Welcome back everyone. 

Welcome back to a new half term everyone, we have settled right back into the swing of things.

This week we have started our new topic 'Celebrations' we looked at the day of the dead, and bon fire night. We spoke  about what the day of dead is and we all designed colourful sugar skulls.  For bon fire night we looked at how to be safe around fire works and sparklers. We also made colourful fire work paintings. 

We are very lucky and our lovely PTA got us some boom wakaers, today we had a go with them! We are now working on a nursery rhyme. 

Come back next week to see what we have been up to. 


Parents now the weather is truing wetter and colder please ensure you have waterproofs and wellies as we do go out in all weathers. and of course a nice warm coat. 

*  Grapes - please can you ensure they are sliced. Thankyou.

Next Thursday - Forest school! please bring wellies and waterproofs. 

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

Well, what an amazing start the children have made to this half term! They have blown us away already with their commitment to their learning and their enthusiasm for our new topics - and we are only on day 2. Our mind map and learning journey are attached for this half term - let me know if any queries about what we will be covering. 

Hello all, 

What an amazing start the children have made to this half term! They have blown me away already with their commitment to their learning and their enthusiasm for our new topics - and we are only on day 2. 

A new half-term

Welcome back to a new half term!  I hope that you and the children have had a great break.  We have a whole range of fantastic learning opportunities planned for this half term.  Please see some of the important details below.

Year 5 Mindmap
Attached below is a mind-map which details what we plan to learn across the curriculum this half term.

Parent Consultations
We have set aside two evenings for parent consultations this half term.  Monday 6th November (3:30 - 6pm) and Wednesday 8th November (3:30 - 6pm).  Please sign up for a ten minute time slot through Arbor - or speak to Mr Hazlewood directly to arrange a suitable time.

PE Lessons
Our timetable for PE remains the same this half term.  Our PE will be on Tuesday.  Children can come into school in their PE kit on PE days.

Supporting learning at home
We encourage learning at home to support the work we do in school and enable children to become more confident.  Our home-learning expectations are:

Daily reading (15 minutes) - reading which is recorded in your reading record will contribute towards your Reading Karate reward
Times-tables and KIRF practice (20 minutes weekly) using Times Tables Rock Stars (TTRS) and the KIRF sheets (attached below).
Spellings (20 minutes weekly) - focusing on our focus spellings and the Year 4/5 and 5/6 statutory spelling lists (attached below).
Online learning - This will be set on Atom Prime (logins stuck in thy front of children's reading records)

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

All the very best,  the Year 5 team.

Maths

This half term in our maths lessons we have been learning about place value. We have been focusing on numbers up to 100 and understanding the relationships between numbers and what they mean. As you can see in the picture, we have also been learning to partition numbers and we used the Base 10 to help us. We have also been practising counting in our 2s, 5s, 10s and 3s. To help us with this we have using some songs which I have copy and pasted below, it would be great to play these for your children at home to help them to count confidently in these times tables. 
2s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvTcpfSnOMQ
5s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EemjeA2Djjw
10s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ftati8iGQcs
3s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_cn87hOCDM

English

English This half term we have been using the story of Little Red Riding Hood to help us write our own traditional tale. We enjoyed immersing ourselves in the story and having a go at writing the story of Little Red Riding Hood before making changes to the original story. I thoroughly enjoyed watching children's creativity come alive with stories of Little Blue or a big, bad fox! We then explored poetry and what this actually is. We enjoyed listening to a range of different poems and discussing the differences between poetry and stories. Our text we used to help us was Apes - Zebras, an a to z of animal poems. We then focused on shape poetry and enjoyed writing our own poems all about lions and penguins.

DT

This half term we have been looking at wheels and mechanisms and making a trailer for a bee bot. The children have thoroughly enjoyed exploring different toys that use wheels and axles and labelling diagrams. However, perhaps the most exciting part was using the saws to practising our wood cutting skills! We will finish this unit off after the half term and look forward to sharing our creations with you!

Science

Our topic this half term has been animals including humans and specifically focusing on growth. We have been exploring what animals and humans need to survive and moved onto looking at a balanced diet. We looked at naming the 5 major food groups and thinking about ensuring we are eating a balanced diet. We finished this off by creating our own balanced snack plate and the children enjoyed eating this!

History

This half term we have been learning about the sinking of the Titanic.  The children have really enjoyed this topic and got stuck in. We have sequenced the events of the night it sank, reasons why it sank and used some sources of information to help us understand what the Titanic was like. We will finish this off after half term before we start our new topic, which dare I say it... It might be even more exciting! 

Harvest Festival

Thank you for coming to join us at the church for our Harvest Festival celebration. It was lovely to support Liskeard Food Bank and show off our love for music. As Mrs Spencer said, if you do need any support, please don't hesitate to get in contact with us.

General information

Thank you for your continued support this half term, it has definitely been a tiring one! The children have been working really hard and it has been great to get to know them more. At the end of the half term I will share the new mind-map for this next half term's learning which will outline our new topics. After the half term, we will also start to learn and practise our KS1 nativity and the children in Year 2 will be given parts. I will share more information with you as it comes about the Nativity but watch this space!

Have a lovely half term,
Miss Harden

Maths in Reception and Year 1

We have been working hard and having lots of fun in our maths lessons. When we introduce a new topic to the children we use the Concrete, Pictorial and Abstract approach. We have started the Autumn term focusing on Place Value. The children have been counting and sorting objects, recognising the written words, finding 1 more and 1 less and counting backwards. We have been using the vocabulary ‘less than’, ‘more than’, ‘fewer’, ‘greater than’ and ‘equal to’. Have a look at some of our work. 

Well done to the children for a fantastic start to the year.

Our learning adventure (Ancient Egyptians) is coming to an end and the children have impressed me with their enthusiasm and curiosity this term. After the break we will be learning about where our food comes from and I will update the blog soon to let you know what this will entail.

Thanks for everything you do at home; reading, KIRFs, TTRockstars – it makes such a difference! I have added a maths homework onto Atom Learning. The usernames and passwords have been stuck into reading records. Please  log on to access this and let me know if you have any problems.

The children have also loved learning about the scratch software in their computing lessons and this is freely available at https://scratch.mit.edu/educators for any budding programmers out there.

Finally, we are well on the way to filling our marble jar for our class reward. All being well, we will be having a class party on Wednesday afternoon. Please bring a toy of your choice that can be shared with classmates (no electronics). We will also be voting on a film.

Miss Boney and Mrs Gamble.

Another week of fun here at Pre school.

Wow, we have had another fun week here at pre school. Kick starting the week with our Kixx session on Monday. Please remember this is EVERY
Monday. 

We then have had signing with Miss Rowes class and we performed our harvest festival song to them.  We then went into the forest school area with them and had a blast.  We will be starting this every Thursday after half term - Thursday parents please look out for the Tapestry post.

This weeks number we have been focusing on is the number 4! We have learnt to recognise the number and how to touch count out 4 objects. Children have even had a go at drawing the number 4 number block and recognising that he is a square!  

Our mark making and junk modelling area is a BIG hit with all of the children. Nearly everyone has visited this area and had lots of fun!

I know a few of you have said that the children have been signing the nursery rhymes at home so here we go - 

                                                   
Number song of the week - https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/school-radio/nursery-rhymes-five-little-speckled-frogs/zjjbnrd

Nursery rhyme - https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/school-radio/nursery-rhymes-mary-mary-quite-contrary/zdtj47h 

* Don't forget next Wednesday is school photo day - there is a Tapestry post regarding this.

Have an amazing weekend, we shall see you all next week.

Miss Whitty and Miss Ronald