Dear Parents and Carers,
We have reached the end of another busy half term and everybody has worked exceptionally hard.
On Tuesday 7th February the school took part in Safer Internet Day. It is incredibly important that we teach our children how to stay safe online and one way the school does this is through SMARTY. To support you as parents I would like to invite you to a an Internet Safety Presentation for Parents run by the Lucy Faithful Foundation to be held in the evening at St James Primary School on 16th March. Some of our parents attended last year and they found it extremely valuable. It is important to recognise that even though our children are very young they still can be at risk when using technology so we do need to teach them how to stay safe and make the right choices. Further information regarding this event will be sent out after half term.
On Thursday 9th February the children and staff enjoyed taking part in the sponsored dance. Thank you to FoML for organising this. We are very lucky to have such supportive parents at Manby Lodge and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our parent volunteers. We are always happy to have more, so please contact your Class Teacher if this is something you would be interested in doing.
I hope that you all have an enjoyable half term and we look forward to seeing you all back on Monday 20th February.
Kindest regards
Mrs Creasey
Reception
This half term we learnt about Chinese New Year and the story behind the celebration. In our outside small world area the children retold the story and in P.E. we learnt dances inspired by a Chinese New Year parade. In the creative areas we have been learning different printing skills and the children had the opportunity to create their own stampers to print with and tried monoprinting. In the classroom, the children have also helped to choose and create role play and small world areas. Our role play areas have included a greengrocers, a vet, a supermarket and a Chinese restaurant.
In maths the ‘Muddle Monkey’ visited the classroom and changed our number lines so we practised ordering numbers from lowest to highest. We learnt to find one more than a given number using objects and have now started to add two groups of objects together and record our calculation. This half term we have also learnt about weighing and practised comparing objects around the classroom and used cubes to measure the weight of objects.
We have started Phase 3 in our phonics which means the children have been learning lots of new tricky words, digraphs and even some trigraphs! We have used our new sounds and segmenting skills to write lots of Nosey News and used our blending skills to share our news with the class.
Despite the cold weather, the children have been busy in the outdoor area during Independent Learning. They have discovered dinosaur bones in the sandpit, made their own recipes in the mud kitchen, designed and built obstacle courses and chalked pictures and words.
In our Investigation Areas we have learnt about different materials. The children practised matching and sorting materials into wood, plastic, metal and glass. We have also explored sounds in our Investigation Area and as part of our learning we have visited the music room to explore different instruments. We have practised making quiet and loud sounds using different musical instruments.
Year One
This half term in Maths we have focused on place value, addition and subtraction. The children have been partitioning numbers into tens and ones. We have also learnt to tell the time to o’clock and half past.
In English we have been learning about stories with repeated phrases. One of the stories we focused on was ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’ and we had an exciting time re-enacting the story. We have also learnt about Zog, and written character descriptions using adjectives and conjunctions.
In our Science lessons we have been learning all about animals. The children have explored the different animal groups and looked at features of each group.
In Geography we have been learning about different climates. We have created the Arctic, Desert and Rainforest using materials. We compared the 3 climate zones and also compared their houses.
Within Art, the children have looked closely at animal print. They have observed the fine details of the shape and texture to sketch their own. They have also mixed paint to create the colours they needed for their print.
Year Two
We have been reading The Twits, George’s Marvellous Medicine and The Enormous Crocodile by Roald Dahl. The children have all thoroughly enjoyed this topic – and so have the teachers! The children took part in lots of exciting drama lessons recreating Roald Dahl’s tricks and descriptions. Through Roald Dahl’s stories we have been inspired to practise our descriptive writing and to get creative by inventing our own marvellous medicines. We have also focused on improving our reading comprehension skills.
This term we have learnt about money and geometry. We have practised adding different amounts of money and finding change from given amounts. We have learnt about the names and properties of a range of 2D and 3D shapes. We have learnt to identify and count vertices, edges and faces.
Our topic this half term has been All Around the World. We have learnt to name the 7 continents and the 5 oceans. We have been very interested to learn facts about many countries across the world including Japan, China, Australia and Brazil. We have also enjoyed learning about the art work from these countries and tried to recreate some of them using different techniques. In Science we have learnt about the life processes of all living things and identified things that are alive, no longer alive or have never been alive.