Top Tip for the week     NCA Financially motivated sexual extortion

The following communication has been received from the National Crime Agency Financially motivated sexual extortion: alert for education settings.

Attendance

This week I would like to share some school statistics. During the Spring Term we have lost a total of 108 hours of education due to pupils missing part of the school day for appointments, lates and other reasons. Already for the Summer Term, we have accumulated 43 hours, which mainly consists of appointments.  I fully appreciate there are times when appointments have to be made during the school day, but where possible can you please seek to make these outside of school hours.  Thank you. 

This week the Wrens have enjoyed learning more about plants and how amazing they are.  We learnt that they are used for food, building and even clothes and medicine.  It is really important to look after all our plants as they are really special!  Our beans are growing well and some of the results of our experiment have been quite surprising as the beans in the dark cupboard have grown the most!  We have also had a new arrival in our classroom as a pot of very tiny and very hungry caterpillars was delivered.  We have been using our magnifying glasses to observe them closely and have been thinking about what will happen as they grow bigger.

Along side this we have been enjoying our class story "The very hungry caterpillar" by Eric Carle.  The children have been doing some fantastic writing based on this story and we thought of some excellent vocabulary to make our writing more exciting.

In maths, we have continued to explore numbers beyond 10 and challenged ourselves to create some fantastic caterpillars with repeating patterns and between 10 and 20 legs in the art area.

In RE, we explored the Christian story of creation and thought about all the amazing living things that we are thankful for.

On Wednesday we had a lovely trip to The Chantry to take part in the Tiny Olympics.  The children enjoyed a wide range of activities including kurling, parachute games and playing with the giant Kinball.  They all showed great sportsmanship and were a credit to the school. Please look at the news article for more photographs.

I hope you all enjoy the bank holiday weekend and the sun shines!

This week in English the children finished their diary entries as Iris from our story 'How to Hide a Lion'. They have worked so hard on these and have all produced fantastic pieces of writing. We ended the week by researching lions, ready to start work on our next piece of writing.

In maths, Year 1 have looked again at making doubles and worked with larger numbers when doing so. They have also been making equal groups through both grouping and sharing. Finally, they have started to learn about halves of shapes and objects. Year 2 finalised their learning on mass, volume and capacity by measuring temperatures and began the topic of fractions. They have been identifying parts, wholes and equal and unequal groups. They also then began learning about halves.

In science, we have been learning about plants. The children's beans that they planted have started to sprout and they have been checking up on them frequently. This week, we learnt about wild flowers. To do this, we went on a hunt around the school grounds to spot and keep a tally of the different wild flowers we found. We also began sorting plants in a variety of different ways.

In DT, our topic is healthy eating and smoothies. This week, the children were practising their food preparation skills. During the lesson, the children completed a carousel of different activities. The activities included designing a fruit salad, using plasticine to practise cutting skills, juicing lemons and oranges and using knives to cut a variety of different fruits. The children enjoyed this and will be using these skills in the next couple of weeks as we move onto making the smoothies.

In English, we are working towards writing a diary entry from the point of view of Sophie from our class book, Rooftoppers. We have worked on writing in the 1^st person in an informal style.

In maths, we have completed our work on Mass and Capacity and are now revisiting fractions. This week we have looked at how we can add and subtract fractions and we will be moving on to finding fractions of a whole.

In geography, we were answering the question 'How are rainforests changing?' The children shared their understanding from the previous weeks and we looked at photos and videos showing why the Amazon rainforest is important, what the threats are to the Amazon rainforest and what could be done about it.

In music, we have composed a short piece of Minimalist music and performed it using the glockenspiels.

We conducted another brilliant experiment this week in science testing the melting point of chocolate under different conditions. The children really enjoyed this and Mrs Gibbons brought in a thermal measuring device to aid the children's investigation.

In art, the children have produced some amazing paintings based on the fascinating early work of Henri Matisse and we will be moving on to his later work on collage going forward.

In RE, we are looking at the Gospels. We continued our study of Jesus recruiting the disciples and focusing on the work that the disciples did to help Jesus in spreading the word of God.

In English this week, the children have continued to enjoy reading our class book, 'The Wind in the Willows'. Ratty and Mole have been spending time with Badger and learning more about Toad's impulsive personality! In their writing, the children have been creating their recount of Mole capsizing Ratty's boat, not long after they first met. They have been working hard to include all the grammatical features we have covered over the past two weeks.

In maths, we have been looking in more depth at the values of digit in decimal numbers. We have been comparing decimal numbers as well as ordering them and our invaluable place value grids have been making this task much easier.

In Yoga, the children have been learning how to control their breathing and how this can help them create tension in their bodies whilst holding poses. The children learned many different poses and were demonstrating these to their peers, who then copied their movements.

This week in Merlins class, the children have worked extremely hard as they continue to prepare for their SATs assessments which will take place in just over a week. This week  we have explored commas for clarity and for lists, identifying determiners, sentence types, parenthesis and using inverted commas.  We have covered a great deal of topics in the last few weeks,  but the children have taken it all in their stride and I am extremely proud of their attitude.  I truly believe this will put them in great stead for SATs week.

In maths this week, we have been practising reflecting shapes across a reflection line, learning to read and plot coordinates across 4 quadrants and reading and interpreting data on bar graphs. We have also revised squared and cubed numbers, multiples and factors as well as calculating the mean.

In geography this week, the children have learnt about the human geography of the Mojave desert. We have learnt about the recreational and tourism opportunities; the nature parks; the local infrastructure and the clean energy wind farms that have been built to better improve the environment. The children then took on the identity of the desert and we personified Mojave and boasted unapologetically about all of the physical and human geography that the desert provides.

In Art, we used our very own 'view finders' to take a closer look at the patterns and colours of sliced fruit. The children used pastel in their art books to practise forming patterns and shapes that they could see through their 'lens'. Later in this unit, we will move onto using clay and tools to create fruit tiles which are representative of these patterns and shapes.

In science, the next lesson in our topic of 'Humans including Animals' was all about puberty and the changes the children will go through. They were extremely mature and we are able to have an open and honest discussion where they shared their knowledge and questions willingly.

In music, we have explored and created different motifs to represent our chosen planet.

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May/June issue