Week ending 4th October 2024

We have had another busy week in Chestnut Class.  We are very pleased that the children are feeling settled and safe in their new classroom and are getting used to the routines of our mixed age class.
English
As well as their daily phonics lessons, the children had the following text based lessons this week:
Year one have started planning and writing our own story based on Stanley's Stick this week.  In our lessons, we have been learning about nouns, adjectives and verbs and have been using them in our writing.
Reception children based their drawing club activities on the story of Farmer Duck. This fed into other areas of their learning such as making lego farms, playing with the farm set, making playdough animals with cutters and utensils and floating rubbers ducks down the guttering in the water trays!
Maths
Reception children have been exploring how numbers can be composed of 1s and began investigating the composition of 3 and 4. Composing and de-composing numbers involves children investigating part–whole relations, e.g. seeing that 3 can be composed of 1 and 2. The children learnt from practical experience that a ‘whole’ is made up of smaller parts and is, therefore, bigger than its parts. 
Year one have come to the end of the unit on place value in which the children have learned to count on from any number, find one more and one less and to compare and order numbers. They also practised using number lines! Big ones in the playground and smaller ones in their books! Next week we will begin our second unit which is all about addition and subtraction. 
Wider Curriculum
We learnt about Mary Anning in history this week.  She was a scientist and palaeontologist who is famous for finding fossils in Lyme Regis where she lived including the first ever ichthyosaur skeleton. But perhaps her most important find, from a scientific point of view, was her discovery of the first plesiosaur. 
In music on Monday we began singing our harvest song The Dingle Dangle Scarecrow and on Tuesday we had our PE session with our Saints coach.  Year one also learnt about the parts of a computer and we are learning how to log in to an account on a Chromebook.
On Wednesday we continued with our D.T. project making a mechanism for our moving monster. All Year 1 children made a linkage system using levers and pivots and had the best time whilst making them. It was quite a fiddly task, but all persevered and really enjoyed the task! Afterwards, we continued our PSHE lessons talking about our emotions and recognising how we might behave when we feel certain emotions such as butterflies in our tummies when we are nervous or laughing when we are happy. 
On Thursday we had an afternoon of golden time and Karen came to say hello! The weather was glorious so we all made the most out of our outside area, playing in the sand, with the water, the dolls house, the farm shop and the construction materials. It was so nice to see them playing so beautifully together!
On Friday we continued with our SAINTs PE session and had a go at our science lesson, learning about reflection. We used a torch to shine onto objects to see which ones 'reflected' the light the best. The objects we used included a mirror, a spoon, a plastic bowl, a dark blanket and a teddy bear. 

Reception- please remember to have a go at the phonics links posted onto dojo today and to have a go at your flashcards and your sound blending books!
Year 1- well done on the fantastic efforts with your spellings and your homework! Remember to keep this up as it really makes a difference. 
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