Our story this week has been The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle as we have started to think about changes and transitions and how the children feel about moving to their new class in September.

The children have learned about the life cycle of a butterfly, comparing it to other lifecycles we have previously learned about such as plants/seeds, frogs, chicks and humans. We have watched videos of caterpillars spinning their chrysalides and the butterflies that emerge from them and explored pictures of different caterpillars and butterflies, trying to match them together. The children have also created some fantastic artwork over the week, making their own caterpillars and butterflies in the craft area to contribute to this fantastic class display with the sunflowers they made a few weeks ago.

In Maths we have been learning about manipulating shapes, using them for a purpose and rotating them to create a range of shape pictures. They have also learned about Tangrams and used the shapes from a tangram square to create a number of different minibeast and animal pictures.

Monday is the whole school move-up morning where the children will be spending the morning in their new class. They will register in class as normal in the morning and return to Beech class as normal after their lunch break. If you have any queries about this please email me on the class email beech@crowmoorschool.co.uk

We hope you have a lovely weekend and don’t forget to keep reading!

Miss Jones & Mrs Kenny

This week we have had great fun with our book of the week ‘You Can’t Take an Elephant on Holiday’ by Patricia Cleveland-Peck. The children have come up with some fantastic ideas for what else you can’t do – take a pig to the park, a lion to the library or a giraffe to gymnastics! Here are some examples of their fantastic independent drawing and writing below.

This week’s phonics has been a little tricky, reading words ending in ing, words ending in -ed (but making the ‘t’ sound e.g. bumped, cracked), words ending in -ed (like hunted) and then words ending in -est (freshest, softest) as well as learning the tricky words out and today. The children will continue to review and consolidate for the rest of term to ensure they are ready for starting the next stage of their phonics journey in Year 1 in September.

In Maths they have been exploring patterns and learning about a ‘rule’ being the repeated part. Over the last couple of days they have been making up their own patterns with various resources and trying to guess what their friend’s rule is. We have tied this in with revisiting odd and even numbers and doubles and seeing if they could identify the different number patterns presented to them.

We have also been talking about special people in our lives, why they are special to us and what nice things we can do for them to show them we appreciate them. I believe there will be a lot of people getting breakfast in bed and a hand with the cleaning this weekend!! 😉

Please make sure you look in your child’s bag, as they have made some ‘fab’ cards to give to their special person.

This week we have also been practicing for our Sports Day, which is on Tuesday morning at 9:30am on the school field. Fingers crossed the rain will stay away, so they can show you their fantastic skills – definitely some athletes in the making. Please ensure children come to school in their PE kits that day.

There will be NO PE on Friday (20th) next week. Children should come to school in full uniform that day.

PE will return to Fridays the following week (27th) for the rest of term.

Have a lovely weekend. Don’t forget to read, read, read!

Miss Jones & Mrs Kenny

It’s been lovely to see all the children back after the half term break to hear all their news and start our new theme of Summer! We started the week reading the story The Train Ride by June Crebbin and talking about all the places you can go by train. The children had a super time role-playing travelling on a train, taking turns to be the conductor and making their own tickets. Yesterday they turned it into a reading train, where everyone on it had to read a book! 🙂

They have enjoyed drawing and writing about who would be at the end of their train journey and also where they might end up if they went through a magic tunnel! There were some very interesting choices and some super writing.

In phonics they have continued to learn longer words and practiced ‘chunking’ them to help us read them easier. They have also learned the tricky words there, when, what and one.

In Maths the children have consolidated their understanding of grouping, by finding out how many ice creams they can decorate with 12 sprinkles if they are grouped in 2’s, 3’s, 4’s, 5’s or 6’s! Some children were starting to see the connections such as you can only decorate 2 ice creams with 6 sprinkles, but you can decorate 6 ice creams if you only put 2 on etc.

We’ve also talked about the seasons and discussed the changes we see, hear and feel. We all agreed that summer makes us happy as we all get to be outside more (when it’s not raining!), go to the park and the beach and of course eat ice creams! We have now turned our home corner into an ice-cream parlour which they are enjoying ‘working’ in and visiting as customers. They also enjoyed crafting sunflowers, which we all felt were the flower of the summer and made us smile. Keep an eye on Tapestry to see more!

Today we started practicing for Sports Day (9.30am 18th June) – that does seem to have come round rather quick!  We have practiced two different events today, one of which was Javelin. We definitely have some budding athletes in our class with powerful throws and I am very glad the javelins are only foam considering how far some of them managed to throw them (almost at me!) today!

Please remember to record in your child’s reading record each time you read with them. Lots of them are telling us they have read but without it recorded we cannot count it towards their chance of picking from the Lucky Dip box!

Have a lovely weekend. Fingers crossed the sun stays with us!

Miss Jones & Mrs Kenny

We have had a great week this week continuing our underwater theme and reading the story ‘Somebody Swallowed Stanley’ by Sarah Roberts, who is a wildlife expert and animal behaviourist.

The story is all about ‘Stanley’ who is actually a stripy plastic carrier bag, and what happens to him (and some of the sea life) when he ends up in the ocean. We have been discussing what we can do to reduce the amount of plastic we use and how we can help keep our oceans clean and save the sea creatures. Here is some of their fantastic independent writing!

They have all been very enthusiastic about the topic of recycling, sorting some of our ‘rubbish’ by type and talking about the things we can and can’t recycle. They created some great turtles, dolphins and fish using recycled egg cartons.

They’ve also thoroughly enjoyed reusing their own ‘Stanley’ to make a kite (like the boy does at the end of the story, although we didn’t quite have enough wind to see if they would fly well before it started to rain! Don’t forget to look on Tapestry to catch up with what we have been up to.

In Maths they have been learning about sharing and grouping, making sure each group is equal. We will continue to work on grouping, odd and even numbers and will also revisit doubling next week.

In Phonics the children are continuing to work on reading longer words using the sounds they already know and they are trying hard to read with greater fluency. We hope you are enjoying hearing them read their Little Wandle books from their previous week’s group read. They have already read this book in school 3 times so were excited to take them home and show you how brilliantly they can read them. They do also have their phonically decodable Bug Club book to practice reading with too.

Please don’t forget to record in your child’s yellow reading record each time you read with them. If they read at home at least 4 times in a week, they can choose a special prize from the special Lucky Dip box. If you have any queries about your child’s reading books please let me know either in person or via the class email beech@crowmoorschool.co.uk

Have a lovely weekend – hopefully the sun will keep shining!

Miss Jones & Mrs Kenny