Weekly Newsletter

This week we have continued to explore animals, with a particular focus on crocodiles. We have listened to the stories ‘Smile Crocodile Smile’ and ‘The Selfish Crocodile’. The children have enjoyed learning about crocodiles, as well as the importance of looking after our teeth and how we go about it. We have talked about the three main themes in good dental health: Keep sugary and acidic food and drinks to mealtimes. Brush teeth at least twice a day with a fluoride toothpaste. In the provision we have had a crocodile swamp in the tuff tray, made playdough teeth and had a dentist’s role play area. Whilst in the finger gym we have been busy brushing the dirty teeth to make them all clean again.

In phonics we have looked at initial sounds. We have enjoyed shopping for things that start with a certain sound. In maths we have talked about when different things happen using the language - day, night, morning, afternoon, before, after, today and tomorrow.

The N2 children have thoroughly enjoyed exploring the Reception provision and are already quite at home there!

Star of the Week: Ignacy Szafranski

This week our focus has been non-fiction. We have looked at a selection of seaside towns and designed our own, thinking carefully about the features that we like. We have also read about Mary Anning and her pioneering work of studying fossils. This inspired our own excavations, with chocolate chip cookies! It was tricky to dig out the chocolate chips and helped us to see what a skillful job this is. We have also looked at seasides in the past and found out some amazing facts! This also helped us to write in the past tense. Finally we thought about the different kinds of weather that we may experience at the seaside. We watched the weather forecast and then had a turn ourselves.

In phonics we have introduced 4 new alternative digraphs - oy, ir, ue, aw and we have completed our workbooks to practise using these new sounds.

In maths we have been taking away, with the help of tens frames, green bottles and pirate treasure!

Our R.E work has been focussed around the Jewish celebration of Sukkot. We worked together to build a sukkah which is a temporary shelter that Jewish families build during the festival.

Moving forward, we are waiting in anticipation for our reception trip to Beetle Bank Farm!

Star of the week:

Moon - Millie-Rose Scott

Mercury - Ada Parker-Houlden

We have been continuing with our new theme for this half term - A Knight’s Tale! We started this week by completing the Year 1 Phonics Screening check and we are so proud of how brilliantly the children did. They were fantastic at using their robot arms to sound out and blend any tricky words back together. Massive well done to all of them! In Writing, we have looked at writing instructions for how to pass Dragon School, based on the story of ‘Zog’. The children were amazing at remembering the key features of instructional writing, as well as incorporating imperative verbs throughout. In Maths, we have finished looking at Place Value and have now moved onto our new unit of Money, where the children have been getting hands on with coins and trying to understand their different values. In Music, we have looked at different genres and our likes and dislikes. There has been a real push on using correct musical terminology and they have been giving reasonings for their opinions using key musical sentence stems. In History the children have continued to look at castles and specifically focussed on changes of this over the centuries, they have placed these in chronological order and have looked at the different names of each of the different castles.

We are so proud of how determined the children have been this week and the skills they have shown throughout. Well done all of you and keep up the good work!

Star of the week:

Venus- Rio Helstrip

Galaxy- Miles Smith

This week we have been honing our recount writing skills. We have enjoyed watching the animated film ‘Little Boat’ and writing a recount as if we were the boat. We’ve also been practising using expanded noun phrases and conjunctions. Well done Year 2, we are loving seeing these elements in your writing! We’ve also been writing character descriptions and have enjoyed our new class novel of Flat Stanley. We practised making predictions about the main character and what might happen and had great fun thinking of things we could do if we were flat like Stanley. In maths we finished our topic on statistics, making and interpreting block graphs and pictograms.Our RE this week looked at the Christian view of looking after the world and others and we focussed on the story of The Good Samaritan.We even acted out a classroom version of the story. In music we looked at a modern piece of music called Connect It which uses lots of body percussion and we started creating our own pieces of music based on this. We continued our work on William Morris in art, carrying out a study on the colour green. PSHE this week has been about our wants and our needs and PE continued our learning in netball and athletics. Phew, what a busy week! Well done Year 2! Keep up your amazing attitude and hard work!

Star of the Week

Earth: Ashleigh Bramald

Mars: Riley Cooke

It’s been a rather hot and humid week of learning, but the children have taken the high temperatures in their stride, cooling down in the classroom with a wet paper towel and plenty of fluids. On the plus side, the presence of daily sunshine has meant we could conduct our science investigation of measuring the varying length of a shadow at different times of the day. In English, the children planned and began writing their own version of ‘Flood’ using the features learnt during our sentence stacking lessons. The children are even more inspired than usual because they’re writing the plots on special sheets of paper that will be collated into a story book. Earthquakes have been our focus in guided reading and geography; the children have learnt about tectonic plates and boundaries, and that the movement of these causes an earthquake. Shape is our new unit in maths; we have learnt how to identify right angles and that one right angle is the same as a quarter turn. The children have also learnt a little rhyme and action to help them remember the appearance of acute and obtuse angles. On Friday afternoon, we continued our DT project of embroidering a Binca bookmark. This week, we carried out market research, choosing our favourite three initial designs of the class. The children then used the positive elements of the winning bookmarks when producing their final designs in preparation for sewing. Another fantastic week of learning - well done Year 3. :)

Stars of the week

Saturn: Logan Gibbard

Jupiter: Mabel Waugh

We’ve had a very exciting and busy week in Year 4 this week. The greatest science share on Tuesday was a great success. All the preparation and work the children have been doing in school looked fantastic on our display and was admired by many! Although we didn’t win, the children worked incredibly hard and did a fantastic job going up on stage to present to so many children and adults from other schools. I don’t know who enjoyed it more, us or the children! This week we have started our new unit of time in maths. The children have learnt about years, months, weeks and days, hours, minutes and seconds and also converting between analogue and digital times. We even learnt a rhyme to help us remember how many days there are in each of the months. In English, we have started planning for our independent writing for our poems about a river. The children have started planning which features they will be including in their poems about their local river. On Thursday afternoon, we continued with the Young Leaders award and this week the children discussed the local area and considered what they could do to improve it and what they could do to serve the community. In computing, the children learnt about what goes on inside of computers and mobile devices and how the parts work together to ensure devices are working effectively.

Well done Year 4 for another fantastic week!

Stars of the week:

Meteor: Abigail Lawlor

Neptune: Freddy Tonks

Another really good week for the Year 5s. They produced some fantastic character descriptions for Scheherazade and The Sultan, some even pushing themselves to practise their joined up handwriting. We have now moved onto developing a storyline using dialogue effectively, rather than one word sentences. In Guided Reading, we have read another one of Scheherazade’s tales, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. The children have had to use the text to answer vocabulary, predictive and contrasting questions. Decimals have played a large part in our Maths lessons the past couple of weeks. We have had a discussion about what they think is the most efficient strategy to use when adding and subtracting. Each child is different, so as long as they get the correct answer, they could complete the question the way they wanted. Finally, in Art the children were exploring mark making with watercolours. The children really enjoyed being creative with the different suggestions that they were given.

Stars

Asteroid - Amelia-Grace Jackson

Pluto- Charlie Coltman

We’ve had an ‘ all things transitional’ sort of week this week in Year 6. It started with a visit from staff from Selby High and then from Holy Family and Brayton Academy so we are all now much wiser about the expectations and informed about what we need ready for high school in the autumn. We also had a visit from some of the members of Brayton Methodist Church who came to do a special class worship this week, not dressed as ‘Open the Book’ characters but instead they wanted to give some Scripture Union booklets containing information and inspiration about the move too. We’ve also followed this up with a chance to reminisce about our time in school and share some fun memories as we start to prepare for our end of term ‘Year 6 Production’.

We have also had our usual array of lessons too. Maths has been finishing off the topic of shape and starting the final unit of work on position & direction while in guided reading we have continued to find out more about the children lost in the jungle in our class text ‘The Explorer’. We have also been amazed by the real-life case of the children who were in the news recently having been rescued after surviving 40 days in the Amazon rainforest.

Stars:

Constellation: Joe Possnett

Nebular: Scarlett Southern