Scratch, skeletons & skim and scanning the text

Year 3/4a have been busy bees!

We have deepened our understanding on Egyptian gods/goddesses through our guided reading sessions, imitated algorithms in our ICT lessons using the platform https://scratch.mit.edu/ to learn how to program a sprite and debug and have discovered which animals have endo-, exo- or hydro-static skeletons in Science.

Another great week

The weeks are flying by in 5H this year and this week has been a belter!   We started off on Monday learning our new class text map to help us with our WW2 diary writing.  We were so good at learning the text off by heart that we earned ourselves a reward.  As well as learning the text map, we have been learning about the features of diary writing and practising some of the sentence types which will be useful when we come to write our extended pieces.

In Maths we have been building our understanding of place value and are becoming much more confident using numbers up to one million!  We've learned how to order, compare, round and partition these numbers.

Deborah came in on Monday to teach us about what the bible tells us about love, and we have started to build towards programming our own Micro-bits.  We learned about Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler in our learning adventure and we even linked our PE to the World War by completing freeze frames to create scenarios which people might have experiences in the World War.

Well done to Tristan and Ruby for winning the 'Star of the week' awards this week - well deserved!

Another week of fun in the sun!

We have had another fun week here at pre school. 

This week we have been focusing on the number 3! around the tree, around the tree that's the way we make a 3! The children have loved counting out objects to make the number 3. 

We have had fun on the adventure play ground using all of our gross motor skills.

In singing time this week we have been singing the song we are learning with Mr Warwick ready for Harvest festival in a few weeks time. But we have also been singing all of our nursery rhymes. 

We have popped a post on tapestry but please start to get your shoe boxes ready for December - all the information is on the tapestry post. 

Next week we are starting to look into Autumn if you find anything on your walks please bring them in for our tuff tray. 

Have a lovely weekend and we will see you all next week . 

Miss Whitty and Miss Ronald :) 

2023-2024 Team Captains

Congratulations to our democratically voted Team Captains this year. We thoroughly enjoyed your videos and well done for gaining a majority vote! A perfect opportunity for the school to explore the British Value of Democracy and Rule of the Law in a school context. We look forward to working with you all this year and hearing some of your fantastic Team ideas! Go Kilmar! Go Sharptor! Go Bearah! Go Cheesewring!

Look at what we have been up to so far...

We are all enjoying pre school and learning new things! 

We are focusing on our colours at the moment. We are all really enjoying the 'Rainbow song'  - https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/school-radio/nursery-rhymes-i-can-sing-a-rainbow/zn3tqp3.

We have enjoyed exploring our outside area and our new outdoor music area! 

We are enjoying our music assemblies with Mr Warwick on a Thursday afternoon. Even if your child is not in on a Thursday we all still learn the songs! 

On Monday we had our first Kixx session of the year with Coach James and he said everyone was super star! This is every MONDAY so please make sure your child wears suitable footwear. 

It looks like the lovely weather has left us. Please can we ask that your child comes in with Wellie boots and water proofs, we do go out in ALL weathers. 

We have been focusing on the number 2 this week, the children have been going away and choosing 2 objects! You can do this at home. Also we have been learning to recognise what the number 2 looks like. When you are out and about please encourage your child to spot numbers in their environment. This could while out on walks ect. 

Come back next week to see what else we have been up to! 
Have a lovely safe weekend. 

Miss Whitty and Miss Ronald :)

Autumn Term 1  

Learning Adventure

What a fantastic start to the Autumn Term Year 3/4A! We've already begun our expedition to Ancient Egypt, discovering facts about the pharaohs, the journey to the afterlife and the pyramids. One thing's for certain, you'll never go hungry!


Maths - Place Value

We have used Base 10 and manipulatives to support our understanding of partitioning, realising that there may be more than one way to do this! Applying our knowledge of multiplication and division, has allowed us to calculate the intervals on a number line after finding the mid-point. 


English - Traditional Tales
 
We have started to look at the key features of traditional tales and discussed the importance of vocabulary used to create impact on the reader. 

Reading:
All children have been given a new reading journal and should have a banded reading book (Grey/Blue/Phonics etc.) plus a 'Reading for Pleasure' book chosen from the class/school library. 
Please continue to read as often as possible, recording this in your child's journal.

A FUN first full week

The first 9 days of term has absolutely flown by!  We have been so busy in class setting up the routines and expectations for the children - and also beginning our adventures in learning.

We have learned so much.  We have honed our poetry writing, using noun phrases, similes and metaphors to convey an emotion.  We have learned about place value and Roman numerals in Maths and even had a chance to play Yahtzee and look at a 'horse race'.  We have started to learn about the WW2 and the events that led up to the start of the war.  We've been excited to start reading our class novel - Letters from the Lighthouse and we've also had time to learn about Algorithms and look at the Gospels in the New Testament.

Its been a whirlwind first few days of the term.  Here are some photos of our learning - please remember to update your photo permissions on the parent section of Arbor so that we can share even more photos of our learning. 

We have enjoyed sharing the Traditional Tale of Little Red Riding Hood. The children have been learning the story, sequencing events and doing lots of role play. The Year 1's have also been writing captions, creating lists for items in Little Red's basket and writing character descriptions in a wanted poster. Have a look at some of our wolves enjoying role play and games in the forest area. 

Friday 8th September 

English

This week in English we have created poems about silly things that we have not done over the Summer Holiday. These things are often silly or highly unlikely, for example, a poem could read: (see below)

This term, we are focusing on the book “An Emotional Menagerie”, a poetry book about feelings.

Our class book is “Letters From The Lighthouse” by Emma Caroll. It is about an evacuee girl who is sent to a lighthouse in South Devon and realises that the place might be linked to her sister’s mysterious disappearance.

Maths

We have completed our pre-test for our unit (numbers up to 10,000,000) this week.

Learning Adventure

This term we are focusing on WWII – 1939-1945. This subject is inspiring our DT, pulleys and levers (WWII tanks). Our PE has also got something to with WWII, as we are doing dance inspired by that period.

Science

Our science subject this half term is Animals Including Humans. So far, we have created mind-maps with what we know so far and what we want to know.

By Tom


WELL DONE to 6K for achieving 100% attendance this week!

It has been a really successful start to the new academic year. It was fantastic to see the children so enthusiastic on return and they have settled into their new classes really well. In addition to the learning on site at school, this year we are busy planning clubs, trips, residentials and wider curriculum opportunities. Please bear with us as we set all of this up and we will share details with you once these have been firmed up. We will offer Bikeability again this year in Reception, Year 4 and Year 6 as well as swimming in Year 4. Full details of these will be communicated to parents across the year and we look forward to the learning at school and beyond.

We will soon be looking at elections for our Team Captains and Student Leaders 2023-2024 – Miss Kite will share further information with the year 6 parents/carers and we will hold a whole school election as we did last year. These ambassadors will support many things including enabling students in sharing their ideas for enhancing life at St Cleer.

As well as these ambassadors every class has an ‘I wish my teacher knew box…’ and there is an ‘I wish my headteacher knew…’ box outside my office for children to add thoughts, ideas and questions across the year. We always take their ideas into consideration.

Our focus value for assembly this half term is ‘Be creative…just like a chameleon!’

English

We kicked off our Traditional Tales unit by reading our unit text; Little Red Riding Hood. The children really enjoyed the story and even started to make comparisons to other traditional tales that have a big, bad wolf. We focused on retelling the story in pairs before then sequencing it in our books and writing a sentence to describe each picture. It has been a great start to the unit and the children have shown great enthusiasm for the learning ahead of them. 

Maths

This week we started our unit all about Place Value. This focuses on children's understanding of number and what those numbers look like and mean. We started off gently by practising making numbers with different resources in the classroom. This focused our thinking to tens and ones in numbers before we started answering some questions in our books. We will continue this next week and use lots of manipulative to help us. 

Another key part of our maths learning will be the Year 2 KIRFs (key instant recall facts). These are number facts that children should be able to recall instantly in order to help them make strong connections across different topics in maths. We will practise these regularly in school but it would be extremely beneficial if children could practise these at home too. With KIRFs, a little bit of practise often goes a long way and it is the repetition of these facts that will really help embed their learning. At the bottom of the blog post are the Year 2 KIRFs for the Autumn term, please do spend some time having a quick look at these and the recommended websites. If your child practises these at home, please do share their work with me via Dojo - I always love to celebrate any work completed outside of school!

We highly recommend the app 'One Minute Maths' by WhiteRose Mathematics. This is the scheme we follow in school and the app is designed for children in KS1. It is a quick and engaging way for children to practise addition and subtraction, and some of the questions link to the KIRFs. Daily practise on this app really will support your child's learning and quick recall of number facts. The best part about it... The app is completely free! For more information about this app, please follow this link: https://whiteroseeducation.com/1-minute-maths . 

General Information

Attendance has been fantastic this week so thank you for your support with this, it has been great to see the children again and get them settled in. Our PE lesson will be on a Wednesday so children can come into school in their PE kits on this day.

Below this blog post I have attached the KIRFs that children can practise at home but I have also attached a mind-map. This mind-map tells you what your children will be learning during this half term. You will also find some YR2 common exception words, these are words that we expect children to be able to correctly spell independently when in Year 2. It would be great for children to practise these at home regularly too. 

We do ask that you listen to your child read every day and write this in their reading record. We will collect their reading records on a Friday morning to check these and count up their reads for the Reading Karate bands. If you have any questions about your child's reading, please do get in contact as soon as possible. 

A gentle reminder, if you have not already please can you complete your parental consents on Arbor. This helps us to know which children can be photographed when completing the blog. Thank you in advance for your support with this. 

As always, if I can do anything to support you or if you have any questions, please do get in contact.

Take care, 
Miss Harden

What a great first week Reception/Year 1 have had with Mrs Nute and Mrs Rudd. We have all settled into school extremely well; making new friends, discovering our fun new learning environment, learning new routines and having lots of exciting learning opportunities. Please click on the links below to view our 'Welcome Booklet' and our overview for this terms learning. 

Welcome back! Welcome to Class 3/4B. It has been great welcoming the children into school this week - they have made a good start already and are settling in well.

Our Learning Adventure topic this term will be the Ancient Egyptians, which the children are very excited about! I have attached a document outlining what will be covered under this topic. I have also attached a mind map showing what we will be covering in the rest of the curriculum. I will update the blog with lots of your children’s amazing learning soon! Please come and say hello and reach out if you have any questions or queries! 

Miss Boney

REMINDERS

• Please read every day at home.

• See attached document for Maths KIRFs (Key Instant Recall Facts) to be practised at home too please!

• Our weekly P.E. slot is Friday mornings, starting this Friday. Please remember to pack a P.E. kit.

Welcome to Year 5!

Welcome to Year 5!  I hope that all of the children are happy and will have a wonderful time in Year 5.  We have been busy setting up the classroom and making sure that the start of term can be as smooth as possible.

Curriculum

Our topics for this half term can be found in the overview that I have attached below.  In addition to this you will find this half term’s Key Instant Recall Facts (KIRFs) to practice with your child.  I have also included the Year 5 recommended reads and statutory spelling lists.  Copies of these will be sent home.

P.E.

Our PE day has had to change to a Tuesday – please remember that children should come into school in full PE kit.

Class blog & photo permissions

In Year 5, we will endeavour to regularly update this blog to give you a flavour of what we have covered in class, and also pass on any important information.  To help us with this, please make sure that all image and publicity permissions are up to date on Arbor so that we can share images on the blog as soon as possible.

Supporting learning at home

As the children enter Upper Key Stage 2, we ask the children to consolidate their learning at home – however we never want this to become a battle! As a guide home learning expectations are:

Daily Reading (15 minutes) – recorded reading record to contribute to a Reading Karate reward

Times-tables and KIRF practice (20 minutes weekly) using Times Table Rock Stars (TTRS) and the KIRF sheets below

Spellings (20 minutes weekly)

Online learning – set on Atom Prime (logins will be stuck into children’s reading record)

As always, if you have any questions or concerns please do get in touch.

All the very best, Mr H and the Year 5 team.