Nursery Rhyme Week
16th – 20th November 2020
World Nursery Rhyme Week is fast approaching and we are delighted to confirm we will be taking part. The initiative, which was launched in 2013, promotes the importance of nursery rhymes in early childhood development and education with a particular focus on how nursery rhymes boost early language and literacy skills.
We have a number of activities planned throughout the week including: making a cup of tea using little teapots, building a wall for Humpty Dumpty, hopping like the Five Little Speckled Frogs and helping Incy Wincy Spider. We will be doing lots more activities linked to other nursery rhymes!
Singing nursery rhymes is a wonderful activity you can enjoy doing together at home and all of the resources are available for you to download. You can access all of the free resources at: www.worldnurseryrhymeweek.com
Thank you!
Miss Marsden
History topic – The Great Fire of London
We have started a new history topic. Lots of our learning will be linked to The Great Fire of London. We are reading this book to support our learning:
You could search for a video of it on You Tube or there is a slideshow of the story here that you can read with your child at home.
We will be learning about where and how the fire started, why it ended up being so ‘great’ and what happened afterwards. We will also be learning about fire safety.
Help at home by asking your child about what they have learnt about The Great Fire of London so far.
Reading detectives
Many mythical creatures were made up of different animals combined to make one beast. In our reading lessons, we have been using our inference skills to work out which animals were combined to make up these mythical beasts.
First, we listened to and read the description and tried to draw the beast.
The Sphinx was a female monster with the body of a lion, the breast and head of a woman, eagle’s wings and a serpent-headed tail.
Triton was a fish-tailed sea god, the son of Poseidon, king of the seas. He is blowing a conch-shell trumpet. In his other hand, he holds a staff.
Pegasus was an immortal, winged horse which sprang forth from the neck of Medusa.
Then, we matched the images to the description – the monsters were easy to match because the text gave us key information (tail, wings, horse).
The Three Little Pigs
This week, we’ve started our first focus story for this half-term.
Today, Foundation practised retelling the story using actions.
Check out our amazing story telling here!
Story Maps
The F2 children drew their own story maps and were really good at remembering the structure of the story.
Parental Partnership Presentation
Click on this link to view the Parental Partnership Presentation.
If you have any questions after reading the presentation, please email or chat to me on the gate.
stjameseyfs@spherefederation.org
Christian Value: Friendship
This half term, our Christian Value has been friendship.
We have thought about how we can be a good friend and what we can learn from the Bible about friendship. We learned that Jesus teaches us to be a good friend to all – he told a story about how the good samaritan was a friend to someone who was supposed to be his enemy.
In our reflection areas, we had two challenges: a friendship flower and how to be a good friend.
For our friendship flower, we thought about who was a good friend or someone we were thankful for and wrote or drew a short thank you thought or prayer for them.
We took the friendship finger challenge and thought about all the things that make a good friend. We thought about how we could be a better friend.
Foundation stage have also been learning all about our Christian value of friendship. They’ve created a friendship tree and friendship stones whilst thinking about the qualities they would like in a friend.
Look out for next half term’s Christian value: perseverance.
Living and Learning – mental health
We have been looking at mental health over the last few weeks. Using mindfulness techniques (we like some of the Go Noodle ones) and talking about our feelings, moods and emotions is important. The SMILERS 7 steps to wellbeing is also a simple self-help guide.
Living and Learning: I recognise mental health is important
This week, our Living and Learning statement was “I recognise mental health is important”. At school, we understand how important our mental health is which is why the first question we asked at parents evening was about how each child has coped since coming back to school and the changes due to covid.
To support this learning, we have been looking at the different emotions that the children could have been/ have been experiencing and how this can impact their mental health and what mental health is.
We looked at different emotions, when we might feel them and how we could react to those emotions and feelings.
Together, we created a feelings wall – it showed us that all feelings are acceptable and we talked about the different strategies that we could use to overcome/deal with any negative feelings.
Our Living and Learning lesson involved using some resources from the Anna Freud website and it has lots of advice and links for children and families if they need support around mental health.
Phonics – sound mats
At the recent parent-teacher consultations, a few parents asked about the sound mats we use in school. Children have been talking about ‘orange’ and ‘green’ sounds at home – which is great!
Here are the sound mats and below is a link demonstrating how each phoneme (sound) is pronounced.
Listen to the orange sounds here.
Home – Link Challenge
Here’s the home learning moments sheet for the half-term home-link challenge.
You can either print it off and fill it in or send the home learning moments electronically.