A Love of Reading
Year 5 and 6 have had a busy reading week! World Book Day was a great success – we had the opportunity to listen to one another talking about their favourite books and authors. The pupils thrived when visiting Year 1 to read with the younger children – we also had a surprise visit from Mrs Payne, who discussed her favourite books and authors with us.
With their refreshed love of reading, the pupils visited the school library this week. Some pupils chose to have an individual book, and some pupils chose to pair up and choose the same book. The aim of this was for the pupils to discuss their book each week and share their love for it. Here are some pictures of pupils enjoying their new books.
5,4,3,2,1 blast off!
Our focus story this week has been ‘The Hundred Decker Rocket’ by Mike Smith. This is a fantastic story based on looking after the places we live and creating a huge rocket for everyone to travel on.
In Reception we began thinking about how we could look after the places we live. We had a great discussion about litter and decided to do a litter pick in our school grounds. This also allowed us to go and see if we could spot any signs of Spring!
In maths this week we have been working on our counting skills and spotting patterns when counting. Did you know when we add 1 more to towers they look like stairs! We had great fun taking part in a bean bag challenge.
We created maps of our school to help others find their way around school and even created maps for the Beebots to follow. It was tricky to program the Beebots at first but we soon got used to what we needed to do.
Our poem this week had lots of fun actions! please check it out on the link.
World Book Day
On Thursday we had a wonderful day celebrating reading! Parents and carers joined us for bedtime stories in class and then we had special visitors from year 3 and Mrs Valentine.
Living & Learning: I know we’re all the same and we’re all different
In this week’s Living and Learning lesson, we thought carefully about how we’re different yet all the same.
We explored what’s meant by discrimination and alongside that, discussed what the term ‘stereotype’ means:
It was fantastic to listen to and see how mature Year 4 are about topics such as discrimination. Everyone was incredibly respectful, mature and knew that to discriminate is not a good thing.
Going forwards, it’s great to know that this class knows how to be great members of our community outside of school! Nice one, Year 4!
English
Our class text is Nothing by Mike Inkpen (This is a YouTube link. Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog along the play bar and turn off autoplay – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip). We have enjoyed reading and sharing our thoughts on the book this week. We picked out some vocabulary that we weren’t familiar with, explored the meaning and added them to our word wall.
Challenge: Can you use any of these words when talking to friends or family?
Today, we looked at the nouns and adjectives used in the book and wrote some expanded noun phrases.
Check out our fantastic writing!
Challenge: Look around you and come up with an expanded noun phrase.
“The orange, chair”.
“The round, yellow table”.
Living and Learning: strong emotions and feelings
This half term, in Living and Learning with Mrs Bald, we are thinking about emotions and friendships.
We’ve thought about how it feels to be happy, excited, nervous or sad and when we might experience these different emotions. We thought about how our bodies react to our emotions. For example, if we are happy then we will laugh and smile. If we are sad or worried, then we might feel knots in our tummies or we might need to cry. We know that it is okay to experience different emotions and that other people do, too.
We’ve thought about different ways that we could comfort people, and ourselves, if there are feelings of sadness. One example was mindfulness exercises, such as listening to calming music or colouring in. We also thought about what we would say to someone who felt sad and discussed this in one of our circle time sessions.
Another area that we’ve thought about is the idea of friendships. We know that sometimes our friends can make us happy and sometimes we can also be sad because of friendships. Our Christian value this half term is forgiveness so we’ve thought about how we can ask for someone to forgive us or to show forgiveness if a friendship has made us sad.
World Book Day!
Today, we celebrated World Book Day in Year 2! We reflected on our talk time homework and brought in our favourite books to share. We discussed why we like our books and how important it is to read.
“Reading helps our mental health by relaxing.”
“Reading more helps us become fluent readers.”
“Reading is fun to do with our family and friends.”
“Reading can help us with our learning”
Take a look at our favourite books – there’s a range! Chapter books, picture books, fiction books, non fiction books, books about animals, books about maths….
We joined up with our Year 4 friends to read and share our favourite books. Help at home by reading each night before bed to build up fluency. Talk about the order of events in your book or about new words you’ve learned.
World Book Day
What a wonderful day we have had celebrating reading. We have enjoyed sharing our books with each other and listening to a few stories and books being read aloud by different adults in school.
This morning, we had a surprise visit from Miss Gledhill who read Ping and this afternoon Year 5 and 6 came to our classroom to share stories with us too.
What have we been learning about in Year 2?
There’s been some fantastic learning happening in class recently. We wanted to share some of it with you…
Reading: learning to use a dictionary!
We’ve recently been exploring a poem called The Three Little Kittens by Eliza Lee Follen in our reading lessons – you may have seen this on our homework sheet! There were some new vocabulary words that we weren’t sure about, so we used a dictionary to help us learn the definitions of sigh, fear and soil. We know that dictionaries can help us spell words and look up meanings of words we are curious about. We use our knowledge of the alphabet when looking for words in dictionaries.
Maths: doubling numbers!
We’ve been making fantastic progress with our multiplication and division learning in Maths. We’ve recently learned to multiply and divide by 2. Our knowledge of the 2x tables helps us with doubling numbers. We used Numicon and mirrors to help us with our doubling learning!
Computer Coding
Today, the children explored a digital game called Scratch. They created a sprite (a 2D character) and used the coding blocks to form an algorithm. The children enjoyed creating, coding and testing their ideas.
What is Scratch programming?
Scratch is a programme aimed at supporting children developing their coding and programming skills. It can be used to create stories, games and animations. Scratch promotes computational thinking and problem solving skills.
Have a go at home – it’s free!
Zooming Julia Donaldson
To kick off world book day, we enjoyed a zoom with Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. We enjoyed a story about a hare and a hedgehog who were in a running race. Axel Scheffler showed us how he draws the characters. Julia Donaldson then read us a new story about some baddies. The children were gripped!
