JUNIOR DEPARTMENT NEWS

This week in Reception

Each day in Reception combines a number of different activities, combining both teacher-led classroom lessons and child-initiated elements.

In the afternoons, Reception pupils enjoy Child Initiated Learning. This means that they are able to follow their interests and choose from a range of activities, designed to support their learning across the curriculum. They may choose Literacy or Numeracy based activities, or opt for imaginative or creative tasks, involving a wide variety of materials; whatever they do, it will promote their knowledge and skills across one or more of the seven areas of learning in the Early Years Foundation Stage, which are

Communication and Language;
Personal, Social and Emotional Development;
Physical Development;
Literacy;
Mathematics;
Understanding the World;
Expressive arts and design.

Below you can see just a few of the things that Reception have got up to in the afternoons this week:

The Reception Team.

This week in Year 1

Year One are enjoying their weekly French lesson with Madame Fairburn. She encourages the children’s curiosity, teaches about the lives of french children and deepens their understanding of the world.

The children are able to express their ideas and thoughts , and can understand and respond in French. The children are excited to learn, use phrases and words through singing French songs, playing games and interactive games on the Smartboard. The children always begin the lesson with the Bonjour song and end with the Au Revoir song.

This week the children are gaining in confidence in the use the numbers and counting to 20 in French. They thoroughly enjoyed playing a dice counting game, where they had to put the numbers from the game into a sentence and say it in French.

In last week’s newsletter, we asked you to guess what we were making with ModRoc as part of our Africa topic – this week, you can see our finished masterpieces – African animal masks! Great job, Year 1!

This week in Year 2

Brrr, this week Year 2 delved deeper into the Arctic, with their research into Arctic animals. The children honed their skills of using a highlighter to answer questions and identify interesting facts before producing an information sheet of their own. All the children were (justifiably!) very proud of their pastel drawings of some of the Arctic animals that they had researched – you can see some of their pictures below;

This term in Maths we have been focusing on multiplication and division. The teachers are astounded at how brilliantly Year 2 have taken on the challenge of starting to learn their times tables. Well done to all the children who are accessing the Times Tables Rock Star App; their average play time is six minutes a day, which is clearly why so many of them are making such incredible progress – wow, we are all very proud!

In class we have been using the manipulatives to help us to understand arrays and have discovered that this is a great way of seeing patterns and recognising answers. The highlight of the week was the ‘Smarties Challenge’ where, equipped with their own tube of Smarties, each pupil investigated the different ways in which they could share their Smarties into equal groups. It introduced us to the idea that not all numbers can be divided equally. Some of us even discussed ‘prime numbers’ as many of our packets contained 29 sweets.

Our Maths brains have officially been stretched this week – well done!

Have a lovely weekend!

The Year 2 Team

From the Junior Library

A Hero Called Wolf, by Lucy Rowland

A Hero called Wolf is the latest release by Lucy Rowland and Ben Mantle, creators of the fantastic Little Red Reading Hood.

Its bold and endearing illustrations combine with the delightful rhyming storyline to create a lovely book. Readers follow Wolf as he indulges in his favourite pleasure; reading. But the more he reads, the more he realises that heroes come in many shapes and sizes – all strong and handsome – but never a wolf like him.

He wonders if heroes could ever be like him, could they be a nice and kind wolf? Maybe he himself can be a hero…

Teachers’ Book of the Week

To support our pupils in their enjoyment of reading, members of staff will be sharing their favourite books over the coming weeks – this week, it is Mr Bullock’s turn.

He has chosen “The Church Mouse” by Graham Oakley, saying his family loved this series so much that they even named their cat Sampson after one of the characters!

Next week there will be another choice by another member of staff…

Mrs Lott and Mrs Ford

Head’s Commendations

Well done to all the recipients of Mr Balfour’s Commendations this week:

Year Group	Nurture	Engage	Inspire
Reception	-	Rory, Kezia, Jaxson, James A	-
Year 1	-	Samuel W	Cecily, Beatrice,
Year 2	Lucinda, Samuel R,	Vivian, Amelie M	-