JUNIOR DEPARTMENT NEWS

This week in Reception

Reception pupils have thoroughly enjoyed their Building and Materials topic and were excited to use their knowledge to create their own buildings.

It was wonderful to see their imaginations and creative skills run wild as they drew, painted and made collages of palaces, tree-houses, castles, holiday homes and hotels. Our budding young architects added some special additional features to their buildings – slides, lifts and turrets were the most popular additions!

Having created their buildings, the pupils were then inspired to write about and describe their buildings.

Reception Red, Blue, Green and Yellow towns are now proudly on display throughout the Reception corridor!

The Reception Team

This week in Year 1

This week, Year One (temporarily) left the continent of Africa and travelled to Asia to celebrate Chinese New Year!

We have enjoyed reading Chinese New Year stories The Great Race and Sam’s Lucky Money and also learning about the country of China through non-fiction texts. We learnt facts about pandas and also found out how Chinese people all over the year prepare for this important event. In Art and DT lessons, we have made leisees (special red envelopes for lucky money!), Chinese tigers, lanterns and fortune tellers. These photos hopefully show you a little of what we have got up to this week.

Kung Hei Fat Choy!

Drama and Dance

Year 1 have been using their imaginations and heaps of creativity in their dance and drama lessons this half term to invent all sorts of machines. They have worked individually, in pairs and created a whole class machine that worked so fast it exploded! What wonderful ideas and amazing teamwork, Year 1!

Mrs Hegarty

This week in Year 2

FOREST SCHOOL

Year 2 leapt at the opportunity to venture into the woods for Forest School on Wednesday. The whole year group enjoyed the freedom to choose from a whole host of different activities whilst waiting for the thrill of s’mores and hot chocolate.

Please enjoy looking at what we got up to by scrolling through these photos:

PSHEE

Our focus this week in PSHEE was ‘Body Language’.

Each class has a lovely new PSHEE book where we are going to record our thoughts. The children enjoy looking back at previous sessions, which has certainly helped to reinforce important learning. The message from the session was to be ‘Body Language Detectives’ and use these non-verbal clues to tell us when our friends might need support, even when they are telling us they are ‘fine’.

I think you can tell from the photos that Mrs Storey had as much fun as the children!

Ice Caps Investigation

Clearly as much fun is being had at home as at school!

As part of a challenge set by Mrs Dalkin, the children carried out an Ice Caps Investigation. After freezing their own ‘ice caps’, they created their own polar landscape (some of us had to be creative here) and watched and measured as the ice melted.

Back in school this served as a great speaking and listening activity as the children shared their photos and clearly explained what they had learned about the impact of melting ice at the poles.

This week we also talked about our ‘carbon footprint’ and the children have been set the challenge of coming up with three goals to reduce their impact on the environment.

We all agreed that small changes have the potential to make a large difference.

In addition to these photos, you can also read Arthur’s presentation here and watch Paige’s video here.

Have a lovely weekend, everyone!

The Year 2 Team

From the Junior Library

My Big Book of Outdoors, by Tim Hopgood

Stunningly illustrated by Tim Hopgood, author of Wow! Said the Owl, My Big Book of Outdoors is a season by season delight. The level of detail included means it works well both as a stand-alone book for confident readers and also as a sharing book for a younger audience.

The book is a mixture of poetry, facts and inventive activities; chocolate bird nests, butterfly spotting, leaf mobiles…

In addition, there are hidden pictures within the illustrations making the book engaging throughout.

Teacher’s 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 Mrs Hegarty’s turn.

She has chosen “Mrs Armitage and the Big Wave” by Quentin Blake, saying how much she loves Mrs Armitage’s “creative problem solving and the energetic illustrations!”

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	-	-	Ariana L, Haris A, Lily M, Zoe P
Year 1	-	George L, Akio,	Wilbur
Year 2	-	Lila N, Marcus F-H	Theo B