Week ending Friday 16th September 2022

Welcome
Welcome back to the children's first full week back after the Summer holidays. They have a had a very busy week in class and have continued to settle very well. Their attitude to reading at home is superb and almost all the class do this every night which is wonderful. Homework will commence soon and we will have more information about that in the next few days. Independence is already developing with them taking charge of resources and roles in the classroom. They love jobs such as putting out the benches in assembly, collecting the team points and tidying the pencil pots. The children have also been busy carrying out baseline assessments this week and have applied themselves very well. 

English
We have begun our first writing sequence which is based on the core text I am Cat by Jackie Morris.  This week, we read and responded to the book, which is actually a poem about a domestic cat dreaming of being various wild cats.  The book has beautiful illustrations and the language used is poetic and wonderfully descriptive.  We will be looking at other 'Cat' texts through this unit which will culminate with the children writing their own 'I am...' text about an animal of their choice.

Maths
We will begin our maths unit focusing on place value, numbers up to 10,000,000, comparing them, writing them, using number lines, powers of ten, rounding and negative numbers. This unit will last two weeks.

History
Our History unit this half term is all about the Industrial Revolution.  In this first lesson, the children learnt a little bit about what it was like to live in Victorian Britain and the class system in place at the time.  They also discovered that there was a huge boom in the population at this time and the effect that this had on people's lives. Next week, we will find out a bit more about the living conditions for working class people living in the cities at this time.

Art
This week in Art we completed our ‘All about Me Hoodies’ and this gave a great insight into who we are! They are on display in the classroom, and we hope you get chance to see them at our information evening next week. We also began to look at ‘Impressionism’ (totally different to the previous activity) and the children practised mixing watercolours to replicate a small section of Claude Monet’s famous ‘Japanese Footbridge’ painting.

French
In our French lesson we recapped phrases we had learnt last year and also discussed why we learn a foreign language and what makes a good linguist. We also began learning a new phrase “his name is and her name is…” and used it to play games.

P.E.
In our P.E. sessions with Coach Edwards the children will be focusing on netball and the skills associated with it. This session will be every Friday morning for the year.  This week we played some small team games where we practised some of the skills needed for netball such as passing and moving to find a space for the ball and then we all got chance to play a game to recap the actual game itself. We will also begin swimming at Okehampton which will form one of our P.E. lessons. this will start on Thursday 29th September 2022. 

Remember next Friday 23rd at 3:35pm our Information Evening and the straight after at 4pm our French Residential Information evening. We hope we get as many of you as possible to attend this very important date and an incredible opportunity for your children! 

Wishing you all a peaceful bank holiday weekend. We will see the children next week on Tuesday. 

Thank you,
Mrs Ware and Miss Ruby