We have had a busy week in Wrens and are thoroughly enjoying our class topic of "Into the Woods".  This week we were focussing on the season of autumn and spent an afternoon exploring our wonderful school grounds looking for signs of autumn. The children were amazed by all the different coloured leaves they found, and we are looking forward to using them in some autumn craft over the next few weeks.  We have also set up an autumn investigation tray so if you go on a walk in the woods over the weekend and your child finds any interesting autumn items, please bring them into school so we can add them to our display. 

There were two Gruffalos on the loose in Forest School as our story this week was "The Gruffalo's child". It has been lovely to watch the children growing in confidence as they take it in turns to become the characters and act out our stories.  Unfortunately, we didn't have any snow for making tracks, but we found out that mud works almost as well!

In maths this week we continued to look at sorting and had great fun making up our own rules for putting things into sets.  We thought of all sorts of different ways to sort our farm and safari animals!  We then moved onto practising our careful counting and using the mathematical language of "more" and "less" to compare amounts in different sets.

This week the children will be bringing home their first reading book. The children have already read these books in school 3 times with an adult. When the book comes home, they should be able to read it with confidence and I hope they enjoy sharing them with you as a celebration of their reading ability.  At this stage you will find some of the reading books do not contain words.  As the children develop their blending skills they will move onto worded books.

Please come and chat to me on the playground before school if you would like any further information on our phonics programme.

This week in English, Year 2s have spent time identifying rhyming words from our book. They then had a go at producing their own rhyming words about different animals. They have also learnt about when exclamation marks are used and how they alter the way that we read something. The remainder of the week has been spent planning and editing poems they have produced. They have been writing poems about things that they love and have had the challenge of including alliteration, rhyming words and exclamation marks. Year 1s have been busy reading longer words which contain phase 4 long vowels. We are improving our 'chunking' and splitting words into smaller words to help us read them.

In maths, Skylarks have been very busy! Year 1s have been comparing objects and numbers using the language 'less than', 'greater than' and 'equal to'. They then progressed onto comparing numbers using the inequality signs. Year 1s have also begun to look at number lines and use these to count forwards and backwards. They drew giant chalk number lines on the playground and used them to count with a partner. 

Year 2s continued their learning on number lines by using them to identify tens and ones. They also used their knowledge of numbers to estimate where different numbers go on a number line labelled only with 10s. Year 2 have also recapped their learning on comparing objects and numbers and have done this using the inequality signs.

In art this week, we went on a leaf hunt as leaves were the focus of the artwork. Children carefully sketched their leaves using fine liner pens and sketching pencils. They took their time and looked carefully at the details of the leaves in order to make their sketches realistic. They used wax crayons to take rubbings of the leaves to spot further detail. They drew leaves with wax crayons before using Brusho to create fantastically bright and beautiful leaves which will go up in our classroom as autumn creeps in.

This week we have been using number lines to estimate the value of numbers up to 1,000 and where they are on a number line. We have compared numbers within 1,000 and represented them using base ten.

In English, we have completed our character descriptions and have introduced our new writing of an inner monologue. We have focused this week on the purpose of our writing and the children have done a brilliant job on editing and evaluating their character descriptions. Towards the end of this week, we looked at the grammatical and writing features of an inner monologue. 

This week in science we have explored further life cycles of different animals. We looked at the stages of an animal's life cycle that takes it from a young animal to adulthood. The children created their life cycle diagrams and explained them. 

In history we looked at what life would be like for the early humans living in the Mesolithic Stone Age. The children analysed a secondary source of a Mesolithic camp focusing on the tools and technology they could see.

In English this week, we have finally discovered how the Krindlekrax came to be in the sewers on Lizard Street. Ruskin's father, Winston, used to work at a zoo and he brought a baby crocodile home for Mr Cave to draw it for his pub sign. The creature managed to escape and has been living in the sewers eating the left over toast from the Splinter's house! We have been looking at the different features of recounts and the children are going to use this event from the story to create their own recounts next week.

In maths, we had a recap lesson on Roman numerals and then moved on to negative numbers. We discussed when we might use negative numbers and then the children used both horizontal and vertical number lines to help them understand the concept.

This week in Merlins class we have been generating interesting vocabulary and phrases and writing exciting sentences about The Highwayman. Next week, we will be furthering this before writing our first narrative of the year where we will write the poem as an exciting story.

In maths this week, we concluded our topics of place value by learning how to use negative numbers on a number line. We began the topic of addition and subtraction and, so far, we have practised using the formal written method for addition before testing ourselves with some challenging 'missing digits' problems.

Important Information:

• Reading books and records should be in school every day
• 15 mins of TT Rockstars to be completed by Wednesday
• One page of mental arithmetic book to be completed and handed in by Wednesday
• Weekly spellings are given out each Friday and 10 games on Spelling Shed should be completed by the following Friday in preparation for the weekly spelling test

In science, our focus was on the spectrum. The children created colour wheels to see what happened when these span quickly and saw how the colours merged. They then investigated with torches and prisms to see how the light refracted and they could see the full spectrum of colours.

In music, the children continued to create their own anthems based on the Battle of Britain. They took the lyrics they wrote last week and started to compose their own music to sing these to. The children used a stave to write their musical notes and play these on a glockenspiel.

We have also been practising our songs and dances for Young Voices. If you haven't ordered your tickets or t-shirts (for the children), please make sure your orders are in before Tuesday 10^th October to avoid disappointment!

In History this week, we have been learning about the contributions of the British Empire to the WW2 effort. We discussed whether we felt Great Britain would have been able to defeat the axis powers alone and we came to the conclusion that this would have been incredibly difficult without the support of its empire. 

In PE, we were learning to volley in Tennis and we had the opportunity to practice this new skill in a doubles match. In handball, we learnt about the role of the goal keeper and how they can work to support the team's efforts before taking part in some 2v3 matches.

In PSHE, we have explored Maslow's theory of a hierarchy of needs. We talked about our wants and needs and how any unmet needs that we have may impact our ability to learn and how we might overcome this. We also had the opportunity to compare our met and unmet needs with that of a Ghanian cocoa plantation worker and how their unmet needs might inhibit their ability to learn also.