Week Ending 01/03/24
Date: 19th Feb 2024 @ 12:49pm
Happy Friday! We have really enjoyed welcoming the children back to school this week. They had so much to tell us about their exciting half term breaks that we had a very long Show and Tell on Monday! This is a short but busy half term so please see the key dates below for EYFS and look out for emails from the school office. This week we have been on the look out for minibeasts that are hiding in our gardens.
Some ideas of how you can embrace our topic at home:
- Research your favourite mini beasts - can you find any fascinating facts to share with the class?
- Make your very own bug hotel! There are lots of great designs online- but they can be made from things such as: old plant pots, small rocks, sticks, stones bark and leaves... You'll soon have lots of mini beasts checking in!
- Go on a mini-beast hunt in your garden or local area/park - what can you spot?
- Share any mini-beast related stories you might have at home or spot at the library.
Spring Term Dates
- Thursday 7th March - World Book Day (come dressed as your favourite book character or in comfy pjs!). Please do bring along a book too!
- Wednesday 27thMarch – EYFS class assembly (9am – school hall)
Mother's Day Shop
Next Wednesday and Friday, the PTA will be running the annual Mother's Day Shop where your child can purchase something from the selection of gifts available. Each item will be carefully gift wrapped. If you would like your child to buy something, please send their money into school in labelled envelope. We suggest no more than £5. Please hand this to a member of staff on the doors. Please only bring money on your allocated day (see below).
Wednesday - KS2 and their siblings
Friday - KS1 and EYFS
Little Wandle (Phonics)
This week we have been revising the digraphs we learnt last half term such as AI, EE, IGH, OA, OR, UR and OO. Thank you to all the families who returned their book on time this week, it was nearly a 100% success rate. We are so grateful for the care taken over with our books, we want to ensure the children learn to take good care of them too. When reading with your child encourage them to turn the pages themselves and hold the book carefully, thank you.
Kinetic Letters
Kinetic Letters is the first thing we do each morning as the children come into school. We focus on teaching the children letter formation and aim that it becomes automatic as soon as possible. Please can you ensure that your child is in school by 8:45am so they are not missing out on this important lesson.
At parents evening, we spoke with lots of parents about the importance of fine motor skills on a child's writing journey. By enabling handwriting to become automatic, we remove that from a child's cognitive load when writing. This way they can focus on sentence construction and spelling. We do Kinetic Letters each more to give each child automaticity in their handwriting as soon as possible. You can help at home by encouraging play that strengthens little hands; playdough, tweezers, lacing, tying shoe laces, doing their own zip up, opening crisp packets/food boxes. In fact, developing independence and fine motor skills go hand in hand!
Challenge Time
Can you write a few simple sentences about your favourite minibeast? My favourite minibeast is certainly a butterfly. I just love the beautiful symmetrical patterns on their wings. What can you find out about that you didn't know already?
In Maths, we met Numberblock 7 who makes up the 7 colours of the rainbow (one for each number block). We have also been practising our counting skills by starting from different numbers and counting forwards and backwards. This is a great skill for early mathematicians. We have focused on splitting seven into two parts and finding all the pairs of numbers to make our whole. We did this using tens frames and two different colours to represent the two parts. The teachers also taught the children a magic dice trick. If you have a dice at home, ask your child to show you this trick...it certainly impressed them!
On Monday, we started our week long poetry unit using the book ‘Mad About Minibeasts’. The children went on a bug hunt outside in our grounds. They managed to find worms, woodlice, centipedes and spiders. What a great first day back as newly Dormice and Hedgehogs!
On Tuesday, we thought about how insects move and acted out some of the poems. We saw some great acting skills as the children had to guess what bugs we were being without using any words.
On Wednesday, we played ‘Silly Soup’ to give us some inspiration to write the poems and worked in teams to record our ideas.
On Thursday, we wrote our descriptions of the insects we have learnt about this week. All of these will be shared with you on Tapestry so please have a look!
On Friday, we explored the signs of spring that are beginning to appear all around us. We looked at the flowers such as daffodils and snowdrops. We made our own observational flower drawings which are proudly on display to also celebrate St David's Day. Spring is definitely coming!
Well done to our Stars of the Week, Drew and Wren!
Our mystery reader this week was Dylan’s Nan. Thank you for coming to share a story with us!
We hope the weather will be nice over the weekend so that we can go out and find our own mini-beasts in our gardens and local area
Have a wonderful weekend and Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus (Happy St David's Day from Miss Selwyn)
Miss Selwyn and Miss Woodward
