Chaddleworth St. Andrew’s & Shefford

This week has had a bit of a musical focus to it!

As we continued to enjoy an unseasonably warm start to October our children celebrated Harvest during our school Harvest Festival. Robins were the first class to perform, it was their first time standing up in front of not only the whole school but also parents! They sang beautifully as they brought harvest items to the table and set the scene for the rest of the Worship. As well as celebrating Harvest we also recognised the 10th October as #Hello Yellow day - wearing yellow we were demonstrating our support for the mental health of young people, showing that they matter and that they deserve the support they need, when they need it, no matter what. Thank you for all your donations and all your support and also to those parents who were able to attend (for those of you who weren't, we have recorded our class performance and will try and wrangle with the video settings to upload it soon - keep checking back!).

In our Harvest song, we sang about juicy apples so it seemed apt that this week we made vegan applesauce cupcakes. The children were able to recognise some of the same ingredients that we used in last week’s banana muffins and loved playing ‘guess the spice’, by sniffing the spice and then making guesses as to what it could be….

”It’s like Christmas cookies”

“It smells like spicy cake”

The spice was of course cinnamon and although not all children liked the smell, they all had a really good go at either guessing what it was or what it reminded them of! As the smell of our applesauce muffins drifted through the classroom, soon everyone couldn’t wait to take theirs home and try them! It is lovely to see and hear how enthusiastic the children are each week to learn a new recipe and all support each other with each stage of the process “I’ll help you, I can hold the bowl while you mix!”

Although the temperature outside felt more like summer, with the scent of warming cinnamon and apple filling the classroom, we felt very much in middle of Autumn!

In phonics we continue to develop our recognition of phonemes, this week we added c and k to our knowledge. So far, we have learnt sounds s,a,t,i,p,n,m,d,g,o,c,k,ck,e,u,r. Throughout the week Robins have been playing CVC phonics games where they have to turn over different phonemes and check if they have them within their CVC words. Robins have also been impressing us with their reading - we are hearing some fantastic segmenting and blending using the sounds taught so far. This week, we also had a visit from Kirstie Hanson who is the EYFS Improvement Adviser & Phonics Lead for West Berkshire, she actually wrote and complied the Phonics scheme that we use so we were delighted to be able to show off how well we are doing using her scheme. It was quite a special occassion for us.

Just a heads up, next week we will learning sounds h,b,f,ff,l,ll,ss - I wonder how many of you will spot these sounds over the weekend - we love a bit of pre learning!

In Maths, we were building on our subitising skills, this week, within 4. We watched BBC Numberblocks - if you have not ever watched it, please do, it is fantastic and so brilliantly made - so brilliant infact that it won a BAFTA! We regularly watch Numberblocks to support our Mathematical learning. So, back to number 4.....we were using Numberblocks to create patterns of 4 and using positional language to describe our patterns of 4 e.g there are 2 blocks on the top and 2 on the bottom.”

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, we seemed to be in a rather musical mood this week, as well singing in the Harvest Celebration, we were treated to a Piano worship led by Joe Overend who comes into our school on Wednesday's to teach piano, several of Joe's piano pupils played their pieces for us, they all certainly had talent - if anyone is interested in taking up the piano, please do get in touch - in fact when I do manage to upload our Harvest singing you will spot that it is one of our pupils in Owls class who is accompanying us on the piano).

Then on Wednesday we continued our Music lessons with Danielle in Pantomimus where we sang, played instruments and took turns to perform.