Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas! Have a happy and healthy holiday. Thank you for all your hard work this term, both in school and at home.
Countries and continents
This afternoon, we completed a challenge that Mr Wilks has set us. The big question we had was which continent has the most countries at the World Cup? We used atlases to help us find out which continent each of the 32 countries are in.
Then, we worked as a class to create a bar chart.
Help at home by asking your child questions about our bar chart. Some ideas:
- How many countries does Africa have at the World Cup?
- Do any continents have the same number of countries at the World Cup?
- Which continent has 1 country at the World Cup?
Living and Learning: I recognise mental health is important
Over the last few weeks, Years 5 and 6 have been reflecting on our mental health and how to look after ourselves.
Mental health is about our feelings, our thinking, our emotions and our moods – things you can’t see, but that affect our lives in lots of ways.
In our Living and Learning sessions, we have discussed the types of things that might fall under the mental health category. Here’s what we came up with:
- feelings
- inside feelings
- anxieties
- emotions
- actions
- how our brain feels
- what’s going on in our mind
- mood swings
We also came up with a list of ways to help if we, or someone we know, is struggling from poor mental health:
- Talk to someone you trust. This could be a parent/carer, teacher, friends, other family members, a therapist or Childline (0800 11 11)
- Go to a safe space. This can help take your mind off things that are worrying you. Take some time in a place you feel safe/comfortable to reflect and relax.
- Write in your journal/diary. Sometimes, it’s difficult to express our feelings/concerns by talking. If you prefer, you could write down what you want to say.
- Go outside and exercise. As we all experienced lockdowns due to Covid over the last few years, we all agreed that physical activity outdoors is a great way to make yourself feel better. This can distract you from your mind for a while and give you chance to relax and enjoy the outdoors.
Help at home:
Give your child regular opportunities to talk about their feelings/worries. In our circle times, children have really benefitted from speaking out and asking others for help. Even if the worries seem small, it’s important that the children know we are all here to help, both at home and at school.
Active for Advent
In our PE sessions this half term, we’ve been thinking about movement. We know that we can move at different speeds, heights, directions and that we can move in many different forms of travel. It seems that our favourite form of travel is jumping in Year 2!
More recently, we’ve been completing a series of movement challenges. Help at home by staying active over Christmas – use our Advent calendar!
Feeling festive!
In Year 2 this week, we’ve completed some Christmas themed challenges. Have a look at what we’ve been getting up to!
Help at home by counting baubles together, finding the longest piece of tinsel or talking about your Christmas tree using adjectives. There’s lots of Christmas challenges that are fun and keep us learning!
Final Piece of Digital Art
We have been digital artists and we would like to share a few of our finished pieces. We hope you enjoy our gallery.
Christingle and Christmas Production
What a busy week we’ve had in Year 1 and 2. On Wednesday, we went to church to celebrate Christingle. The children did a fab job singing their song ‘In a Stable’ and holding their candle very carefully.
We’ve also performed our Christmas production three times to an audience. We are all so proud of how well they all did.
Writing: What is a promotion?
Lately, we’ve been learning about promotions in our writing lessons. Today, we gave it some thought as to what even makes a text a promotional text and who texts that promote/sell a product are even aimed at – we call this kind of stuff the purpose and audience. It’s a great idea to really take a step back and analyse a text like this before you get down to the nitty gritty of the language etc.
Check out how awesome we are at analysing texts…
As always, if you’re a bit unsure, come and chat to us at school – we’re always happy to explain what’s going on in class for you!
Week 6 – The Jolly Christmas Postman
It has been a busy week in Reception! Our book this week was all about the jolly postman taking special Christmas gifts to everyone. We decided to write our own postcards to send to people we care about.
As part of our creative time we made our own stamps. We thought about why stamps are important and looked at lots of different designs.
We have used our printing skills to make our own pieces of wrapping paper. We used different items to print with including potatoes! We enjoyed counting how many of each shape we had included and also recognising different colours.
On
On Monday we learnt more about Christingles. We discovered what the different parts of the Christingle represent. We made our own Christingles ready for our church service later in the week.
On Wednesday we had our first visit to church. We had a lovely walk looking for signs of Winter on the way. When we arrived at church we had a look at the building and found a special stable in the corner which reminded us of the Christmas Nativity Story. We all felt that it was a very special service.
We hope that you all enjoyed our Christmas Nativity production “It’s a Party” We have loved learning the songs and working with year 1 and 2 to create a super show. Thank you to everyone for all of your help and support.
Things to remember:
On the 12 December everyone is welcome to come into Reception to see what learning we have been doing this term. Learning Journeys and floor books will be out for everyone to have a look through. We hope you can join us from 3:30.
Science Investigators
This week in science, we were learning all about making a fair test. We learnt that for a test to be fair, we needed to only change one thing and everything else stayed the same.
In science, we have been learning about John Dunlop and how he invented the pneumatic tyre. So, we decided to test which ball was the bounciest. We rolled the ball down the ramp and decided the bounciest ball was the ball that bounce back off the wall the furthest. To our surprise, the sponge ball was the bounciest. Have a look at our science experiment below and our recording of it.
