in the half term holiday and recounted their Halloween celebrations and experiences. They have produced some fantastic fireworks pictures and thoroughly enjoyed watching a video of a large fireworks display. They also started practising their ‘Shine Star Shine’ Nativity songs and joined in with great enthusiasm. 

The Nightingales were very busy and created firework pictures using the paintbrushes to ‘splat’ the paint onto their paper. They all had enormous fun and got quite messy. The children in the Robin class have been learning about Bonfire Night and explored a mixture of different media to create some lovely firework pictures.
 
The children in the Sparrow class also got very messy when using red paint, sponges and their hands to create lovely poppies for Remembrance Day.


 
Another busy week. Super work from everyone.