Week ending 22/03/24
Date: 16th Mar 2024 @ 8:18am
Happy Friday! Easter is a time of joy, renewal and reflection, filled with delightful traditions and profound spiritual meaning. While children eagerly anticipate Easter eggs and hot cross buns, it's essential to also highlight the religious significance of this event.So, along with all of the other ‘egg-cellent’ Easter activities we will undoubtedly have planned, we want our children to foster a deeper understanding of the religious side of Easter and why it is so important to Christians. This is something we have been delving deeper in our class collective worships.
Spring Term Dates
- Wednesday 27th March – EYFS class assembly (9am – school hall).
REMINDER:
We will be holding our Class Assembly on Wednesday morning at 9am. Please wait outside at drop off and a member of staff will let you in once all the children have entered school. Please can your child wear a black top/black leggings/trousers for the day as well as their trousers for PE later that morning. We have all the costumes in school but this will intend to be their base layer or a part of their overall costume. There will be an opportunity at the end of the performance to see your child and congratulate them.
Please may I ask that any photos taken are for your own personal use only. Any pictures that include other children are not to be shared on social media for GDPR purposes. Thank you.
Easter Bonnet Competition
It is that lovely time of year when the first signs of spring are upon us and Easter! This year on Friday 19th April will be having an Easter hat/bonnet competition for the children in Key Stage One and EYFS. Please could you support your child in designing and making an Easter hat or bonnet. Your hat could be made from card, paper, or use a baseball cap/sunhat/woolly hat as a base. Then allow your child to decide what they would like on their hat, it could be flowers, signs of new life such as Lambs, chicks and chocolate eggs. It can be anything linked to Easter. Please send the hat in with your child on Friday 19th, we look forward to seeing all the wonderful hats and bonnets! Pictures of the parade will be on Twitter and Tapestry. We will send out a reminder on the first day back. An email containing more details will be sent out shortly.
Kinetic Letters
At parents evening, I 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!
Dough Disco with Shonette is a firm favourite in the Early Years as it focuses on strengthening our fine motor skills making it easier for writing. Here is the link if you want to have a go at home. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=spread+the+happiness+dough+disco
Phonics (Little Wandle)
Please see the downloadable attachment below to practise the sounds/words we have been learning this week. Next week is assessment week so please continue to look over all tricky words and Phase 3 sounds as you can see in the videos and tricky word mat attached.
Maths
In Maths, we have been exploring the concept of mass. We have been thinking about the language of ‘heavy, heavier, heaviest’ and ‘light, lighter, lightest’ to compare objects. This is a simple game to replicate at home with different objects around your home. Ask the children to predict which will be heavier then weigh them and ask them to use the sentence 'the X is heavier than the X' and vice versa. Consider investigating the misconception, 'are all large items always heavier? We used a grape and a balloon for example. We also talked about making the scales balance by making sure both sides of the balance scales are equal. We got the children to predict which items would be heavier/lighter/balanced by pretending they were a human balance scale using their arms! If your child uses the language of ‘heavier’ and ‘lighter’ to compare/order two or three objects at home, then please upload these to Tapestry. Think about moments that make you say ‘WOW!’
Challenge!
An added challenge would be to use number bonds and explore which side would tip the scales. Write out different number sentences and choose two from a bag. Can your child quickly use their recall of number bonds to 'tip' their scales to show which is more or less? For example, 2 + 3 is more than 1 + 2 because 5 is greater than 3.
https://ictgames.com/mobilePage/scales/index.html
On Monday, we arranged a conscience alley to answer the question ‘would you like to be a pirate?’ We discussed reasons for our decisions. Some said yes because they wanted to talk like one and others said no because they would be away from home for too long!
On Tuesday, we were creeping towards the end of our story ‘The Pirates Are Coming!’ and asked the children to predict what might happen next and why. Jack the Dog began Holy Week by telling us the story of Jesus riding on a donkey on Palm Sunday.
On Wednesday, Jack told us about Jesus washing the disciples' feet as an act of selflessness. As a class we came up with a list of acts of kindness. I must say we have some very thoughtful and caring Reception children at our school. It's always lovely to see them putting their ideas into action.
On Thursday, we enjoyed finishing the story of ‘The Pirates are Coming’. The children were amazed to find that the pirate captain was Tom’s Mum! They laughed as they realised that the villagers were hiding to shout ‘SURPRISE!’ and not because they were scared. No one predicted that ending! In class worship we read about the Last Supper where Jesus shared bread and wine with his friends. We pretended to share our own bread and wine (ribena) as we reflected on this part in the Easter story.
On Friday, we learnt about the Earth, sun, moon, planets and stars and created our own pirate maps. We discussed that pirates didn't use Google maps to help them navigate the seas instead the vast expanse of the night sky transformed into a celestial map along with other forms of navigation like a compass and sextant. This led us to look at reading and interpreting different signs and symbols on maps and creating our very own ones to navigate the rough seas of Tarporley!
Well done to our Stars of the Week, Thomas B and.Thomas O!
Our mystery reader this week was Maxwell's dad! Thank you for coming to share a story with us!
Have a fantastic weekend!
Miss Selwyn and Miss Woodward
