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