21st Nov '25
Goodness me, where have these past three weeks gone? We can't believe it is almost December. We are definitely "Living Life In All Its Fullness". The week started off with a nice surprise for the children in Year 1 and Year 2. This term for P.E. on a Monday we have a specialist P.E. teacher in from Park House. He will be introducing the children to different sports each week up until Christmas. This week was golf. The children learnt how to hold a golf club correctly and hit a ball aiming towards a target. They had great fun!
In Literacy Year 2 wrote their own poems based on "Woolly Saucepan" by Michael Rosen. They had some great ideas. Once they had written their poems, many children wanted to read their poem to the rest of the class. They were lovely to hear. The confidence of each child being a poet was lovely to see!
In maths this week Year 2 were focussing on adding and subtracting one digit numbers to and from a two digit number. The children are getting very good at counting on and counting back. They also know that they can use a number line, a 100 square, base 10 or draw the problem to help work out the answer.
Year 1 have continued thinking about part, part whole models. This is where the two parts make the whole. They then looked at a bar model to see how the parts and whole were represented on this. The top bar is the whole and the bar underneath is split into 2 parts of different sizes. Each of these parts has a number in it. For example, if 10 is the whole (the bar on top) and 7 and 3 are parts (the bar underneath), 7 is the bigger part and 3 is the smaller part of the bar underneath the bar containing the whole.
In Phonics, Year 1 have continued with their sentence dictation using all the sounds they have learnt so far and have been spelling the majority of words correctly - nobody got caught out with the spelling of phone this week - they certainly all knew that 'ph' makes the 'f' sound.
Next week, some of the words that might (they certainly will) crop up in Phonics are :-
Monday - Steve, Japanese (split e rule and capital letters)
Tuesday - time to shine (split e rule again, whereby the e on the end turns the vowel into its name not its sound)
Wednesday - whip, white (wh)
Thursday - their (tricky word) way (ay endings)
Friday - said (tricky word), alphabet (ph) phone (ph again).
Thank you to those who are supporting this learning at home, its really having an impact as the children are feeling really confident when writing these sentences independently.
In science this week we have been thinking about the words flexible and rigid to describe properties of materials. The children sorted some objects. Can you use these words at home when talking about objects with your children?
This week, the children have also made decorations for the village Christmas tree. We though about birds that we see in our local area. They then used oil pastels to colour on a wooden disk to make their bird. Don't they look lovely!
The cold weather has certainly been settling in this week and as the week continued we most certainly needed not only our coats but our hats and gloves to go with them too! These definitely came in handy during our PE lesson this week, which we can all safely say we found a little bit chilly!
As we continued to practice our attack, shoot and defend skills, this week we started off by a 'raid the base' game, which was lots of fun, as we had to work together as a team to take the tags from each others bases! It was quite tricky though as everyone was moving so fast and we had to remember that we weren't allowed to take a tag when someone was inside their own base, oh yeah and we couldn't take tags off our own team...whoops!
I can't say we were warmed up but we were eager and ready for our next activity! This time we were working in groups of 3 and it was both a game of speed and listening game!
As one person gave us instructions- heads, shoulders, knees, heads, ears, shoulders etc etc they would then suddenly saying CONE! and we would need to touch the cone, the first one to do it would win!
Despite the chilly conditions Year 1 and Year 2 had a great PE lesson!
In Kingfishers we enjoyed listening to Michael Rosen poems so much last week that it inspired us to continued it within our shared reading sessions this week, so on Thursday......
As we listen to Michael Rosen read the poem as only Michael Rosen can, the poem was once again brought to life! Kingfishers were copying the actions, the sounds and were imagining they were there with Michael, picking up the crumbs of the chocolate cake before carefully slicing it and then gobbling it all up!
We then learnt our new technical word of the week.....
onomatopoeia
Simply put onomatopoeia refers to words that sound like the noise they represent, for example 'mmmm' or snip' and chocolate is full of them! We had lots of fun reading through the beginning of the poem together and finding all the examples of onomatopoeia!
We can't wait to continue exploring chocolate cake next week!
In History this week we were extremely lucky to receive some actual Victorian artefacts from the West Berkshire Museum and both Year 1 and Year 2 extremely enjoyed spending time exploring what was inside our very special Victorian loan box! Today we explored our first two items, let's have a lot what we found......
We also got the chance to look at a Christmas card from Victorian times!
It's that time of year when we are busy preparing for our Christmas Nativity as today you're children will be coming home a letter explaining what their part is in the Nativity, information on their costume and if they have any lines that we need them to learn. If you do have any questions about the Nativity please do not hesitate to come and ask one of the team who will be more than happy to help you!