Hi all,

It was wonderful to see so many of you at today’s Learning Fair. We hope you enjoyed celebrating your children’s learning— we are certainly very proud of everything they have achieved already this year! We have had a wonderfully busy week. Despite getting a bit wet in the rainy weather, the children have kept smiling and shown such positive attitudes to their learning.

English

In English, we began a fantastic new book to spark our imaginations: Stanley’s Stick. The story follows a boy who uses a simple stick in creative and imaginative ways. Our Word of the Week was plot, and we practised retelling the key events of the story before creating story shapes to show this.

We have been working hard on writing sentences with:

  • capital letters
  • full stops
  • finger spaces
  • and checking that our writing makes sense as we go

We also spent time thinking about what our stick could become, ready to write our own imaginative versions of the story next week!

Maths

In Maths, we continued to explore place value using numbers up to 20. We have:

  • created number timelines
  • practised ordering numbers
  • used number lines to solve questions
  • compared numbers using the symbols greater than, less than, and equal to

We remembered that the “alligator” always eats the bigger number, so the open side of the symbol faces the largest value. Next week, we will deepen our place value understanding to 20 before moving on to addition and subtraction problems.

Phonics

This term we have so far covered the following graphemes:

/ee/ – y (funny)
/e/ – ea (head)
/w/ – wh (wheel)
/oa/ – oe / ou (toe, shoulder)
/igh/ – y (fly)
/oa/ – ow (snow)
/j/ – g (giant)
/f/ – ph (phone)
/l/ – le / al (apple, metal)
/s/ – c (ice)
/v/ – ve (give)

Tricky words: any, many, again, who, whole, where, two, school, call, different.

We would be very grateful for your support in practising these at home and reading with your child regularly to help build fluency.

Topic Learning

RE:
We had thoughtful discussions about what you might find in a Christian home. Using a Venn diagram, the children explored which items belonged to other religions, and which family traditions are shared across many cultures.

History:
We began learning about Victorian times in preparation for our workshop after half-term. The children were amazed by how different life was for Victorian children—harsh working conditions, strict schools, and sharing one bedroom with many siblings! They quickly realised how lucky we are today.

Science:
This week we explored where rain comes from and learned that rainfall is measured using a rain gauge. We are excited to put our homemade rain gauge outside next week and begin recording the week’s rainfall.