Squirrels' Class Blog
Friday 13th September
Hello new Squirrel parents and carers,
Welcome to our first Squirrel class page blog. This blog will aim to give you information about our weeks and ideas for you at home.
Well done, we did it! The first full week of Year 1 and 2 and we are immensely proud of your children. We have spent the first few days in school getting to know our new classroom and all the lovely things to play with (the finger puppet theatre and the ‘magic’ gems are firm favourites so far), learning new expectations and routines, meeting Barney and Daisy (our ray of the day buddies), saying hi to old friends and getting to know new people in our class, and finally waking our brains up after 6 fun-filled weeks and learning lots of new things! Hands up if you had a sleepy child at the end of the week?
We’ve started our timetable straightaway this week with a busy day of recapping phase 4 phonics (Y1), recapping phase 5 in spelling (Y2), starting reading practise, lots of counting in maths and mastering number, discovering our new story in English, learning about the life cycle of chickens in science, learning about the Torah and a yad in RE and developing our throwing and catching skills in PE this week. Year 1’s were delighted to learn we have books for everything and Year 2’s have been fab at remembering neat presentation in their new books. Children will still have ‘choosing’ time to play and socialise at various points of the day and there is always an afternoon playtime to see friends across all KS1 classes too.
Some of you may already met Barney the Bear and Daisy the Rabbit. They are our ray of the day buddies to celebrate a child’s achievement or effort every day. We like to call it someone who’s been letting their light shine extra brightly and they will get to take either Barney or Daisy home for 1 night (if your child is ray of the day on a Friday, please bring Barney/Daisy back on Monday). Please get your child to contribute to the book and then we will share it with the rest of the class the next day. We love hearing about yummy tea’s and favourite stories. It is a lovely time where we come together to celebrate one super squirrel. I will plan for every child to have been ray of the day by the end of the first half term.
Our learning this term is available on our class page and we’ve got lots of exciting things to come; KS1 disco, Harvest festival, a visit from owls, and dare I say it … nativity rehearsals will start after half-term! In English we have loved discovering new pages of Meesha Makes Friends together and thinking about what qualities a good friend has. Year 1’s have been working on accurately using their phonics to spell and learning about capital letters and full stops and Year 2’s have been focusing on using expanded noun phrases to describe. We had lots of fun designing our own friends just like Meesha and worked hard to think of adjectives to describe. I wonder if your child can tell you any adjectives to describe something at home or in a book?
In maths, Year 1 have been learning to verbalise ways of sorting objects. They have worked on confidently being able to say something along the lines of: this group of objects have been sorted by colour/shape/size etc. I wonder if you could practise this at home with toys, food etc. They had a go in the classroom and then went outside. They loved sorting twigs, stones, fallen leaves, grass!
Year 2’s have been focusing on place value within 100 which has meant lots of counting forwards and backwards, learning about the tens and ones digits in numbers and thinking about when they change. Some children were able to spot patterns in numbers and realised the ones digit changes from 29 to 30 because one more means 9 ones become 1 ten. I wonder if you could practise counting forwards and backwards crossing the tens boundary at home? Can they confidently say what numbers come before and after 30, 40, 70, 100?
That’s all from me! We’ve had a busy but wonderful first full week at school and have loved getting to know your children. I am so proud of how hard all children have worked, they truly are super squirrels! If you need anything from me, you can email any questions to the office and I’m always available for a phone call or face-to face chat. Apologies for my blank face at home time, I promise I’m trying hard to learn your faces!
Have a lovely weekend,
Miss Jones
