So here we are at the end of Spring Term – two thirds of the way through the academic year already! We have had a lovely week carrying out Easter crafts, making chocolate Easter nests, Easter cards (check for a white envelope in their book bags!) and painting boiled eggs! We were going to roll them down the hill to race them but unfortunately the weather wasn’t on our side today!

We have continued our consolidation of Level 3 sounds in phonics this week and I must say I was very impressed with their writing in today’s phonics session – keep an eye out on Tapestry for posts about our Phonics, Maths and PE from this week. Unfortunately not everyone had their reading records in school when I wrote in the results of the children’s phonics assessments and the areas they need to now focus on so please drop me an email on beech@crowmoorschool.co.uk if the details are not in your child’s record otherwise I will update their reading record after the holidays.

In Maths we were learning about flat 2D shapes and solid 3D shapes. We have been doing lots of exploring and talking about their properties.

We have also been exploring materials as we wanted to find a suitable material to make a warm, waterproof hat and were testing materials to see if they were waterproof or not. The children had great fun doing this and managed to narrow it down to two or three things that were waterproof but not necessarily warm. We also revisited how materials change when heated and cooled and I was impressed that so many of them managed to refer to the chocolate being solid then melting into a liquid before cooling into a solid again.

In PE we were working on our ball skills and started out using balloons, trying to keep them up in the air using only our feet. Afterwards we used a football to pass between partners, focusing on keeping control and ensuring we aimed properly so the ball went in the right direction! With a bit of modelling and practice, many of the children were showing good control by the end of the session. We definitely have some budding footballers in our class.

Well done to our 10 readers who managed to get in the Lucky Dip box on Monday. It has just had a refill yesterday ready for after Easter as I have said if the children read 10 times by the time we get back after the holidays they can double dip in the box!

We do hope you have a lovely Easter break and the weather is kind!

See you bright and early on Monday 17th April.

Miss Jones & Mrs Kenny

We have had a lovely week getting ready for Easter and learning all about why Easter is so important to Christians and thoroughly enjoyed watching the dress rehearsal of Year 3 & 4’s play Glint of Gold. In Drawing Club we read the book ‘If I were the Easter Bunny’ by Louise Gardner and learned the words ‘joyful’, ‘thoughtful’, ‘conceal’ and ‘munch’.

In Phonics we have continued recapping level 3 and have completed assessments so we know what sounds and tricky words the children need to continue practicing. There will be a note of these in their reading records next week. I am really pleased to see there has been LOTS of regular reading this week so far, so please keep it up over the weekend and let’s see if we can get the highest number yet winning a prize from the lucky dip box on Monday.

In Maths the children have taken part in lots of independent activities recognising numerals and different representations of numbers to 10, ordering numbers and finding bonds to 10. Next week we are going to be learning about 3D shapes and pattern.

Thank you to everyone who has returned the consent form for the Brilliant Brushers scheme. If you have not yet returned it could you please ensure it is returned to me  by WEDNESDAY 29th March so we can make arrangements to have everything ready to start after Easter. If you have any queries about the scheme please let me know via the class email address beech@crowmoorschool.co.uk

Next week is the final week before the holidays. Don’t forget the Friends of Crowmoor have organised a special Easter disco for the children on Wednesday afternoon (during school hours) and the children are welcome to attend school in non-uniform that day.

It is also the day that the Easter Competition will be judged by the Mayor and the winners will be announced so don’t forget to get your entries in by Wednesday morning!

Have a lovely weekend.

Miss Jones

What a funny week it has turned out to be! I don’t think any of us expected as much snow as we had – it was certainly very deep where I live in Broseley! I hope you all managed to get out and have some fun whilst it was here! It’s been great to see some of your snow pictures on Tapestry and the brilliant reading that’s been going on using the sound cards and tricky words! Looks like some of you have been VERY busy!

Before the snow arrived, in Drawing Club this week we looked at an episode of Tom and Jerry called ”Little Runaway’ from 1952 (I know Tom and Jerry animations were a firm favourite from our survey of parents and grandparents last term). The children thoroughly enjoyed the episode which started with a seal escaping from a circus and ending up in Tom and Jerry’s pond. They were brilliant at learning our ‘Get up, Stand up’ words – abscond, flabbergasted, dupe, scarper, imitate and capture and enjoyed drawing their pictures of the seal, alternative food to give him so he didn’t take Tom’s fish and designing a trap for Tom to catch him and get the reward money from the circus. There’s some great writing coming from these too as they write their magic words/phrases or write about what might happen to their picture.

In Maths we were looking at counting forwards and back from 10, talking about WHY a particular number was next and also looked at identifying MORE and FEWER and again talking about how we knew. The children are becoming more and more confident with this as we will always ask them WHY or how they know when they give an answer to ensure they have a good understanding.

In RE we have been talking about why Easter is important to Christians. As part of this last week we learnt about Lent, and this week we learnt about Palm Sunday.

Well done to our 10 readers who picked a prize from the Lucky Dip box on Monday for reading at least 5 times at home. This was our highest number yet! Well done! It would be great to see even more children winning a prize on Monday!

Have a lovely weekend and we will see you Monday morning!

Miss Jones & Mrs Kenny

We have had a super week in Drawing Club reading the book Lost and Found by Oliver Jeffers. Our get up stand up vocabulary was: confused, accompany, dejected, consulted, miniature and constructed. The children had great fun drawing and writing about their own version of the boat, a new way for penguin to travel, something ‘malevolent’ lurking in the water and the polar animals that might come to penguins party!
In phonics we learnt the last three Level 3 sounds, ‘air’, ‘ure’ and ‘er’ and the tricky word ‘they’. These have all been added to their sound card bags to practice at home. It’s been lovely seeing the posts on Tapestry of you using the cards to create words and sentences for the children to read and the children have enjoyed sharing that with the rest of the class. Although they are mostly recognising the sounds on the cards, spotting them in a word is tricky, so by making words with the cards it helps them see each SOUND rather than each letter. E.g. w-ai-t, b-oa-t, n-igh-t. We will continue to practice reading and writing words and sentences using the level 3 sounds over the next few weeks to help children improve their confidence and fluency.

Well done to all the children who had a prize from the lucky dip box on Monday for their 5 reads over half term. It would be great to have even more this Monday when we check again so make sure you read a couple of times over the weekend! 🙂

In Maths we have met Numberblocks 9 and ten and have been learning to recognise and order numerals to 10, talking about how we know they number goes in a particular position and why. We have also started to look at the composition of 9 and 10 and learn about ‘rows’ and ‘columns’ in an array. E.g 10 is 2 rows of 5 or 5 columns of 2 or it can be 2 columns of 5 and 5 rows of 2. We also learnt that 9 is a “square” number like 4, because it has the same number of rows and columns (2×2 and 3×3). Over the next few weeks we will be working on learning number bonds to 10 as well as adding, subtracting, doubling, halving, sharing and grouping within 10 before we start to move on to numbers beyond 10.

If you have any queries about your child’s learning or any issues accessing Tapestry please email at the class email address beech@crowmoorschool.co.uk

Hope you all have a lovely weekend.

Miss Jones & Mrs Kenny