The children are bringing home a WOW moment sheet with some autumn leaves on. Please add to this sheet any significant events or achievements your child experiences over the half term holiday.  They are more than welcome to colour the leaves too!  We can then share them in class after the holiday and add them to our Wonderful Wrens display. Thank you.

Things have been a bit spooky down in Wrens this week.  The children enjoyed dressing up in our Halloween role play and making up their own imaginative stories involving Halloween parties and trick and treating.  We made pumpkins with the playdough and practised our fine motor skills picking bugs out of the giant spider's web.  Up at Forest School we enjoyed the story of "Room on the Broom" by Julia Donaldson.  We made some fantastic wands  and created some brilliant potions in the mud kitchen.  

In maths this week, we have started studying numbers and have been exploring the numbers 1-3.  The children have been practising the skill of subitising - recognising the number of objects in a group without counting.

I am sure you will agree that the children performed brilliantly at the Harvest Festival. We were very proud of them. 

It has been a long half term and the children have been superstars.  I hope you all have a happy and restful half term.

This week in English, all of the children completed an independent piece of writing. They used a picture of a key for inspiration and came up with some very imaginative stories about where and what the key might unlock. 

Year 2 have been learning about common and proper nouns as well as adjectives. They then used the nouns and adjectives that they identified to write expanded noun phrases. 

In maths, Year 1 have continued learning different strategies to add numbers to 20 together. They have been using prior learning of number lines to help them with this. Year 2 have been learning a strategy to make adding quicker and more simple by making 10. For example, 8+7 can change to 10+5 which is easier to work out. 

Both year groups have also taken part in a variety of maths investigations. 

In art, the children created their final piece. They used their incised and additive printing tiles from previous weeks to compose their final layered piece. They also created a big piece of mixed media art work using plasticine, ink pads and pencils.

Year 1 will have their red phonics book coming home today. There is no homework set for Year 2s over half term. However, if Year 2s do want to play on TTRS and Spelling Shed then that will still be available for them.

The children worked very hard to learn their lines and the songs for Harvest Festival and should be very proud of themselves for doing so well. 

Have a relaxing and enjoyable half term!

This week we have been continuing our work with subtraction and introduced the column addition and subtraction method. Further to this, we have looked at how exchanges across tens work using this method. 

In English, we have written and edited our non-chronological report about the Stone Age and the children have presented their research brilliantly.

This week in science we concluded our work on the classification of animals by looking at species characteristics and discerning the different between those that belong to an entire species and those that are for an individual animal. 

Finally, in history the children were introduced to the arrival of iron to Britain and how this changed life for those living here. To conclude our history learning this half term, the children have written a summary piece describing all they have learned about Britain from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. 

This week in music was performance week. The children performed their rhythmic compositions using percussion instruments. Well done everyone. 

In English this week, the children have been planning a suspense story based on Ruskin Splinter entering the sewers to try and find the Krindlekrax. We looked at how we can use a story mountain to separate each part of the narrative so the children can make sure their stories are well planned out. We then looked at character descriptions and the children wrote a detailed description of their main character.

In maths, we have moved on to multiplication and started by multiplying by 10, 100 and 1000. We looked at how the digits moved when multiplying by 10 and the children realised that the digits move one column to the left each time. We then used this to establish what happened when multiplying by 100 and 1000. One of the most important things the children learned was that you don't just add a zero when multiplying by 10! We proved this by using decimal numbers as if you simply add a zero, the value of the number does not change.

There will be no homework over half term. The children have worked extremely hard this half term and deserve a relaxing break from school.

In Merlins class this week, we have completed our newspaper reports on the events of Tuesday night. I have been so impressed with the quality of these reports. The children have all used Formal language that suits the purpose of these reports. Last week, we were practising using the punctuation of speech and the children were able to include witness testimony using the appropriate tone, punctuation, and grammar. 

In maths, we have been practising using long multiplication and have moved on to solving problems and using our reasoning skills. Towards the end of the week, we moved onto short division and have become much more fluent in this formal written method. These topics have highlighted how important it is that children are fluent in their recall of their times tables and I encourage them to continue to practise these, as not doing so will cause a significant barrier when it comes to certain maths topics. 

In music, the children finished composing their anthems and then each group performed theirs to the rest of the class. The children have worked incredibly hard on these and were, quite rightly, very proud of their finished work.

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