Headteacher: Anna Moss

10.11.23

Hello Red Class Families,

Welcome back to the Friday Fanfare and our new topic, ‘Best Books’. This week, we shared our new class story, ‘The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon’. The book is based on the nursery rhyme, ‘Hey, Diddle, Diddle’. With this in mind, we spent some time role playing the rhyme and finding out why the dish ran away with the spoon.

We’ve also been talking about our Big Blackwell Book Festival. The children have decided that they would like to dress as their favourite book character during the event and they would like to invite their families into school to share their ‘Best Book’ (learning journey) and their favourite story. Talking of favourite stories, we would like the children to bring in one book from home on Monday, 13^th November. We’re planning to make a Best Books display using the children’s favourite stories, poems and non-fiction books from home.

In Phonics, we concentrated on ‘ll’, ‘ss’, ‘ff’ and ‘j’. We call two letters making one sound a digraph. Try spotting digraphs in your reading books e.g. hill, puff, miss. Every day we read a challenge phrase. First, we sound talk and blend the words and then we read the words automatically. Try to do this in your reading at home to help with your pace and fluency.

In Maths, we used a range of equipment to make numbers to 10. We also played the arrangement game. We call a style e.g. dice style and the children arrange their counters as quickly as possible to match the style. Playing games like this will help the children to quickly recognise numbers and develop number sense. We count every day too, counting on and back from different starting numbers.

Every Friday, we attend a celebration assembly where two children from each class receive a gold award certificate. During the week, we look for skills needed to be a good learner: resilience, problem solving, co-operation, communication and independence. Congratulations to our gold award winners so far. Who will it be next week?

In Geography (Understanding of the World), we met Blackwell Bear who will be exploring the world with Red Class. Blackwell Bear showed us the world map and we found our country and our continent. Blackwell Bear asked where the children wanted to visit and then we used Google Earth to fly around the world to France, Portugal, Cyprus, USA and Australia.

To find out about Remembrance Day, we watched a short film and we all fell silent to remember. We looked at poppies and thought about why we wear them at this time of year.

Wishing you all a lovely weekend with plenty of play, rest and time to remember.

Best wishes,

Mrs Webb and Team Red Class