Spring term after-school clubs
We’ve had a great first week to our after-school clubs. There are some places available on the following clubs if your child would like to join. Please refer to the letter below to show the relevant year groups.
Exploring habitats at Lotherton Hall!
Today, Year two had a fantastic trip to Lotherton Hall to learn about animals and their habitats. Guided by the educational specialists, we explored different habitats and the animals that call them home.
We compared the skulls of a herbivore and a carnivore, noticing how their teeth are perfectly suited to their diets. The children were fascinated to learn that penguins have sharp tongues to help them grip slippery fish!
Help at Home by:
- Explore your garden or local park and talk about the animals and their habitats.
- Read books about animals and how they survive in the wild.
- Watch nature documentaries together
Living and Learning: drug education
In our latest Living and Learning lessons, we’ve been learning about safety around medicines and household products.
We considered:
What are medicines?
What do they look like?
How are they used?
Why do people use them?
The children had lots to share about their experiences of taking different medicines and what they are used for.
Using different scenarios, we thought about what would be the best things to help. Sometimes a hug, some water, rest, a tissue or sleep can be enough to help someone feel better and medicine might not be needed.
One of the class talked about their inhaler medication – what it is used for and how they use it.
Then, we considered safety rules at home and how to keep themselves and others safe.
We sorted the following safety rules depending on whether they were true or false or if it depends on the situation.
We shouldn’t take someone else’s medicine. It is just for them.
Medicine should only be given by adults.
These might be tablets so they shouldn’t touch them.
They should tell an adult they have found them.
Help at home: please reinforce this key safety message at home. Make sure your child is aware of possible dangers at home, such as medicines and household products, and how to seek help if they need it.
Reading
We are using our class novel, Here We Are (Notes for Living on Planet Earth) by Oliver Jeffers to inspire our reading and writing over the next few weeks. This week, we have enjoyed reading and discussing the book and picking out the main themes and messages.
Each day, this week, we have looked at a new reading skill. We have been using our retrieval skills to read the text and find answers to questions from within the text.
Most children were also able to write their own retrieval question.
Another skill we have explored more this week, is being able to infer the meaning of new words or vocabulary in a text. We learnt how to read around the word to make sense of the unknown word.
We will link the book to our geography learning about our local area too.
Help at home
- read the book again and talking about the key messages
- talk about our local area – particularly what you like and dislike about it
- help your child learn their address
- read other books by Oliver Jeffers
There is a link to listen to it here. (This is a YouTube link. Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog along the play bar and turn off autoplay – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip.)
Have a happy and healthy Christmas break
Well done to the cast of Whoops a daisy angel! It was great to welcome you into school to watch performances this week.
We hope you agree that the children did a fantastic job and we are very proud of them all.
Mrs Taylor, Mrs Lake, Mrs Roth and Mrs Maqbool would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas and we look forward to seeing all the children in 2025!
Whoops a daisy angel
Rehearsals are going well for our Reception, Year 1 and 2 Christmas production of Whoops a daisy angel.
Following our dress rehearsal to the rest of the school on Monday, we will welcoming you to come and watch us on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon at 2:15pm.
If your child has brought a note home about their costume, please could you send this into school in a named bag by Friday. Thank you for your support.
We hope you enjoy the show!
Science: we are chemists
This half term, we have been learning all about materials and their properties (chemistry).
Here’s our vocabulary for this learning.
Actions help us to remember the definitions of these words. Which words are being shown here?
We’ve been exploring materials around us.
The object is a chair. The material is plastic. Plastic is a man made material and it can sometimes be recycled.
Then, we were scientists and we investigated the most suitable material for an umbrella. It needed to be waterproof, light and strong.
Then, we used our playdough to investigate how some materials are flexible and can change shape. How has the playdough changed shape?
Help at home: have a look at home to find different things that are flexible, rigid, brittle, transparent and opaque.
Topic – Art
This half term, we are learning about art – both practically and some art history too.
We are learning about Georges Seurat, who used pointillism (dots), and Bridget Riley, who is an optical artist (uses shapes, pattern and colour to create illusions).
We have created dots using cotton buds and bubble wrap.
Help at home by talking about your preferences for certain artists or colours and shapes.
Design & Technology: food preparation
This week, Year 2 have been using their food preparation skills to create their latest product, fruit smoothies.
This forms part of our Design and Technology food learning which involves following a recipe to create a product each term.
The recipe, taken from this healthy eating website, is our reading fluency text of the week so we’ve had chance to read and understand the instructions before we made our smoothies.
First, we got ready to cook by washing our hands, rolling up jumpers, putting on our aprons and tying long hair back.
We used lots of different food preparation skills including peeling, fork hold to help with claw grip (for chopping), measuring liquids and using measuring spoons.
Then, the children got to enjoy their smoothies.
We always evaluate our product afterwards to see how it could be changed next time. In a link to our learning about adjectives (words that add information about a noun), there were plenty of adjectives used to describe the smoothies – extraordinary, bubbly, fizzy, tasty, yummy, creamy and delicious.
Well done to all the children who worked safely and sensibly with Mrs Roth.
Help at home: your child has taken this recipe home. Can they demonstrate some of their food preparation skills by making this again at home.
English – Little Red
We are linking it to learning about nouns and adjectives in our writing. We are also using our retrieval and inference skills in reading and thinking about the author’s choice or words and phrases.
Help at home by discussing the text with your child. How is Little Red different to the traditional tale Little Red Riding Hood?
