Spring 2 fun!
Date: 30th Apr 2023 @ 1:27pm
What a busy half term we have had!
We have enjoyed celebrating some religious and cultural celebrations this half term as well as some national celebrations, including Shrove Tuesday, Easter, Mothering Sunday, Red Nose day and French Language day. Look at our beautiful Easter garden!
We also celebrated British Science Week and ‘Connections,’ as this was the theme this year. We explored connections between the different weathers and our World. We began with experimenting with colour.We made our own rainbows by adding different colours to fabric and submerging them in water, observing the colours ‘drifting’ into one another. We also explored electrical circuits to make a bulb light up, placing a moon over it to look as if the moon was glowing. We explored rain and discussed how the clouds get heavy and then rain and used a shaving foam experiment to demonstrate this. The children absolutely loved the different science activities on offer and constantly asked questions and learnt new vocabulary along the way. A wonderful week of awe and wonder.
We have had a fantastic half term of forest school where we have built dens and obstacle courses. We have hunted for bugs, made creations and pictures out of natural, found objects and finished the term off with toasting crumpets on the fire.
The children are getting so confident with their exploring skills now and are thinking hard about their learning during their Plan, Do, Tell sessions. They are often noticing when they or their friends persevere, concentrate hard or work well as a team and are coming up with some fantastic ideas they want to explore e.g. making parachutes, pop up pictures and habitats for small world creatures.
Within PE the children have been developing their gross motor skills by taking part in multi skills sessions, this enables them to balance, throw, catch, roll, run, jump, skip and hop. They have used a range of equipment such as balls, hockey sticks, markers and more and they have taken part in a range of fun activities and games.
In Maths we have explored pattern, length and 2d and 3d shapes. We are continuing to explore numbers to 10 and deepening the children’s understanding of each number. They are getting very confident at subitising (recognising quantities without counting) now and it is great to see them using this in so many real life situations. We have started to manipulate numbers in more complex ways too, such as doubling, halving and combining groups.
In English, we have continued to develop the children’s phonic skills and knowledge. They have all now learnt the phase 2 and 3 phonemes and are using these to blend sounds together to read words confidently as well as segment sounds in order to write words. We have continued to use the dough gym to strengthen their fingers and consequently our handwriting is making excellent progress as a result. We have been developing writing simple words and short phrases and the children have been fantastic at listening and having a go independently. Throughout English, we have been learning about ‘Traditional Tales,’ and we have focused on the stories of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and ‘Goldilocks and the three bears.’ The children have enjoyed playing in the role play area of Jack’s house and have been retelling the story in our small world area. We have ordered the story, described the characters and made changes to the story to make it our own. Additionally, we have made masks, puppets, planted magic beans as well as many other activities.
The children have had a wonderful time this half term and have made such amazing progress. We are so super proud of them and their fantastic attitude to school. Well done every single one of you. You are all stars and we can’t wait to see what fun we have in Summer!
