Last week we completed our poetry unit, based on the poem ‘At The Zoo’ by William Thackery. We created our own list poems and some of us even managed to include some lines that rhymed!

This week we have moved onto our new book ‘The Great Fire of London’ by Emma Adams. We are all very excited this is our book because we loved learning about The Great Fire of London in History at the beginning of the year. This book is non-fiction, so we have been looking at the difference between fiction and non-fiction books. We also identified features of non-fictions books in the text.

In Maths, the Year 1s have been looking at numbers from 0-50. We have been partitioning numbers into 10s and 1s and towards the end the week we have been looking at number lines and identifying one more and one less than a number.

The Year 2s have been continuing their work on multiplication and division. We have looked at multiplying and dividing by 5. Then we looked at the connection between the 5 and 10 times tables (e.g. if we know 5 x 10 = 50, then we know 10 x 5 = 20), the children found this really interesting – they thought it was quite tricky to begin with but once they got the hang of it they loved using what they already knew to answer trickier calculations.

In RE we have been learning about the Jewish celebration ‘Passover’. We have learned what ‘Passover’ is and how it is celebrated. We thought about special things we celebrate and how we do it.

In Geography, we have been continuing to learn about Tocuaro. This week we thought about why people might want to visit Tocuaro and what they could do while they were there. We created posters to tell people what they could do and see if they were to visit.

In PSHE, we are learning all about money. This week we thought about jobs and how we need a job to be able to get money and buy things. We thought about jobs we might like to have and what we’d like to spend our hard earned money on!

We have come to the end of the first half of Spring term – it has flown by! Rabbit class have been working really hard this half term and have all earned a well deserved rest next week.

English:

We have come to the end of our book ‘The Dragon Machine’. At the beginning and end of every half term we do an independent piece of writing. This half term we had to create our own version of ‘The Dragon Machine’ story with a different character and creature. It’s fantastic to see the progress the children have made with their writing over the past few weeks – excellent work!

Maths:

We have tackled lots of different areas in Maths over the past few weeks, from money to times tables! It’s lovely to see the children enjoying their maths work and showing our school value of perseverance when finding things tricky.

Science:

We have been putting our scientist hats on recently by taking part in scientific enquiries! The Year 2s have been thinking about the suitability of materials and whether the material of an object can affect whether it can change shape. They had to create an enquiry question (e.g. Can all objects that are plastic be bent?), they then had to make a prediction, carry out their investigation and write what they had noticed.

Year 1s have been thinking about sorting objects. They have been sorting them based on their properties, what material they are made from and how they could be recycled. They had some excellent discussions about the importance of recycling and what they can do to be more ‘environmentally friendly’

Geography:

We have enjoyed finding out more about Tocuaro. The children created some wonderful information posters for homework with facts they had learned. We have used those facts to help us in our lessons. We have been able to locate Tocuaro on the map, we know it is in Mexico, which is on the continent North America. We also located Ruyton XI Towns on the map, which we know is in English and is on the continent Europe. The children can name all 7 continents after listening and learning the very catchy ‘Continents song!’

RE:

We have been continuing our work on ‘Who is Jewish and how do they live?’. We found out that Jewish people have ‘Mezuzahs’ which are small, decorative case which  attach to the right doorframe of the entrance to their home, and inside is paper with sacred words from the Torah. Jews believe that it blesses their homes and they touch it every time they walk in as a reminder that God is always with them. We created our own Mezuzahs and thought about what special words we would include inside ours that would be important to remind people as they entered our homes.

Bird Feeders:

What a fabulous job Rabbit class did of creating their own bird feeders. It was lovely to see so many different bird feeders and hearing from the children how they were made. We spent some time thinking about where would be the best place for them to go around school to attract the birds. We have enjoyed checking if any birds have been snacking on our feeders!

I hope you all have a fantastic half term holiday and come back rested for the start of the second half of Spring Term. You have worked really hard, and should be very proud of your achievements this half term!

Miss Horton