Parents' views

Thank you to all the parents who sent in a completed questionnaire in order to help make our new School Plan. Most comments were positive and thanked the teachers in Key Stage 1 for the good job they do with the children so thank you very much on behalf of our staff.
Unfortunately no parents attended the drop-in session. Because of this Mrs McGrath and Miss McAuliffe will be available before and after school next week for your comments. Please feel free to approach them and let them know of any ideas or comments that will help us to improve our school.
Mrs Kendrick

Masks

Fun with masks

Last week we had lots of fun creating our papier mache masks. Here are some pictures of us making them. I will upload some more pictures showing the finished products.

End of term video

Growing Assembly

Well done to all the children for doing so well in the assembly. They put in a lot of hard work to learn the lines.

Surprise

We had a really nice day in school today... but I'm not able to tell you what we were doing!!!... Mums will have to wait until Sunday to find out.

A Great Spanish Lesson

Fantasy Stories and Shopping

This week in 1D, the children completed some amazing fantasy stories. They were writing about princes, princesses, kings, queens, aliens, dragons, knights and witches. Many poor princesses got their jewellery stolen by dragons. Ask your child about their story!

We also had a shop in the class this week. The children were able to buy toys and sweets which was very exciting. They had to make sure that they paid the correct amount and also had to check their change. They still need a bit more practice with getting change but they enjoyed themselves.

Well done to everyone!!!





Well done to BrownBear638 for practicing maths on-line this week!

Spelling City - High Frequency Words

Dear parents,

Please see the spelling tests I have created in the Spelling City interactive resource.

These tests are based on the High Frequency Words which your child needs to know by the end of Key Stage 1.

Tests in Phases 1 to 5 involve the top 100 High Frequency Words.
Phase 6 tests involve the next 200 High Frequency Words.

I would be grateful if you could try this out and if your child enjoys it, why not use it on a regular basis to reinforce learning.

ROYAL ZEBRA READING GAMES
Take a look at the Royal Zebra Reading games. The full stop games are particularly useful for helping children figure out how to break up a paragraph with full stops.

Mr Devereux

Certificate Presentation for Homework Project

Bits and Pieces

If you have any old food containers/boxes/packets can you please send them in tomorrow or Thursday. We will be making models so as much as you can spare will be very much appreciated.
Apologies for the lateness of this request.
Mr Devereux

The Gingerbread Man is fixed

We had an excellent time today making Gingerbread Men... it was really messy but we all enjoyed it...I hope they all taste good.

Educational Resources

Well done to those children who have been learning using Tutpup this week:
BrownBear589, BrownBear594, BrownBear612, BrownBear638 and BrownBear643.

Please check out the 'Educational Resources' links added to the blog.
- Hundreds, tens and units: This is an excellent yet simple resource which helps pupils understand the relationship between hundreds, tens and units.
- Maths Learning Clips: I added this last week. It is primarily aimed at Years 3 to 5 but it is worth checking out, especially if you have a child further up the school. You will need to register as a user but it is a straightforward process and well worth doing.
- iBoard: Lots of activities which you can use with your child.

I would be grateful for any feedback with regard to what you think about these sites.

Shapes, Portraits and 'An Enormous Turnip'

Exploring our senses!

Last week in our Science lesson we had great fun exploring our senses. We explored our sense of hearing by closing our eyes, listening to various instruments being played and trying to guess which instruments made the sound.
We explored our sense of taste by getting some children to close their eyes and taste various strong flavours.
Our sense of smell by covering up foodstuffs with powerful scents and trying to guess what they were. Items included lemon juice, coffee, crips, vinegar, barbecue sauce and popcorn.
Finally, we explored our senses of touch and sight by looking at objects such as seashells and Weetabix with our magnifying glasses.

The children then wrote up this lesson using the vocabulary learned in last weeks literacy lessons.

Maths, Dancing and Art

Poetry In Motion

Last week in 1D we were looking at poetry. All the children wrote beautiful poems about sea creatures. We have written them up in our best handwriting and we are going to make a display based on this hard work.

When creating the poems, the children had to think about a sea creature and use 'WOW' words to describe the creatures' actions and appearance. The poems also contained repetition.

Here is a selection of verses taken from poems:

Here comes the big dolphin,
See him twirl in the sea,
Here comes the hungry shark.
Listen to him chewing in the sea.

Here comes the cute dolphin,
See him splashing in the sea.
Here comes the ugly shark,
Watch him diving in the sea.

Here comes the angry whale,
Listen to him swimming in the sea.
Here comes the big shark,
Watch him playing in the sea.

Here comes the blue dolphin,
See him dive in the sea.
Here comes the clever seahorse,
Watch him float in the sea.

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Well done 1D for all you wonderful work !!!!

I will endeavour to upload more photos by the end of the week.

Mr Devereux.

Happy New Year

Our first week back in the New Year was fantastic.

In R.E. we started a new topic entitled journeys. We spoke about journeys that we took alone and with other people. We spoke about good times we had on journeys such as trips to Southend and trips abroad to meet up with family and friends.
We also spoke about modes of transport used to reach our destinations and the fun things we did when we got there.

In numeracy we looked at tens and units. We looked at ways we could add big numbers together e.g. 13 + 24, 14 + 25 etc.
The children found this very difficult be we will be practicing more.

This is the method we used when adding:
Question: 13 + 24 =
Answer:
10 + 20 = 30 (Add tens)
3 + 4 = 7 (Add units)
30 + 7 = 37 (Add answers)

In literacy we worked on rhyming poems with some great results.
We also looked at some strange fish and wrote sentences to describe them.
Below is one of the peoms writted by the children. I have also got them to read it out:

When I Was One
When I was one I had fun,
When I was two I said moo,
When I was three I ate some peas,
When I was four I was poor,
When I was five I was alive,
When I was six I was sick,
When I was seven I went to heaven,
When I was eight I learned to skate,
When I was nine I felt fine,
When I was ten I found a hen.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

As promised, below is a video slideshow of the work the children did for their 'Local Area' homework. I also presented them with special certificates for all their hard work.

At school today we created paper lanterns - we turned off all the lights and used a torch to light them up. They were all absolutely beautiful and would look lovely on a Christmas tree.

We also had our Christmas party which involved DVDs, games, dancing and of course, lots of food!

I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy Christmas and New Year. I have really enjoyed this term in Year 1 and look forward to more fun times in the year ahead. Thank you for all your kind words, cards and gifts, it is very much appreciated.

Hope you all have a nice relaxing break and see you in the New Year,
Mr Devereux.

Tom Sweep and wonderful projects...

Firstly, a big thank you to those children who brought in their wonderful projects about their local area. Each child has been given the opportunity to do a 'show and tell' of their work to the class. I will endeavour to get images of the children displaying their projects up on the blog by the end of the week.

It's been a fantastic couple of weeks in 1D with lots of interesting work being carried out by the children.

In Literacy last week, we did some work based around a cartoon character called 'Tom Sweep'. Poor Tom was a road sweeper and no matter how hard he tried to keep the streets clean, someone always dropped rubbish on the ground. Using our imaginations, we gathered together a huge amount of information about Tom, his job and his family and this resulted in excellent writing being produced.

In Numeracy, we learned about halves and quarters amongst other things. To help us learn, we had lots of sweets which needed to be shared. First we shared them between two people making halves, then we shared them between four people making quarters.

Science was such a blast! We got lots and lots of different materials and tried to discover which ones were reflective!!! Some children got the opportunity to bring disco balls into the dark area and create reflections on the roof of the dark area by shining torches on the mirrored balls.

In R.E., we have been learning about 'Birthdays' and the special birthday of Jesus which we will celebrate on Christmas day. We spoke about how the Angel Gabriel visited Mary with the message that she would give birth to a special child. We also looked at the story of the Nativity.

All the children are really looking forward to Christmas and we made beautiful Christmas cards today. The children can bring them home tomorrow and share them with you.

Regards,
Mr. Devereux.