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Design a King's Crown House Competition

If you could design a new crown for the King, what would it look like?  Remember:

• This competition is to design a crown which incorporates one of our school values or attributes
• Your design must be on an A4 piece of paper and decorated using pens, paint or colouring pencils.  You can also decorate parts using tissue paper or collage, but no gems, sequins etc. as these cannot go through the laminator
• To write your name and the value your crown represents on the back of your design
• The closing date is Friday 5th May

The designs will be displayed outside in the school grounds for the duration of the Coronation weekend and will form part of the Abberley Village Crown Trail.

Year 6 celebration with Bayton

On Thursday 18th May, year 6 at Bayton will be having their end of SATs celebration campout. They have invited the year 6 children from Abberley to join them from 3.45pm until 5.45pm for basketball, netball and football matches.

Parents would need to arrange transport to and from Bayton, but you are welcome to drop the children off. We hope that it will be a great chance to socialise and wind down following the SATs.

We've had a great week in Wrens.  We started out with designing and making traps to catch the giant with Mrs Postlethwaite in DT on Monday.  We were very impressed with the children's creative ideas and how they used different resources and materials around the classroom to bring their designs to life.   In PE we practised running with control and being able to turn and stop.  We also practised throwing and catching beanbags before putting our aiming skills to the test in a team game.  In topic, we set up an experiment to see what conditions a seed needs to germinate and made predictions about whether it needed light and water, just light or just water.  We will let you know the results in the next couple of weeks!

In maths this week, Year 1 have been looking at putting objects into equal groups and working out the total amount of objects by writing a repeated addition sentence.  We used our knowledge of counting in 2s, 5s and 10s that we learnt last week to help us solve the problems.  Meanwhile, Reception have been looking at the composition of the number 10 and explored number bonds through playing games to see how many more we needed to make 10. 

In English, Year 1 imagined what land they might find at the top of the beanstalk.  We were very impressed with all the different creative ideas and the children worked very hard to include interesting vocabulary in their writing.  Reception continue to make good progress in their phonics learning.  They are now working on phase 4 which covers reading words with consonant clusters, plurals and multisyllable words.  Phase 4 also introduces a lot of new "tricky" words so please continue to practise these using the homework sheets in the red books.

In English, the children have written some fantastic instructions on how to wash a variety of animals (some of which would be incredibly tricky to wash!). These have included some great imperative verbs and lots of children stretched themselves to include different types of clauses. As the week continued, we have looked closely at the structure of 'How to Wash a Woolly Mammoth' and are going to be writing our very own story that is closely aligned with how our class book is set out. We wrote a plan together for a story called 'How to Wash a Hooty Owl'. 

In maths, the children have learnt to measure mass in grams (g) and kilograms (kg). We know that 1000g make 1kg and have all held a kg in our hands to see how heavy that really is and how light a gram must be! The children have begun to look at scales and what numbers appear between two labelled parts of a scale for example 100g-(missing measurement)-200g. The missing would be 150g and we are learning to look at the scale to work out the missing increments. This has been tricky in some cases and we'll practise lots more over the next couple of weeks. The children have also started using their multiplication and division facts to solve fraction problems. We have learned that to find half of a quantity then we can either share the amount between two groups or count in groups of two until we reach the number given. I wonder how you find a third or a quarter of an amount?

In DT, Year 1 & 2 have begun their new topic on 'free standing structures' and our focus this week was bridges. We have spoken all about different bridges we know about, whether they were high or low, long or short and what they were made from. We learned that bridges can go over a lot of different things like rivers, streams, valleys, motorways and railways (including lots more). The children then built their own bridges in teams of 5 between two chairs. 

In Year 1&2 RE lessons, the children have thought in detail how important it is to be part of a community and how many people in the UK and around the world might be lonely.  The children thought about how it might feel if you don't have anyone to share things with, like experiences, playing or meals. The children filled in a template of themselves with things that made them individual and special and then listed feelings they would have if they were lost. Lots of children were excited to share all of the communities they were part of such as Brownies, Beavers, their neighbours, family and swimming clubs to name a few. 

In science, the children explored to find different varieties of plants in our school ground. We discovered that trees, bushes and grass are all plants. 

In PSHE, the children were sharing their experiences of what types of 'touching' they like and which types they dislike. We found that lots of children liked to be tickled and nobody liked the feeling of being pushed or hit. We know that we all have the right to say 'please stop, I don't like that' if we don't like the way another person is touching us. 

In geography, the children have been learning about food miles. We had fun investigating how far some food travels before it reaches our plates. 

Last week we saw some super swimming from all year 1 & 2 pupils. All children entered the water with confidence and we were impressed with how many children had made such excellent progress in their swimming since we last swam in the autumn term. 

Remember to get creative and get designing a new King's Crown for our Coronation competition.

Skylarks enjoyed their celebration hot chocolate today after raising the most money for the £20.23 challenge. Thank you Kerry for the delicious hot chocolate. 

English, we have continued to focus on non-chronological reports. The children have been practising the skills of drafting and editing their research in order to make it interesting and to flow for the reader. After the drafting process was complete they began to produce their non-chronological reports about life for children during the Victorian era. They have worked very hard on these and the final products are great!

In maths, we have been looking at decimal fractions. The children have been identifying tenths as decimals on place value grids and number lines, and dividing 1 and 2 digit numbers by 10. We then moved on to identifying hundredths as fractions and decimals and how these look on a place value grid. 

In geography this week, we began looking at landscapes. The children identified different types of landscapes and how they can affect what lives and grows in this location. They then used this new knowledge to design their own islands that had to have a variety of different landscapes.

In science, the children quickly recapped their learning on mirrors linking with light. Then we moved onto our new topic which is electricity. The children identified ways in which we use electricity and what life would be like without it. They then learnt about static electricity and experimented with it to give themselves crazy hair! 

In English this week, we have continued to read Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. The children have been learning about direct and reported speech and how to punctuate these correctly. 

In maths, we have continued our work on angles and the children have been using this knowledge to find missing angles in straight lines and around a point. They have also learned about opposite angles being equal in intersecting lines. The children have seen how they need to be angle detectives, using what they know to help them, as not all missing angles are obvious straight away.

We were able to finish our DT unit from last half term this week, much to everyone's delight. The children used their prototype models to make their mini bird hides. They put many of the techniques we had learned to very good use and they worked extremely well together as a team to produce excellent results. As you can tell from the photos, they were very proud of their shelters.

In PSHE, we were discussing how some online communities can be good and how to keep themselves safe whilst being online. We also talked about age restrictions and why these were necessary. 

In athletics, the focus was on sprinting this week. The children had to think about what they needed to do to increase their speed and help to improve their technique. The children worked in small teams to do this and worked as coaches for each other. 

This week in Merlins class, we have continued consolidating our understanding of a number of topics covered throughout the year. In English, we have recapped all word class including verbs, adjectives, nouns, pronouns, determiners, prepositions, conjunctions etc! We have also revised our knowledge of clauses and phrases and differentiating between a main and subordinate clause.

In maths, we have recapped using the four operations with fractions. We have also revised using BIDMAS when solving mixed operation calculations. We have  been reflecting shapes across mirror lines and finding lines of symmetry. We ended the week with a competitive game of battleships to consolidate our understanding of grid coordinates!

In PE this week, we have been practising short distance running. We have taken on various roles including runner, coach and timer to refine our sprinting technique. 

In Geography, we have explored the city of London and how it became the capital city it is today. We looked at the main landmarks and tourist attractions within the busiest parts of the city and plotted a route map through the streets of London using a  6 point compass. We then began to explore the geography of Wales and used an atlas to locate the main cities, rivers and mountains.