Chaddleworth St. Andrew’s & Shefford

We are so busy living life in all its fullness - February is proving to be a jam packed month full of rich experiences.

This week we experienced Candlemass and Number Day, house meetings, visitors and sandwich making!

We started the week with our usual cvc writing, focussing on our letter formation and independent learning. We have been so impressed with the progress that the Robins are making, we sometimes have to remind ourselves that they are only four years old, they demonstrate such maturity and eagerness to their learning.

Some of our Governors visited us this week to "see all our learning in action" as part of their monitoring visits - I think they thoroughly enjoyed their time in Robins - we were able to demonstrate our Write Dance learning, focussing on our control of the pen!

On Wednesday morning we headed to the Church for our Candlemass service. Robins explained why we light candles in our daily worship "because Jesus is the light of the world" and to represent "the Father, Son and Holy Spirit." The "awe and wonder" moment came when everyone held a lit candle and the lights went out......

Having walked to and from the Church we had worked up quite an appetite. Wednesday afternoon we were sandwich making. It's always fascinating to watch the children's independence - up they got, collected their equipment - chopping board, plate, spreading knife and cutting knife. They sensibly chose their filling, either, ham, cheese or tuna topped with cucumber or tomato. They spread, cut and chopped....and of course ate and washed up. I don't think I need to say anything further, these pictures say it all.

Next week - pancakes!

In Art, following on from last week where the children learnt how to draw a detailed face, this week they thought about the rest of the body. So, this week they drew a whole person! They were introduced to the French artist, Edgar Degas who enjoyed painting people. The children had a look at some of his paintings.

In PSED, we continued our topic "Dreams and goals". This week Mrs Harris set a goal for the children to build a tall tower using the magnetic shapes. We started off well but then some shapes were added which made it difficult to make the tower taller - these were triangles. We talked about not giving up and we thought about ways how we could still reach our goal. They children decided if we made the bottom of the tower wider, we could then build the tower up higher. Great problem solving Reception!

In Maths the children were introduced to the concept of time. We read the story "Peace at Last" by Jill Murphy and talked about day time and night time. We then talked about different items that can tell us what time it is - clocks and watches etc. The children were then introduced to the concept of "one minute" using the sand timer. We talked about there being lots and lots of minutes in a day. The children then carried out some one-minute challenges. How many beads could they thread, how tall a tower could they build? The children really enjoyed challenging themselves.

And of course, this was the perfect build up to Friday - Number day.

In the morning, we played lots of games involving lots of numbers and counting.

In the afternoon, we came together in our Houses for more Maths games - we had whole house Bingo followed by card games, Uno, Snakes and Ladders, Jenga and so many more - there are elements of Maths in everything we do!