22nd Nov 24
Kingfishers have had a great week! As always we started on Monday with Forest School. The children had great fun this week building dens. Playing in the autumn leaves also continued to be great fun for all!
On Tuesday the children used their sense of taste in science to try a variety of vegetables in preparation for designing their own wraps or pitta bread sandwiches. They tried carrots, spinach, beetroot, lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes and peppers. The children then created pictograms to show which were the most favourite and least favourite vegetables in the class.
The children then thoroughly enjoyed designing their wraps or pitta bread sandwiches in design and technology. Some children just chose a couple of fillings but some wanted lots of different ones. Ask your children what they have included in their design!
This week the children have also been designers in Literacy. To link with our story The Paper Bag Princess, the children designed a new crown for the princess using the results from our science experiment that we did before the half term holidays. The children had decided that card would be better than paper as it would last longer if it got wet!
On Monday the children designed their own crowns, adding labels to their diagrams for how they wanted to decorate it. On Tuesday they sequenced the instructions having watched the teacher make a crown and on Wednesday, the children followed the instructions when they made their own crowns. Next week the children will be writing their own set of instructions for the The Paper Bag Princess just in case she ever needs to make another crown!
In maths, we have been doing lots of counting up to one hundred. Going forwards is easy but going backwards is trickier. We had to take care when we were crossing a tens number, for example, 29, 30 or 49, 50. The children discovered how knowing our pattern of 1 - 10 with our fingers can really help us. Have a go at counting forwards and backwards this weekend.
As we reached a rather chilly Friday morning, we all came excitedly into school, wrapped up warm and ready to take on the day and with acts of kindness in the form of a mini craft car a mini bunch of flowers to greet me this morning, what more could I want from a frosty Friday morning!
We were all super excited to talk about our plans for the weekend, with one main theme running through Kingfishers today.....birthday parties! From siblings parties to parties in Kingfishers, we were ready to sing our hearts out and eat some cake! Some of us were also very excited to discuss their upcoming trip the cinema, which was quite the coincidence as this was also the theme of Newsround this week, even if the film was different we were all very excited to meet the cast of one of the new films in the cinema!
On a Friday Kingfishers have been working really hard to develop their comprehension skills, from looking at a picture and answering questions on it in Year 1 to reading a short piece of text and answering questions on it in Year 2.
At times they have found it quite tricky to make sure they read the questions carefully as otherwise they have found that they can make easy mistakes.
We have worked on reading the question, making sure we understand it and then going back to the picture or text to find the answer, keep practicing this at home with your reading books!
In Phonics today Year 2 ended the week by looking at j, g, ge and dge. We warmed up by hearing the sound within the word and reminding ourselves of the following rules;
- 'j' is never used at the end of a word
- 'dge' is often used after short vowels
- 'ge' is often used after consonants and other vowel sounds
- 'g' is often used before 'i', 'e' and 'y'
We then used our rules to sort words into a table depending on what sound we could hear in the word!
Our week was almost coming to an end but we still had time for one of our favourite activities of the week......show and tell and this weeks certainly didn't disappoint us!
As our first Kingfishers stepped up we knew that this one was going to be worth the wait, there had been a mysterious box that had been sat on Mrs Brown desk all day....what could be inside? As the box was opened and newspaper was carefully peeled back, very carefully and gently an item was taken out of the box and held up for all of us to see....wow...we couldn't quite believe our eyes!
"It's a birds nest from my Grandad's garage in Devon"
There were so many questions that needed to be asked...
- How had it been made?
- What bird had made it?
- When did you find it?
- Is the moss sticky?
- How old were you when you found it?
We were in awe of this nest! Luckily for us our Kingfisher had the answers! It had been made with straw and some moss, we think potentially a sparrow made it. Our Kingfisher found it on a Sunday when she was 6 and at that time the moss was dry and still is but we did however discuss that the moss was potentially wet when the bird made the nest.
There was also lots of ideas shared about what our Kingfisher could do with the birds nest now, a lot of her friends thought it might be a nice idea to put it in a tree for another bird to use, although we were too sure how to get up the tree!
For our next show and tell we had a glimpse of fame and fortune, with talk of a Porsche and dancing on TV with a rating of 10, this could mean onto one thing......one of Kingfishers had met a Strictly Come Dancing Star and not just anyone but Mrs Brown's personal favourite! It was of course Anton Du Beke!
How exciting our Kingfisher had travelled to Hungerford Book shop and had bought one of his books and got it signed by him but not only that but we also saw a picture of our Kingfisher with him! Our Kingfisher also gives the book a 5 star rating as well!
What a busy week Kingfishers have had, we hope that you all have a lovely weekend and look forward to seeing everyone back next week when we will be starting our Christmas play songs!