Week 5

This week is the first week of Advent and it really is beginning to look a lot like Christmas! The children started the week by writing their letters to Santa, explaining how they had been good this year and politely asking for various exciting toys and games.  In RE we thought carefully about the importance of preparation, especially at this time of year. So we wrote 'To Do' lists and Mrs Tordoff's list was definitely the longest!

Our beautiful class wreaths were blessed by Father Declan in a wonderful assembly and the candles on these will be lit every day, providing a moment of Prayer and reflection for the children and staff in school. 

By Wednesday we were surrounded by oranges as every child in school made a Christingle. We enjoyed singing at our lovely Christingle Assembly and learning all about the symbolic nature of the Christingle itself. This inspired the children to produce some fabulous writing as we learnt how to write a set of instructions for making Christingles. 

Photographs in Nativity costumes were next for the children of Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1. Keep your eyes open for the order forms coming soon, you really will not want to miss these photos, they are beautiful.

We ended the week with the Christmas Fayre and the children finally had the chance to showcase the fabulous Christmas Decorations that they had sewn. Most have now be sold but there are still a couple left so if you didn't manage to attend the Fayre then we probably still have your child's hand sewn Christmas decoration if you would like to buy it. 

There is still a lot of learning and fun to be had before Christmas but we definitely launched the Christmas festivities in style here in Class 2. 

Week 4

We started this week with a whole school visit to watch a Pantomime. (Oh no we didn't, oh yes we did!) The children had a fantastic time, as I'm sure you can tell from the pictures on our brilliant new Facebook page.

The Year 1 children also had a visit to see some very special visitors who came all the way from Denmark to meet us! Designers from the Lego company joined our Year 1 children at Goldthorpe Library to help with our Lego Project 'Mission Moon'. The children were very inspired by discussions with the designers and now many of them want to work for Lego when they grow up! But for now, we will continue to develop our designing, building and evaluation skills in the classroom!

It has been assessment week this week which gives teachers a chance to work with the children in small groups and formally assess their ability levels in Maths and Literacy. Please don't hesitate to speak to Mrs Tordoff should you have any questions about your child's learning and development.

Week 3

This week we have been 'Adjective Detectives!' We looked for adjectives in a wide range of texts and then we used some fabulous adjectives to describe the Lego characters that we have designed. A letter then arrived from the Head Designer at Lego, Denmark. Their chief designer is off work because she is poorly and there is a new Lego character waiting for a description to be printed on the box. Luckily, the designer had left some adjectives on her desk but some of them were not appropriate for the character. So we used the ones that worked and then added some amazing adjectives of our own.

In maths we have been learning all about 2d shapes. Mrs Tordoff thought that only squares and rectangles have 4 sides but after some fabulous investigations  we discovered that there are a lot of other shapes with 4 sides and these are all called quadrilateral shapes. We have been looking for quadrilateral shapes in the environment, can you help us?

On Friday we had a fabulous 'Book Swap' day', a great way to share and recycle our books. Dressing up as our favourite character or word from a book was brilliant fun and everyone looked fantastic. Well done to all our parents and carers for the wonderful range of costumes! Mrs Tordoff was 'The Cat in the Hat' and sharing this well loved story got us talking about rhyme. We looked at rhyming words and wrote our own sentences to add to the text.

Another exciting week of learning in Class 2!

Week 2 - Anti-bullying Week

This week we asked 'Why bother with punctuation?' and we quickly found out how important it really is to punctuate sentences correctly with the appropriate punctuation marks. We learnt all about question marks and full stops and we read some sentences that are very funny when the wrong punctuation mark is used.

In Maths we were also looking at symbols . Less than (<), greater than (>) and equal to (=). We used these symbols to organise numbers and find missing numbers. 

The theme for this year's Anti-Bullying Week is 'Choose Respect'. We learnt about the importance of being respectful, both in person and when interacting with others online. Adults are the greatest role-models for children in terms of modelling respectful behaviour and we discussed making the right choices in a range of scenarios when being respectful could be difficult. 

Week 1

Bonfire Night is a very exciting time and is an ideal opportunity to inspire children. We made firework pictures which were very hard word but the final pieces of artwork are very effective, it is just like being at a real firework display! Not only did the pictures test our creative skills, we were also developing our fine motor skills, which is essential for holding a pencil and sustaining writing for longer periods of time.

We also wrote acrostic poems about Bonfire Night. An acrostic poem is where the first letters of each line spell out a word or phrase. Some children used the word 'Bonfire' and some children were challenged with the two words 'Bonfire Night'.

We used another exciting game this week which really helped us to learn how to read and spell those 'Common Exception Words' that Mrs Tordoff keeps going on about! They really are very important words because once we can read and spell them, we will be able to read more fluently which will help with our understanding of books. The game is called 'Little Bird Spelling' and you can find a link below.

Mrs Tordoff is getting new carpets at her house and we needed to help her measure the floor. We started by using cubes but we thought the carpet company might not have cubes so we used a ruler to measure and decided that a ruler wasn't long enough and it would take too long. We then used tape measures and metre sticks to measure bigger objects and spaces. We compared and ordered objects and spaces and learnt lots of new vocabulary related to measuring. We just have to keep reminding Mrs Tordoff to say centimetres or metres after her measurements so that we know which unit of measure she has been using. (Otherwise that carpet of hers could turn out to be a real disaster!) The week ended with a maths investigation, measuring how far different toy vehicles travelled when they left the bottom of a ramp. Sometimes we were able to measure using a ruler but sometimes we needed to use the metre stick.

This week has been the last week of our very exciting topic 'Towers, Tunnels and Turrets. We have shared our learning with each other and also with our families in our Class Assembly on Friday. Thank you to everyone who came to see their children and thank you to all parents and carers for your support last half term. For any parents/carers who missed our assembly,the link below is for the power-point and I'm sure your child would love to share it with you.