What a super week we have had and a fab day to end the term with everyone dressed as their favourite characters and sharing their favourite stories. Please make sure you check out the pictures on Tapestry from today. If you are unable to access your Tapestry account please let me know via the class email beech@crowmoorschool.co.uk and I will do my best to resolve that for you.

We have completed phonics assessments this week and I am really pleased with the progress the children are making and how hard they are trying to build their fluency and learn their tricky words. Please don’t forget they have access to the Big Cat ebooks online at Collins Ebooks (collinsopenpage.com) using the logins that were sent home earlier this term. If you need a reminder of this please let me know.

In Maths we have been learning about shapes, talking about 2D and 3D shapes and their properties. The children have been trying hard to use the correct mathematical language to describe them such as ‘flat face’ and ‘curved surface’. They have also been working on continuing and creating more complex patterns.

Next term our theme is Under the Sea. Details can be found here: Beech Class Information Page if you scroll towards the bottom. You will also find a number of useful websites and other useful information on that page.

Please remember it is really important for the children to still keep reading and practicing their sounds and tricky words over the holidays. Just a few minutes a day can make all the difference.

Have a lovely couple of weeks – hopefully the weather will be kind!

See you bright and early on the 9th of April!

Miss Jones & Mrs Kenny

The end of another week already and what a lovely Spring day it turned out to be!

This week our book was Jasper’s Beanstalk by Nick Butterworth and Mick Inkpen. The children have been drawing and writing about the main character Jasper and had some fantastic ideas about what they thought might be at the top of the beanstalk he grew. Fairies, unicorns, friends, castles and princesses to name a few but my favourite was the cotton candy van that gave away free cotton candy! Yum!

They have also really enjoyed exploring different types of seeds and planting their own sunflowers. We have also sown some cress to see how much quicker it grows than our other seeds.

In Maths we have been learning more about 10 and have been working on finding and recalling bonds to 10. Today some of the children were even exploring 3 or 4 parts – so 2 and 3 and 5 or 2 and 3 and 3 and 2!

In Phonics we are continuing to consolidate our knowledge of the Phase 3 sounds and tricky words and have been looking at longer words with double letters e.g. butter, bigger, dinner, shimmer and they even read the word fan-tas-tic brilliantly! Well done to those who managed to read their reading books five times this week and earn a dip in the lucky dip box. We are aiming for fluency so each book must be read at least three times before it is changed. If you are logging on to the Collins Ebooks that are available to them, please just record this in their reading record too! Thank you.

Just a reminder that PE is on FRIDAY only until Easter. Children should be in their PE kits on this day. Trainers should only be worn on PE days.

Next week we will be learning about animal lifecycles and will be reading the book The Ugly Duckling. We have already had some discussions about what sorts of creatures hatch from eggs and which animals give birth to their young, but will be looking more into different lifecycles next week.

It is of course World Book Day on Thursday, so we look forward to seeing who the children decide to come to school as and hearing all about their favourite book characters. There will be a little surprise in store for the children and I am sure it will be a wonderful day.

Hopefully this afternoon’s sunshine will stay a while! Have a lovely weekend!

Miss Jones & Mrs Kenny

We’ve had a great first week of Spring 2. To start our topic of Growth for this half term, in English we have read the story ‘Monkey Puzzle’ by Julia Donaldson. The children really enjoyed joining in with the repeated parts and thought it was funny the butterfly kept getting it wrong! We have been learning some wonderful new words – sorrowful, frustrated, bewlidered, persevere and triumph – see if they can remember them and what they mean. They have drawn and written about their favourite character from the story and also enjoyed imagining what might come out of an egg that butterfly finds in the forest! Some interesting and brilliant ideas!

They have also been creating some lovely artwork of the animals, which will be going up on our display in the corridor. We will share a picture for you to see when it is complete.

We have also talked about other things that grow, that we will learn about this term, emphasising that only living things (plants, animals and humans) grow and this week focused on animals and their babies, talking about which ones hatch from eggs and which give birth. We have also started a little project to design and build a carrier to keep an egg safe. If you have any small cardboard, plastic or other boxes or containers you were going to recycle, we would be really grateful if you could donate them to us for them to use. Thank you.

In Maths we have learned about 9 and 10. They have been exploring and finding the numerals or numbers of objects, representing the numbers themselves in different ways and comparing them to the other numbers they know. Next week we will look at one more and less, doubles and number bonds to 10.

In Phonics we are continuing to practice the sounds we learned last half term, revisiting them daily and working on our blending and fluency. It is really important the children sound out the words e.g. “c-oa-t” then blend to read “coat” whilst they are still developing their blending skills. If they are finding this tricky, you can model for them but it is important they still say the sounds before the word so they learn to do it more confidently themselves rather than just learning the words by sight.

Just in case you’ve not seen it I posted a memo on Tapestry recently asking if you would be willing to share a family photo to put up in our new home corner after the big half term move round. We just thought it would be lovely for the children to have a picture of their family up on the wall to share and talk about. If you would like to do this please email beech@crowmoorschool.co.uk, add it as an observation on Tapestry or pop a copy in their bag and we will copy it and return it to you.

Have a lovely weekend – hopefully it will be a little drier!

Miss Jones & Mrs Kenny

This week our book of the week was Poles Apart by Jeanne Lewis. The children have enjoyed following Mr White the polar bear and the penguin’s trip round the world to get back to the South Pole, making models with the construction kits of some of the landmarks they passed, and using found resources to make boats to travel across the sea. They have also written shopping lists and created their own picnics for Mr White.

In maths they have learnt about mass using balancing scales and explored the capacity of a range of containers, comparing them and putting them in order to show greatest to least capacity.

In phonics this week the children have been working on reading and writing longer words such as lemon, market, farmyard, rooftop, bedroom using the ‘chunking’ method and reviewing all the tricky words we’ve learned so far. We have also been completing some phonics assessments so we know which sounds and tricky words we need to keep practising after half term.

We had a lovely chat about why we were all dressed in our own clothes today and talked about what mental health was and why it was important. The children shared their favourite things to do and thought about what was special to them. We had a real range of answers from things to places and people. E.g. “my X-box”, “my toys”, “my house”, “the beach”, “watching the rain”, “looking for rainbows”, “hugging my mum on the playground after school” and “just my family”

It was their last Monday PE session with the coach this week. After half term PE will be on Fridays only.

Have a lovely half term break and don’t forget to read, read, read!

See you Monday 19th February.

Miss Jones & Mrs Kenny