Ash Class Inspire, nurture and challenge 

The children have been busily working away the last few weeks and lots of new learning has been happening. Notably learning and recognising number bonds to ten, learning more split digraphs a-e/o-e/I-e, the sounds ow and our making the ow sound, and practising our handwriting, and the tricky f formation! Please do encourage your child to show you their learning so they can practise at home. In English we have been writing variations on the Owl Babies story.

On Wednesday we began author fortnight, and introduced the book “The Fantastic Flying books of Mr Morris Lessmore” The children came into class and were greeted by an ancient case full of old looking books, some over 100 years old! They were absolutely wonderful in their responses, working out where the books might have come from and how they came to us. We will be doing some more learning on this topic over the next ten days.

On Wednesday afternoon we joined with Oak Class for some cross curricular learning on the theme.

Last week we continued our work on houses and homes, notably those in Petworth, by building some mini versions of the shops we had been to. The shop owners were so impressed!

 

On Tuesday we were lucky to have a visit from Simon Atkins, a parent and architect, who spoke to us about his job and some of the amazing buildings he has worked on. The children were excited to learn about sheepswool walls and plant roofs and had lots of questions. They followed this up by designing a building, from the exterior to the interior and including a floor plan. 

Next week we have various Christmas deadlines to meet so will be beavering away on these, but hopefully you will see the fruits of our labours at the light switch on on the 1st December.

As usual we have been busy bees in Ash Class and this week there has been lots of new learning going on. We have been trying to get our heads wrapped around the idea of a split digraph (I didn’t know it either!) in our phonics and have been trying to spot lots of words with the a_e sound, like make, take, snake and cake. It would be great if you could encourage the children to keep spotting at home, as this has been tricky! We have been practising our handwriting also, the ascender d and descenders g and q.

In English we have started our new class text, which is Owl Babies, by Martin Waddell. This book may be familiar to you and is readily available online if you want to take a look. The children have been sequencing the story, looking at the language and considering the emotions of the main characters, some baby owls.

Can you work out how the owls were feeling from our freeze frames?

Maths has been tricky this week! Last week we worked on part part whole problems – for example that 3 and 4 are two parts of 7, the whole. This week we have progressed onto writing number sentences using the addition and equals signs and we have been practising writing our numbers to ten, as well as reading numbers to twenty, and counting in ones, and tens in some cases! Again, it would be really helpful if you could help the children with these key skills.

We are starting our new topic on Where we live, and starting to look at materials and how houses are built. We are going to be building our own mini shops next week, so if you have any small boxes at home that we could use we would be most grateful.

As part of our computing, we have been learning some e safety and using the website thinkuknow.co.uk. This is a really useful website for educating all ages about some of the challenges that face us in the digital age. The children have been very interested in learning some of the things to look out for, and there are some useful resources on the website.

Dont forget pyjama day on Monday, for Children in Need, and our pupils in the scouting and guiding movement may wear their uniform on Friday as part of our Remembrance commemorations.