Friday Fanfare 27.11.20
27.11.20
Hello Red Class Families,
Thank you for attending our teaching and learning workshop. It was lovely to ‘see’ you all and to explain how we support reading, writing and number work at school. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email the office and I’ll call you as soon as possible.
It was the last week of our topic, ‘Tell Me a Story’ and we created a story sack for the Nursery children. In our art lessons, we explored textiles and developed our shaping, joining and dyeing skills. We created animals for our story sack by wrapping and securing wool around a card and later created scenery by dyeing fabric with food colouring. Some children added a story map to the sack or drew a picture of an animal. We even added our role play puppets. We will give the Nursery children their story sack, next week, when we sing together.
On the topic of singing, we’ve started Christmas early! ‘Little Donkey’ and ‘Away in a Manger’ have been filling the classroom and corridors as we prepare for our Christmas play. We’ve even practised animal and star dances too. Just a reminder that we’re not asking for tights and tops this year, so it will be a nice surprise when your little one appears as a fluffy sheep or the donkey!
This week, Miss Barber wanted to say ‘hello’ too. She wanted to let you know that, “During play and explore the children have spent lots of time creating junk models. There have been some amazing rockets and puppets amongst other fantastic creations, which the children have enjoyed making. Our next step is to think about how we can improve our wonderful creations and make changes to them throughout the week”.
We will keep the children’s junk modelling in school, until Friday, so they can evaluate their work and make little changes throughout the week. So, on Fridays expect to see the contents of my recycling bin in your book bag. Sorry! I did try to convince one little boy that his cardboard box, with an assortment of holes, might need a bit of extra work at school. He was very persuasive and said he had the tools for the job at home.
We had a lovely time at Forest School with the children really engaged in their play and explore time.From making lean-to shelters with branches, trust walks, bug hunts and everything in between, it was a lovely morning. It was also a day for nature as we spotted a magpie on the field, robins flying through the site and a squirrel near the park.
In Phonics we practised spelling CVC words with phase 2 letters and sounds and we listened carefully to the sounds in different positions in the word. At home, you could ask your child to spell a word with magnetic letters or letter cards and leave a space for them to fill. So, if the word was bug, you might leave a gap between b and g and ask your child to select the missing grapheme (letter). Don’t worry if your child is finding it hard to discriminate ‘b’ and ‘d’. This is very common at this stage.
In Maths, we used objects to find the difference in subtraction problems. We created subtraction number stories about jungle animals and used a large ten-frame to take away a number of animals. Some children were able to ‘see’ the answer, other children decided to count the animals that remained and some children could recall the answer mentally. We all learn in different ways and your confidence to explain ‘your way’ is getting better every day.
So, after all that learning, we need to rest! Enjoy your weekend together and I’ll see you next week for our ‘Christmas’ topic when you’ll be finding out about the part you’re playing!
Take care,
Mrs Webb, Mrs Hampton, Mrs Dyson, Mrs Flynn and Miss Barber.