9th Jan '26
Happy New Year to you all! Welcome back, we hope you all had a lovely Christmas. Despite it being a very chilly start to the term, the children have enjoyed seeing all their friends again and playing with each other.
The first week back has been very busy with lots of learning going on. Year 2 have been introduced the story "Lila and the Secret of Rain" by David Conway. On Monday, they predicted what the story would be about. They looked at clues on the front cover and listened to the blurb. They decided that the story would be set in a hot place, possibly Africa or Australia.
We found out about some new words and what they meant for example, weeping, a well, awash and scorching. The children then listened to the story and heard how some of these words were used. The children then wrote about their favourite parts and gave reasons for why they liked a certain part using the word "because". They were very good at remembering how to spell this word - "big elephants can always understand little elephants". In the picture below, the children worked in groups to try and match some words with their meanings before we found out what they meant. Were their any clues in the words?
In maths, Year 1 have been working very hard. They have had a focus on counting within 20, forwards and backwards. They have also developed their understanding of the number "10". Next week will see them developing their understanding of 11, 12 and 13.
Year 2 have been developing their understanding of subtraction. They have been thinking about subtracting across a ten using numbers up to 20. For example 14 - 6. They would subtract 4 to get back to 10 and then take away 2 more. The steps of subtracting 4 and then 2, means that they have then subtracted 6.
They have also thought about using facts that they know. If they know 10 - 4, they know 20 - 4, 30 - 4, 40 - 4 etc. Please keep going over the pairs of numbers that make 10 - both addition and subtraction facts. These facts are so important. If your child just knows the pairs of numbers, it makes using mental strategies much easier.
In phonics, Year 2 have been finding out about alternative spellings for "n". They have come across "gn" and "kn". We have looked at words such as gnome, gnaw, knobbly and knight.
In science we have started our new topic "Animals including humans". We will be learning about basic needs of animals including humans and about keeping healthy. This week we talked about animals and their babies. The children were introduced to the word "offspring". The children looked at lots of pictures of adult animals and their offspring. They then had to sort the pair of animals into "Offspring looks like its adult" or "Offspring doesn't look like its adult". The mammals tended to look more similar to each other, the same body parts etc. However, with a frog which is an amphibian, the tadpole looks very different to the adult frog.
In art, Year 1 and Year 2 have been learning about shading with a pencil. They have created different shades of colour by putting different amounts of pressure on their pencil. If they pushed down hard on their pencil, they got a darker shade. If they pushed down lightly, they got a lighter shade.
Who knew that a simple pencil could create so many different shades of one colour!
On Thursday it was time to start our new Geography topic and this term we were learning all about contrasting localities, but what localities were we going to comparing?
For our Kingfishers we had already had a sneaky peak at the country that we'd be comparing to our very own country through our Literacy lessons this week!
The countries we would be comparing were England and Kenya!
However for today we were staying closer to home and starting by ensuring that we had secure knowledge of the countries that made up the United Kingdom but also their capital cities! As we explored the countries, we were blown away by how many Kingfishers and Robins knew the 4 countries and recognised what made a city in fact a city!
We then began discussing what capital cities we were familiar with, the main one that most children knew was of course.....
London!
As we travelled across the United Kingdom we soon learnt the further three capital cities and soon it was time to put these onto our maps!
It was soon time for PE and due to the frightfully cold weather we used our hall this week for our first session of Tag Rugby, which is always a favourite sport of ours to learn!
This week we focused on our footwork skills and attempting to dodge the other players as they tried to grab our tags from us. For this week we used a sumo square and worked in a group of 3, there was 1 safe spot in the middle, which we could only stand on for 5 seconds, the rest of the time we had to move around inside the square attempting to avoid our opponents taking our tags, who would be the last person with a tag on!
What a great start to our Tag Rugby!
We could hardly believe we had reached Friday and despite there being no snow, it was certainly still very cold! Kingfishers and Robins had been working extremely hard all week and they had a wonderful end to the week with some great discussions within RE around why we read Bible stories and what are Bible stories trying to teach us. It was also wonderful to hear how many Bible stories they can remember, from Jonah and the whale to Noah's Ark, The creation story to The Good Samaritan, The Nativity story to Daniel and the lions den!
Wow, what a lot of Bible stories!
This half term we will be exploring the following question in RE and exploring more stories together!
To finish the week Kingfishers and Robins loved working in pairs within Jigsaw to discuss their similarities! They thought really hard about how they were similar, discussion not only what they looked like but also what they had in common, from favourite films, colours, games they liked to play and even food they liked to eat!
Do we have to like the same things to be friends?
