Living and Learning: I can show perseverance
Our Christian value this half term is perseverance. This week it was the focus of our Living and Learning session. We looked closely at the words in this definition: ‘Persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success’.
Everyone closed their eyes and said the first thing that came into their heads related to the word ‘persevere’:
“To try and try again.”– Jessica
“Challenge yourself, don’t give up”. – Lily
“Be resilient, like one of the 8 Rs.” – Hannah
“When I persevere towards a goal I feel happy because I know I’m challenging myself.”-Emily
I posed the phrase ‘practice makes perfect’, but was very astutely corrected by Oliver: “No, practice makes progress, not perfect.”
Finally we watched an animated clip about one animal’s perseverance to overcome all the obstacles in his way. He didn’t give up and remained focused on his goal.
We left the session with a small task for next week:
Think of an achievable goal or target you are going to work towards.
You’ll need to demonstrate how you showed perseverance to accomplish your target.
We’ve all got until Christmas to work on our chosen goal.
Living and Learning: I can show perseverance.
Fantastic feast, scrumptious scran and brilliant banquet
The highlight of our week has been preparing and eating our very own Tudor banquet to go with our time travel topic on food and our current book, ‘A Medieval Feast’.
Our first task was – just like the serfs in the book – to prepare some of the food. We made a soup from a variety of winter vegetables, flavoured with parsley and other herbs.
Then came time for the actual feast. We had servants to announce each course with a drumroll, toasts to the king and queen and other honoured guests throughout the meal, jesters to entertain us between courses and, of course, the mouth-watering food.
We had the soup which we’d made earlier in the week with scrumptious corn bread. We followed this up with succulent roast chicken and fresh vegetables. All washed down with goblets overflowing with fruity red wine – not really! It was a feast fit for a king.
Living and Learning: I can participate in democratic decisions.
Last week the election for School Councillors gave us an opportunity to explore democracy, which is one of the British values.
We thought about how unfair it would be if important decisions affecting our lives, school and community were made without us having the chance to influence the decision. The process of voting in a democratic society gives us this opportunity.
Then, in preparation for the School Council elections, some of us gave short speeches to persuade our classmates to vote for us if we promised certain things. Issues raised included ‘all children should take 30 minutes of exercise each day’ and ‘children should not wear a uniform to school’.
It was brilliant to hear lots of well thought out responses.
The End of Autumn 1!
Wow! What a busy half term we have had. We have developed lots of new skills, settled in to the routines of school life again and shared some magic moments in our learning.
Foundation 2 are flourishing in their phonics. Sid the squirrel has been super impressed with how they have explored and used each sound that he has shown them over the past eight weeks.
We have worked hard to become story-tellers, with everyone in F2 showing they can re-tell a story and some can even write the words or sentences from them! We have been using our fantastic imaginations to share our own ideas and create new stories too!
In maths, we have explored every aspect of our focus numbers and challenged ourselves in our counting, shape and size comparison.
F1 have enjoyed their key worker time, exploring nursery rhymes as a link to lots of different learning. They have been listening to stories, counting, constructing and sharing their thoughts, feelings and ideas.
We have started our PE sessions, working on balancing and movement. We can hop, skip and gallop. Importantly, we have shown that we can listen carefully and follow instructions to make sure that we are safe.
We have now voted for our new themes after half term, based on the children’s interests: Superheroes, Dinosaurs and Toys!
Half-term Home-link Challenges
F2- Please help us build up our role play area by using your ‘fiddly fingers’ to wrap up an empty box (in Christmas or any other style wrap) and add a label (included with the weekly up-date sent home) of what is inside and how much it costs. Please encourage your child to sound out their words and write the label independently.
F1- Please draw either a superhero picture or a picture of a toy for our toy shop. Please write down on the drawing exactly what your child has said about their writing in their own words.
Most importantly: have fun! Have a wonderful half term, Foundation 🙂 See you on 05 November.
Meet your new school councillors
After a week of learning about democracy as one of the British values, we have voted for our school councillors. Each councillor – as well as the other candidates that weren’t elected – had to make a small speech and answer questions on why they should be elected as a school councillor.
We would like to wish them good luck in their roles and look forward to seeing them succeed and help make our school the best it can be!
Odd one out
As you may have seen from previous homework and news posts, the majority of our learning this half term has been about place value and the number system. We have represented, compared and ordered numbers to 1000 in may different ways.
As such, this morning we played a game called ‘Odd one out’. The objective of the game was to spot the odd one out in a series of pictures which depicted a number from 1-1000 using various representations.
Once we had answered questions in our books, we all made them for each other and also a whole class problem on the board for all of you to try at home.
Don’t send in your answers – it’s just for fun!
Living and Learning: I can take part in democratic decisions
This week, our living and learning focus is I can take part in democratic decisions. Democracy is a British value. We use democratic decisions a lot in our class and the children understand that this makes whole class decisions fairer.
This week, the class were introduced to a new friend: a bear. The bear needed a name and Leah suggested that it would be a good idea to have a class vote to decide his name.
The children suggested five names between them: Bob, Skye, Oli, Builder and Rosie. The children closed their eyes and put up their hand to show their choice of name.
Bob was the most popular choice with seven votes so we named the bear ‘Bob’. Bob will be joining us for some of our living and learning lessons.
Creative poem
Well done to Olivia who decided to write a poem for her creative homework, to show what life was like in the Stone Age through to the Iron Age.
Homework superstars
Last week, we were asked to create games or quizzes all about our learning on place value in maths.
The time and effort that went into these was astonishing! We have been playing some of the games today and not only are they well thought out and fun, but they actually help with learning too!
Take a look at some of our stand-out stars below!
