Class News

What is a rainforest?

“A rainforest is warm and humid filled with lots of trees,” said Ehtasham.

Edith the geographer stated, “The precipitation levels are extremely high.”

“There are four layers: forest floor, understory, canopy and emergent,” explained Betsy.

Tommy reminds us of the importance of the Amazon Rainforest, “It removes so much carbon from the atmosphere but it’s being cut down.”

Stellar spellers

Take a look at some fantastic spelling practice from Y6, this week.

Our focus has been unusual spelling patterns and the different ways you can write them in order to best remember them.

Help at home by practising spellings as part of writing sentences or when polishing your handwriting.

Science: A smelly experiment!

For this unit of science, we are chemists. We are currently learning about reversible and irreversible changes; this lesson was focused on irreversible changes. Irreversible means ‘when a change cannot be undone to get the same substances back again’.

In groups, the children measured the starting components – vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. Next, they added them together into a bottle, with a balloon on top, to collect the gas that was created (carbon dioxide). This was an irreversible reaction. The scientific enquiry type was comparative and fair tests.

Help at home: Discuss other irreversible changes. For example, burning toast.

Living and Learning: health and prevention

Over the last two weeks, Year 2 have been learning about keeping our bodies healthy.

Firstly, we considered good hygiene. Most microbes do not harm us and some are actually very helpful. However, some microbes can harm us and these are called germs.

We can’t get rid of every single germ but we can think about how to keep them away and stop them from spreading.

Good handwashing is a key part of being hygienic. We reminded ourselves of how to wash our hands properly.

We already use an important technique to stop germs spreading by covering our mouth and nose with the inside of our elbow (the vampire technique).

We also discussed the importance of sleep in our weekly circle time.

All of the children could give a good example of why sleep is important from helping our memory to helping us grow.

This website provides more information about the importance of sleep for children.

Dental health is another key aspect of being healthy.

We thought about teeth-friendly food and drink, how to keep our teeth clean and to understand how our adults and dentists help to keep our teeth healthy.

• For children under 7 years, a pea-sized amount of toothpaste is recommended and brushing should be supervised.
• Children should be encouraged to spit out after brushing rather than rinsing with water, so that the fluoride remains on the teeth.
• It is recommended that water and plain milk are drunk.
• Children aged 5-7 years should visit their dentist for a regular check-up (every 6 months)

Help at home: sleep, dental health and good hygiene are all important aspects of keeping healthy. Discuss with your child which of these they want to improve and the steps to do this.

Summer 1: Week 2

Caterpillars
This week, we’ve been observing our caterpillars daily to see how much the they’ve grown.
We’ve also been talking about the life cycle of a butterfly.
Help at home: Can your child remember the four stages? Draw a picture of the life cycle.

We are super writers!
This week, we’ve been reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. On Monday, we made our own story maps.

After reading and retelling the story, we used our imagination to write our own versions of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We changed the main character and the food.

The Very Hungry Cat
The Very Hungry Spider
The Very Hungry Tiger
The Very Hungry Ladybird

PE
On Tuesday, they enjoyed their first session of PE with Mr McGriffiths. This half-term, they’ll play a game called Hulk Smash to develop their balls skills.

Maths
This week, we continued to develop our subitising skills. We used our understanding of doubles to support our subitising skills when looking at different arrangements. We created arrangements of 6 using different objects. We thought carefully about how we can arrangement the objects so it’s easier to subitise– e.g. 2 groups of 3. We then played a game called Odd One Out. We had to spot an arrangement that was not 6.

Poetry Picnic
This week’s poem was called Under a Stone.

Thank you and goodbye Reception!
Reception, I’ve loved teaching you this year. From starting school to going on your first school trip, we’ve shared many amazing memories together. You’ve made tremendous progress and I’ve no doubt you’ll continue to shine and make your new teacher proud.

Finally, keep reading and enjoy the rest of your time in Reception! I look forward popping back into school to see you all with Baby Wood.

Living and learning: dental health

This week in Living and Learning we learnt all about our teeth and how to keep them healthy. First of all we discussed what are some of the things we need to do to keep our teeth healthy, including visiting the dentist and brushing them twice a day.

Then we talked about what types of food are best for our teeth and which foods damage our teeth. We were really good at telling the difference between the two.

Finally, we talked about how to brush our teeth properly. We discussed the different stages and then had a practise on some big teeth! I love this song to help children remember how to brush their teeth!

Help at home by talking to your child about their dental health and how to brush their teeth properly.

Living and Learning – health and prevention

Year 3 have been learning about how we can keep our bodies healthy. For example, we have learnt about what germs are and how to prevent spreading them.

We started off the lesson by talking about the different types of germs there are; bacteria, viruses and fungi. These can be all around us and some are helpful and some are harmful.

The children then discussed how quickly and easily germs can spread. Wetalked about the need to wash our hands to help prevent this spread. We could use soap or hand sanitiser and to make sure we’ve washed them thoroughly enough, you could sing happy birthday twice while you do it!

Help at home: Discuss other ways we can stop germs from spreading.

Science: plants

This half term in science we are being biologists. We are looking at plants and their different parts. Today, we learnt about the difference between wild flowers and garden flowers. We came up with an amazing list of all the flowers that we knew! Some flowers were difficult to say whether they were wild or garden flowers because lots of people plant flowers they see in the wild in their garden!

After that, we went outside to see what flowers we could see in The Green. We had use great observations skills when identifying the different plants.

Help at home by looking out for different flowers in the park or your own garden. Can you identify them? Are they wild or garden plants?

We are geographers!

This half term, we are geographers.

In our previous Geography unit this year, we were learning about the U.K. This half term, we are expanding our horizons in our explorers unit.

We have been learning about different climate zones and the capital cities of some European countries (which I must admit after all our practise playing Globle, we are very good at!)

Our geography topic will continue to look at flooding, flood defences and learning about the two cities of York and Venice.

Here is the vocabulary for this half term:

Help at home by asking your child what climate zones are!

Term 3.1 spellings

This half-term, our spellings are linked to the rules and strategies we’ll be learning in class:

• alternative graphemes: sh (ch, ss, ti, s)
• alternative graphemes: k (ch)
• adding prefixes: mis, re
• adding prefixes: sub, tele, auto
• spelling patterns: gn, kn
• homophones: piece / peace, main / mane, fair / fare

Each Friday, you’ll be tested on 8 of the words from the list below.