Rabbits' blog 6
Date: 8th Oct 2023 @ 5:42pm
Well hello week 6... and what a week it will be!
We have our Harvest Festival on Tuesday (2pm St Helen's). We had a successful practice on Friday. Although I have to say parading down the High Street with my birthday crown on felt ludicrous, funny and warmed my heart as my remarkable rabbits went all out making me feel special. Miss Bougen, Mrs Hamlett and Mrs Palmer had helped along the way and I was truly touched. Not quite as touched as the balloons were and had to be quietly taken away before another one popped and aged me far more than the 1 year that I was anticipating that day! But back to the Harvest Festival. There will be songs and dancing and prayers and art. And staff trying to orchestrate it all wishing for an invisibility cloak to help facilitate smooth transitions. Be patient with us! It's quite a big thing for the Y1s to handle in many ways. The rabbits seemed to take it all in their stride during the practice but once in front of you... I'm just going to keep breathing and enjoy it; hope you do too.
Mrs Forrester came in to watch a history lesson last week and was blown away with the whole class' learning behaviour and enthusiasm for learning. We are learning about significant changes in history. We have chosen to look at the reigns of our 3 longest serving queens and last week we considered the technological changes during Queen Elizabeth II's reign. They were generally horrified that there were only 3 channels on TV for a long time, that children's tv was at dinnertime and that phones had cords so you couldn't wander too far! Can't wait for the Victorian discoveries! This week we will look at the changes in fashion from the 50s to the 2000s. No one had better ask me if I remember those first Elizabethan decades!
This week we will be learning how to use a rekenrek. Here is one:
They are completely brilliant maths tools for developing 'automacity' in number - basically children 'seeing' how numbers are made up. We will use it for place value (how do you make 14), doubles, number bonds- as soon as we've learnt that it is not a toy. There are a number of 'rules' (because hey Christmas is round the corner and how fab would this be at home for years of great maths!): white on the right; tool noise not toy noise; push (eg 1 push 3 OOO, not O O O). By the end of the week I am expecting every child to be able to command their rekenrek, have started to learn number bonds to 5 off by heart and to develop their (YR) understanding of the concept of Part Part Whole or hopefully in the concept of 5 any number of parts. It's going to be fun!
We have also started Phase 5 of Little Wandle which is all about reading longer words and those many, many alternative GPCs. Last week we learnt that WOW Owl can be written with 'ow' and 'ou', that Tail in the rain can be 'ai' and 'ay', that Boing, boing can be 'oi' and 'oy'. They will come thick and fast so keeping up is imperative. I will be doing some assessments by the end of the week and next week so I can see who needs extra support to keep up.
And then it will be our Pupil Progress meetings :) I will focus on academic information and will tell you whether I predict they will be meeting the age-related expectations for Y1 and what we can both do to move everything forward. Forgive me now if the tech cuts us off!
On that note! Time for tea. Looking forward to this week!
Mrs H
