Squirrels' blog 1st July
Date: 2nd Jul 2023 @ 9:29am
As soon as May hits, life in school gets really busy. You'd think that starting July we might be 'winding down', you'd be wrong! We're still on the 'ramping up' part of education. 3 weeks left to go is just shy of 10% of our school year so every moment still matters as far as I am concerned. I've written and checked the reports (#PleaseEnjoyAndLikeThem!), completed the Y2 SATs and the Y1 Phonics Screening Check but I am still planning all the curriculum subjects in detail until the end of the term although a certain degree of flexibility is required as transition meetings and unexpected things crop up! On Friday, I was asked to be the Hedgehogs' Mystery Reader which I loved (although I think they were disappointed I wasn't their Mummy!) so Squirrels had the pleasure of Miss Selwyn reading to them. All lovely things for the children to enjoy and thank goodness for the wonderful Mrs Line who points me in the right direction all the time whilst gently saying 'keep going Mrs H!'
I do enjoy this time of year though. It's madly tiring, hard sometimes to predict and the days in school are long, but the children are wonderful and I am aware that they are leaving me soon so I tend to cling on to every magical moment with them. They are getting ready for the next chapter. We are spending time talking about it and as soon as they know their new teacher, we will do a lot of transition events to maximise excitement and the 'normality' of the changes. You know you can use the BBQ time to meet the new teacher (and say goodbye to me) and make sure you are feeliing positive as your vibes will be picked up on by your child.
But we are moving ahead of ourselves...this week we read to the end of our book Grandad's Secret Giant. The writing I am getting from the children is fab and I can't wait for you to see it. We will be finishing our 'Writeaway' (the culmination piece of writing) this week and writing it up in neat for our Let Your Writing Shine board. We will spend the last 2 weeks of term focusing on sentence structure so they are solid in the practice of a sentence (usually) being: Capital letter, subject, verb, finish the idea, full stop.
In maths y2 have 'done' time and are now looking at measuring length and mass. Any chance of weighing anything at home so they are reading an electronic scale would be great as we do not have those in school. A lot of the focus is the difference between a kilogram and a gram. Year 1 have been considering 1/4s - not an easy subject but it is kept very practically so that they make halves of a number using objects and then turn that into 4 equal groups. Let them play around with this. Squirrels have played 'doubles wipeout' this week as well to help them learn doubles. We use 10-sided dice so they are learning to double 10 off by heart.
Geography has allowed us to consider differences between the 4 capital cities of the UK- London, Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff. You might be interested in their response to which one they would choose to live if they had to!
We are following our No Outsiders programme for RE this half term and it shows the growing maturity of your little ones that can now talk about what makes them proud and have some understanding of what diversity means and how to respect it.
So here's to the last 3 weeks of loveliness with the Super Squirrels (what on earth am I going to call the Rabbits next year??).
Mrs H
