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

What a long and busy week we have had! The children thoroughly enjoyed the disco on Wednesday and it was great to see so many of you at Parent’s Consultations earlier in the week and have the opportunity to have a chat about their progress and next steps. I hope you enjoyed looking at the children’s writing and seeing how much progress they have made. I hope you also found the information about the Early Learning Goals useful. If you mislay your copy or need another for any reason, these can always be viewed electronically near the bottom of the Beech Class Information page along with other useful information.

This week in Drawing Club we read the story The Ugly Duckling and the children had lots of fun drawing the ugly duckling, the pond he hatched in, their own idea of what else he could have transformed into and what he could turn the other ducklings into with a magic wand/potion! They also learnt some quite tricky vocabulary this week – peculiar, hideous, malicious, transform, elegant and fulfilled.

In phonics they have learnt the tricky word ‘you’ and the next four sounds ‘ur’, ‘ow’, ‘oi’ and ‘ear’. The sounds and tricky word have been added to their sound bags. Remember you can use them as creatively as you like, not just for them to practice sounds but they could be used to practice blending by making words for them to read, especially with the digaphs they are learning. By making them with the cards it is easier to see that it’s still three sounds even though it has more than three letters e.g. c,oa,t,  l,igh,t,  m,oo,n. If they are confident reading them you could challenge them to segment words to spell them using the cards rather than writing them.

In Maths we have been learning about length and height, comparing by using the words long/longer/longest, short/er/est and tall/taller/tallest as well as learning to measure length and height by using cubes. We have also been talking about ordering the days of the week and explored measuring time using the timer and by counting how many things we could do in a set time.

After talking about how we can look after our wonderful world and recalling seeing some of the icebergs melting in the Snowchick, the children then explored ice cubes and frozen blocks and thought of different ways to free the trapped penguins! They had great fun melting and breaking the ice to see what was most effective. They then predicted how long it might take to freeze more water to make more ice cubes and icebergs.

Well done to all our super readers who were able to choose a prize from the lucky dip box. Please remember to keep reading over the next week and we will change lucky dip day to Mondays for the next half term so those who read over the half term will be able to choose a prize when we return to school.

After half term we will be celebrating World Book Day on 2nd March. The children can come to school dressed as their favourite book character – we have been having a chat about ideas this afternoon. We can’t wait to see what everyone will come as. 🙂

After half term PE will be on Fridays only. Children should wear school uniform on all other days. Please ensure on Fridays children come to school wearing their PE kits (plain white t-shirt, black or dark blue shorts or jogging bottoms) and a school jumper and that any earrings are removed for PE as per school policy. Thank you.

Have a wonderful week next week, hopefully the weather will be kind!

See you on Monday 27th February.

Miss Jones & Mrs Kenny

This week we continued our adventures with Pingu in Drawing Club and ended the week with our writing assessment where the children drew and wrote about a short clip called Something Fishy, where a lady at the laundrette looked into the washing machine and it became an underwater scene with sock fish, hat turtles, a t-shirt squid and a jeans shark at the end! They really enjoyed watching the clip and did some great writing. You will be able to see their books on Monday and Tuesday during Parent’s evening and see the progress they have made in Drawing Club since September and with their writing assessments.

If you still need to make an appointment or need a reminder of your time please email me on beech@crowmoorschool.co.uk.

In maths we have been consolidating our knowledge of the composition of numbers to 8 and have been working on recognising different representations – e.g how it looks on a ten frame, on fingers, on a dice or in a dot formation for numbers 7 and 8 and of course the numerals. We have been working on writing them as well as reading them and checking that they are formed correctly.

Phonics is starting to get really tricky as we learnt four new phonemes this week but only three graphemes. The long ‘oo’ (like the moon) short ‘oo’ like a book, ‘ar’ as in star and ‘or’ like a horn. New sound cards have been added to their bags to practice recognising at home as well as our new tricky word ‘my’. Please remember to read at home as often as you can and ensure that it is recorded in their yellow reading records. Reading for just a few minutes a day can make such a difference. The winners of prizes from the lucky dip box for reading 5 times at home this week are: Agatha, Ayla, Billy, Harriet, Isla, Isla-Grace, Piper and Tommy. Well done to all of you! A couple of children just missed out this week and only needed one more read so keep it up!

Next week we are reading the traditional story of The Ugly Duckling for Drawing Club and will be measuring and comparing length, height and time in maths. In phonics we will learn the next four sounds and then we will only have three more left for level 3. We will then spend several weeks recapping and becoming more confident with reading and writing words (and sentences) containing those sounds.

We hope you have a lovely weekend!

Miss Jones & Mrs Kenny