We had a fabulous trip to Pizza Express in the last two weeks of term. Badgers and Otters were able to visit Pizza Express in Ashford, where the fabulous guys taught us how to make pizzas. We learnt how to stretch the dough using three fingers, then how the tomato sauce is made, finally we experimented with different cheese patterns. While our pizzas were being made we tasted different toppings that are used at Pizza Express, the children learnt facts about the toppings, as you can tell from the photos – some were more popular than others!!
Over Easter we would love you to support your children with their phonics and practise it everyday like we do in school.
Here are some websites that you might find useful, the children have to segment (sound out words) and then blend (say it altogether). There are real words and ‘alien’ words which are designed to see if the children can recognise the digraphs (like ai in rain). In school we encourage the children to put ‘sound buttons’ under the word so they take their time to segment and blend it.
Here you can see that the single sounds have a dot under them, and the digraphs ch, sh, ll have a line, this encourages the children to blend the words together.
Every day we are practising the phase 5 sounds with all children for 15 mins after lunch, this is in addition to their personalised phonics learning groups which range from phase 3-5
There is an older post on phonics if you scroll further down our Year One page which gives you detailed information about what phonics is and how we teach it.
Practise is the best way to support your child, they are working really hard on this in school and making excellent progress. We would love you to celebrate in their success and let them show you how fabulous your children are!
Here is a power point where you can give a few words each day to segment and blend. Phonics screening
We are proud to be taking part in Science Week, we have loved our activities this week and are really excited to be participating in the whole school. The week began with an introduction from EDF. They came to help us with our KS1 experiment to calculate wind speed using bubbles! The children learnt how to use equipment and measure distance, direction and time. They worked collaboratively and we were blessed by a small breeze and delightful sunshine.
Our english and maths this week has been linked to science too. We explored how much sugar was in different foods, as well as writing lots of instructional texts. We taught the bog baby how to brush his teeth and then learnt how to make toothpaste. We have followed instructions and found out how to measure ingredients carefully. Today we changed one of the ingredients to see what happens and found that red food colouring turns black when we put it with bicarbonate of soda – the children were confident about black toothpaste – the adults less so!
Have a look at us becoming chemists as we made our own toothpaste…
This week we learnt how to count in 5’s by using a variety of different objects. We counted in 5’s and then practised making tally charts of the things we could find in the classroom. We explored how to share both objects and numbers, the children are now experts at being precise with their halves – just so the teachers don’t get more!
Google Expedition came to St Nic’s this week.. we explored the oceans, saw sharks and deep sea divers and were then transported into the rainforest where the children could get up close to gorillas! We loved the experience and the children were fantastic.
Our science topic this term is ‘We are what we eat’ this week we looked closely at our taste buds, we looked at them in our mouths and learnt that different areas of our tongues give us different tastes. We learnt how to predict in an experiment and then explored different tastes together. We tried limes, lemons, gherkins, coco, sugar, grapefruit, banana, crips and many more – some of the expressions were very entertaining 🙂
This term we are reading and exploring the story of the Bog Baby. It is a delightful ‘finding tale’ where two sisters go into BlueBell woods and fish for newts – but end up with a Bog Baby! Bellow you can read the revised story that we have been learning as part of our T4W program. The children should now be able to tell you the story with actions too!!
The illustrations are amazing if you can find the book in the library or in a book shop!
Please please help us improve our reading across the school by reading 10 minutes every evening with your child – thank you!
Are you up for a challenge?
Could you encourage others to read?
We need Ambassadors who are keen to help encourage their classes to read and to remind them to have their bookmarks signed on a Wednesday evening.
If you are interested, simply design a poster for Busters Book Club. This needs to remind children to read every Wednesday and have their bookmark signed. On the back of your poster, please explain why you think you would be good at the role of Ambassador!
Please hand in your completed posters to the school office by Wednesday 1st February. If you have any questions – see Mrs Longman.
We are so excited at the amazing response to our introduction of Mathletics!
Have you had a go at home with your child? They need to do their set tasks given by the teachers, and then can play against anyone who’s currently online! This is an excellent resource, not just supporting what we are learning in the classroom, but also speeding up our number facts, addition and subtraction to become speedy mathematicians – have a go!
We adapted our story last week and really enjoyed coming up with new things that our farmer could find! The children have become much more confident writers over the last few weeks – its lovely to see!
Look at our story map…
We were luck enough to show off our story to Abacus Nursery too, they enjoyed seeing how much we’d grown – but also listening to our funny story.
This week we have let the children adapt the story themselves, listen out to the new version at home.
Address
Email
Telephone