Our Blogs

Here we are at the end of another term! It is hard to believe that when we get back, it will be our final term in Reception but we have lots of fun things in store linked to our new topic of ‘Under the Sea’. Thank you to all who attended our Easter Service this week, we hope you enjoyed joining in with our Easter celebrations. Today, the children should be bringing home all of their PE kits and book bags. Our new homework grid will be set after half term as usual along with our class curriculum grid, to let you know what we will be up to in Class One.

Reminders/ Other

After half term, we will be doing some of our PE lessons up at the school field! If your child does not already have an outdoor PE kit in school, this will be vital after half term. Sadly if the children do not have their PE kit in school, we are unable to let them participate due to health and safety reasons.

If you would like to do any extra learning with your children over the holidays, feel free to research some sea creatures or learn some facts about oceans and coral reefs.

WANTED! After half term, we will be doing some art and craft involving CD/ DVD disks. If you have any that you could donate to class, we would very much appreciate it! We are also a little short of knickers and boys pants in our spare clothes draw so if you have any Class 1 underwear at home which could be returned to us, or if you would like to donate any old underwear, we would be very grateful!

Lastly, we seem to have mysterious collection of apples accumulating in Class One over the last few weeks (8 in total!) Despite our best efforts to reunite them with the correct child, no one is yet to claim them. If you could send them with a sticker on to ensure they are named, or send them in a little bag/ pot, that would be a great help to us in solving this mystery!

Enjoy your two weeks off everybody,

Miss Ingle and the Class One staff.

This week in Class One we have been visiting our ‘space shop’ which appeared overnight in our classroom! We have been using 1p and 2p coins to add up simple amounts and ‘purchase’ space suits, moon bots, a mars rover robot, telescope and lots more! It was very tricky when we were only given 2p coins and so we have had to remember to tap them twice, to understand that they are worth 2 pennies.

On the topic of Mars rovers, we have been looking at how technology can help both astronauts and people back on Earth, to do lots of jobs for us. We watched a Cbeebies video of how computers are all around us, controlling hand dryers and taps, traffic lights, automatic doors, escalators, microwaves and many more! We then began to think about robots and used our own mini robots called Ozobots. It was great fun drawing mazes on paper and watching them respond to the different colours to do tricks and move around our pieces of paper, we were all very engaged in our robot learning!

On Tuesday we also took part in our school’s ‘Experience Easter Outside’ day and got to take part in lots of different activities, based on the different parts of the Easter story. We will be doing lots more Easter work next week and look forward to singing some songs in church at the Easter Service on Thursday.

Thank you to all who attended parent’s evening this week and we look forward to seeing more of you attending on Monday evening. Enjoy your weekend everyone!

We have had a fantastic time in Class One this week, taking part in lots of science themed activities! This year’s school theme was ‘Outer Space Science’ which linked nicely with our class topic! Some of the activities we took part in included making the different moon phases out of Oreo cookies, creating our own mini-solar systems using oranges, making space shuttles, paper parachutes and lots more!

In other science we have been bug-hunting in our school nature area and had great fun naming our insects and observing how many legs, shells and wings they had. We have also been learning all about Earth as a planet including the layers of the Earth, why volcanoes happen and even making our own volcanoes using bicarbonate soda, vinegar and washing up liquid.

Next week we are starting to learn the about the Easter story and will be taking part in our school’s ‘Experience Easter’ celebration workshops on Tuesday. We will also be starting our mini topic all about nocturnal creatures!

Enjoy your weekends,

Class One

What a great week it has been in Class One! Continuing with our theme of ‘space’, we have read the story ‘Aliens Love Underpants’ this week which has inspired lots of fun learning!

We looked at illustrations of all of the aliens and talked about what we might do if we met one and this led to fantastic alien pictures, complete with written labels. We even did some tricky ‘Year One’ work, writing their own character profile of an alien, using sentence starters and conjunctions such as and, also, but, however and because; they were great fun to read! In maths this week, we have been searching for and creating our own patterns. We looked around the classroom for patterns in our environment and noted some of the shapes we could see. Many of us found it really tricky to name some of the 3D shapes we saw, so we will be working on this over the coming weeks. Feel free to also test us on our shape knowledge at home too. One of our favourite lessons this week was a measuring lesson where we went out onto the playground for a pants pinging competition! We loved seeing how far we cold ping them and measured the distance using metres, centimetres and footprint, it was great fun!

Next week, we will be doing lots of outside learning throughout the week, to look for signs of spring in the environment. In Reception, we believe there is no such thing as the wrong weather, only the wrong clothes, so if your child does not already have wellies left in school each day, they may wish to bring them in for next week! We will be doing lots of scientific activities such as, looking at changes in the trees, comparing and measuring the sizes of leaves, hunting for animal hibernation spots and looking at some of the plants and flower which have started to grow in our nature area. If your child hasn’t already, you may send some wellington boots into school for them to wear throughout the week. On Wednesday, we will be taking part in our school science day too and look forward to trying out all the different science workshops run around school.

Enjoy your weekend!

Class One

Welcome back everyone, hopefully you have all had a restful half term. We began our new topic this week with the theme of ‘journey into space’. The children have been having great fun making space rocks out of playdough, creating their own lunar landing sites with rocks and astronaut figures and have been learning all about the planets in our solar system. We were very intrigued to learn about the orbit of planets and the children have amazed us with their facts about black-hole and meteors this week. We enjoyed learning about each of the planets and have even written a list of things we would pack, to go on a journey to another planet!

The children have also enjoyed learning all about the constellations this week. We counted the number of stars in some of the most well-known constellation and used star-stickers on black paper, to replicate some of our favourites. We then used the star-gazer app on the IPads, to search the sky for Leo the Lion, the Big Dipper (also part of the Great Bear), look for Sirius to dog star, Cassiopeia the W shaped queen constellation and our favourite…‘the pterodactyl’ (also known as Cygnus the swan, but we decided it looked more pterodactyl-like!) We also used our number skills this week to play a fun space number game, adding amounts to 10 to place the correct number of rockets on each numbered planets. We have been encouraged to use our fingers OR physical objects to understand that when we add, our number gets bigger. Next week, we start to think about what it might be like to be an astronaut and of course celebrate World Book Day 2019 which is always a very exciting day.

Enjoy your weekends everybody!

Here we are at the end of another half term and now half way through the year! This week the children completed their mini-topic of fairy tales by growing their own beanstalks, dressing up in prince and princess outfits to visit ‘the ball’, made their own glitter crowns or fiery dragon hats and read lots of traditional tales! We enjoyed looking at how many tales feature the number 3 (3 bears, 3 billy goats gruff, phrases that are said 3 times) and had to think about the moral in each story. We linked our maths to fairy tales too this week by reading ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and then playing ‘what’s the time Mr Big Bad Wolf?’ The children were so good at reading o’clock times! Some are even able to now read half pasts too.

Reminders

• Children will continue to need both an indoor and outdoor kit in school after half term. PE days will continue to be on a Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon.
• Don’t forget WORLD BOOK DAY is coming up on Thursday 7^th March! You may want to get planning your costume in advance. We can’t wait to see supertatoes (and evil peas!), Gruffalos and Horrid Henry’s, stick men and many more! Prizes are awarded to the best costumes and ‘group entries’ are also allowed should you wish to team up and have a theme! (As usual the teachers are sure to get involved too and show our silly sides with some book-inspired costumes!)

Hopefully all children have brought home all of their PE bags, hats, scarves and other school items! Wishing you all a happy half term. We will see you again in a weeks’ time when we begin our new topic….Outer Space!

This week in Class One, we have been talking all about ‘wellbeing’ as part of national ‘wellbeing week’. We have been thinking about what to do if we feel sad or angry, been talking about how to be a good friend, thinking of ways to keep us healthy and practising our ‘self-help’ skills so we can get better at problem solving with independence. One of our favourite parts of the week was our visit from Herts Catering where we got to sample lots of new fruits! Our favourite was the physalis which looks like a little superhero, hidden in its cape! We also enjoyed the dragon fruit, star fruit and figs although the ‘lime challenge’ was hard to do without pulling a very sour face!

In other news, we have enjoyed learning all about Chinese New Year this week. The children have taken part in a variety of Chinese inspired activities including making Chinese lanterns, writing our names in Mandarin, creating animal puppet and masks based on the Chinese zodiac and creating our own dragon dances in PE. Ask us this weekend if we can remember how to say Happy Chinese New Year in Chinese! Enjoy your weekend

Class One.

This week in Class One, we have based our superhero learning around the story of ‘Supertato’. This Monday we arrived in Class to find an unwelcome surprise…. Frozen peas everywhere! And on the carpet, a letter from a nasty villain along with our hero Supertato, trapped under some cling film. There could only be one villain nasty enough to do something like this…..the Evil Pea! Class One set to work straight away to create our own WANTED posters, featuring a description of our green nemesis and a piece of advice to tell people what to do if they spot him. We posted our WANTED posters all around the school and waited for someone to find him…

Luckily, after a week of superhero maths, (finding 2 digit numbers on a 100 grid/ adding 2 numbers together), some computer work (creating our own heroes using the DC Kids, ‘Hero me!’ game), and some fun pea squishing with mashers in Busy Fingers time, we received some good news….the evil pea had been captured! To celebrate, we used our art skills to create our own Supertatos using real potatoes! We then finished the week with some Superhero aerobics in PE and made our Supertatos come to life using stop-motion apps on the IPads. It was great fun watching our videos back and our posters have amazed the rest of the school this week. Well done Class One heroes!

This week we have been continuing our topic of superheroes and super villains! We have been having great fun creating our own comic strips this week, adding character speech bubbles and even acting out some of our superhero scenes! The class have all taken turns to perform their comic strips to the class and in play and learn, have been making some superhero outfits to wear.

In Maths this week, we have been using our doubling powers and have loved singing along to ‘the doubles rap’ (which you can find on YouTube). We have been doing lots of fun, practical number activities to see what happens when we put our two amounts together and have recorded our number work using dots, paint splodges, pictures and sums.

Next week, we will be having a ‘Supertato’ themed week so feel free to visit your local libraries over the weekend, or research the Supertato books, written by Sue Hendra.

Enjoy your weekends and see you all on Monday!

Happy New Year and welcome back everyone! Hopefully you have all day a lovely Christmas and enjoyed your break. The children have come back to school full of beans this week and have got stuck into their learning; their reading in particular seems to have come on lots over Christmas!

We have started our new topic of superheroes this week and we began the theme by learning about some of the many superheroes the children knew about. We talked about what makes a hero, what they might look like and the children worked in groups to create their own superhero characters. Some of the heroes included Jaxon the Jelly Man, an evil genius who throws jelly at people, Heart Girl with the power to love, Super Shark, an undersea hero who can become invisible and Laser Man with the ability to shoot ‘statue rays’ at enemies!

The children have also been adding single digits numbers during their number work, taking part in ‘superhero training camp’ sessions (PE fitness circuits), writing whole pages of sentences about their favourite superheroes and of course, dressing up in our new superhero themed role play! A great first week back!

Other/ Reminders

• The children are rising to the challenge of changing their own books each day!
• Thank you to all parents who have returned badges to school this week.
• A reminder that children will need both indoor and outdoor PE kits this term, in school at all times.

Merry Christmas everyone! Well done to the Class One children who have all settled so well into their new school this term. The class have achieved o much already, it is hard to believe we are now a third of the way through the school year!

A big THANK YOU from all of the teachers for your kind gifts and cards to us all, we are blown away by your kindness!

We leave you with a few reminders and notices and wish you a very Merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Notices

• All books and reading records have been collected in over the Christmas holidays so please do not worry when you cannot find them! Should you like to read over the holidays, you are more than welcome to use books from home or the library to indulge in some festive stories or perhaps even research our new topic of ‘Superheroes’ which starts after half term!
• All lost property left in class has now been passed on to the big ‘lost property’ box situated outside of the office so please check this for any missing items.
• Homework will start again after half term. Thank you for all of your hard work this term, the children loved showing their home-learning off in today’s assembly! It has now been sent home with the children to keep so that we can start afresh after the holidays.

Enjoy your holidays everyone and see you in the New Year!

What a busy week we have had in Class One! This week we have started our mini-topic of dinosaurs! The children have had lots of fun taking part in some of the dinosaur themed activities we have set out in class, including digging for fossils in sand, creating their own model dinosaur, using the dino’ swamp tuff tray (complete with green water) and even using the computers to find out more about their favourite Jurassic creature. Ask us more about our learning at home to see what we can remember!

In other news this week. we had an extra special PE lesson on Monday with Stevenage Sporting Futures…’Pudsey PE!’ we had lots of fun, thank you so much for all of your children in need donations this week. We have also been having lots of fun in our new ‘Costa Coffee’ themed role play all week using our money skills and acting abilities, our teachers have enjoyed watching us act in role!

Other

Parents Evening slips have gone out in book bags today to let you all know which time your appointment is. Whilst we always try our best to fit everyone in with their preferred time, this year lots of parents wanted a similar time which has proved a little tricky. If any of you are unable to make your time, please come and see me and let me know.

If any children have effort/ values/ achievement badges at home from previous weeks, can they please be returned on Monday?

Next week we begin to learn songs for our upcoming Nativity! How is it this time of year already?! Be prepared for your children to come home singing some rather catchy Christmas tunes!

Welcome back everyone, we hope you have all had a restful and happy half term last week. This week in Class One, we have been learning all about fireworks! We began the week with a journey back in time, 400 years ago where we met a rather scary character.... Guy Fawkes! The children loved finding out some child friendly facts about the Gunpowder Plot and took great pleasure in acting out the story, complete with a Guy, King James and some soldiers. Ask us about the Gunpowder Plot at home, to see what we can remember.

As well as our history learning, we have also been using our art skills this week, using printing techniques to make some beautiful firework pictures.

On Wednesday we learnt all about the festival of Diwali by making some clay Diwa lamps, making some samosas in the curriculum kitchen and even trying out some Bollywood moves in our PE lesson!

We ended the week with a Remembrance Day themed day today. The children have tried out different workshops throughout the school, linked to RE values and WW1 history…have a look at some of the photos on the school gallery page very soon!

Other

. Based on the children's interest, week we will be starting a short unit on dinosaurs next week. Have a look over the weekend to see if you can find out some interesting dinosaur facts in preparation.

This week in Class One, we have been starting to think about people who keep us safe and we began this topic by thinking about who keeps us safe when we cross the road. The children were extremely knowledgeable about how to cross a road safely and were able to demonstrate how to Stop, Look, Listen and Think during our demonstration which was really lovely to see! We have been learning about the role of lollipop lady, thinking about how we should behave near busy roads and the children conducted their own traffic surveys outside of the school, to see which was the most popular vehicle to drive in St Ippolyts. The children have even been patrolling our outside area, creating their own ‘speeding tickets’ for fast vehicles that go by and dressing up as police officers which has been very funny to watch!

We had some fantastic links to maths this week by looking at examples of road signs that the children might see when they are out and about and we learnt all about the ‘warning’ triangle signs and other various shapes we might spot. The children then made their own road signs using lollipop sticks and paints….even a ‘dinosaur crossing’ sign!

Thank you to all who came to Open Session on Monday this week and also for all of your kind donations for Harvest Festival. We hope you enjoyed the service and watching your little ones donate all of their lovely food parcels in church. Enjoy your weekend,

Miss Ingle, Mrs Holmes, Mrs Sabri and Mrs Gemmell.

Class One was greeted this week with a bit of a mystery on Monday….a lost satchel in our outside area! Upon inspection, we noticed some envelopes, stamps, paper and royal mail signs inside; it was clear who the lost bag belonged to…the Jolly Postman!

Class One set to work writing letters to the postman to alert of his lost bag. They added a contact number so that he could call the school and signed the letter off with their names in a polite way; the Class One teachers were very impressed with our sounding out skills. We have also built our own post office in class this week to sort out all the postman’s letters. We have been adding stamps onto our envelopes (and choosing first or second class varieties depending on how quickly we want our letters to reach our destinations) and have also been weighing out parcels, using the weighing scales. Other activities have included, buying items from the post office using 1 and 2p coins, creating new decorative door numbers for our houses, drawing pictures from the Alan Ahlberg story ‘The Jolly Postman’ and even dressing up as postal workers, complete with letter bags and royal mail hats!

Reminders

• Thank you for some of the WOW forms we have had in so far. It is lovely to celebrate your children’s successes at home with the class and we look forward to seeing some more soon! More WOW forms to be handed out soon.
• A reminder that next week is our Harvest Festival at St Ippolyts Church. The church service starts at 9:15 and features songs and showing from some of the older children and of course, the giving of any donations by the children of St Ippolyts School.
• Lastly, as you may be aware, new data protection regulations came into effect this year across the UK. As a result of this, schools and organisations are no longer permitted to distribute names of classes outside of school (such as in the form of class lists for parties and Christmas card lists). We appreciate that this is a little inconvenient to parents but hope that you will understand. Should you wish to form a class list yourselves by speaking to other parents outside of schools, you are welcome to do so.
• Lastly, we are looking for donations for Class One spare underwear (especially girls knickers please!). If you have any that you would be willing to donate to our shared class supply, we would be extremely grateful as they always come in handy for our little ones when accidents happen!

Thank you and enjoy your weekends everybody!

This week in Class One, we have been thinking about people who help us at home! We read the Anthony Brown story, ‘Piggybook’ to help us start to think about all the different things that our grown-ups have to do every day. The story features some very amusing pictures in which all of the Piggot family start to transform into real pigs, thanks to their messy behaviour! This led to some great discussions about how we can help out at home and the children have been practising by measuring water into washing up jugs, making pretend dinners for their ‘families’ in the home corner and have even been designing some trophies, to say thank you to those who help us at home.

Next week, we will be reading the story of the Jolly Postman to begin to think about people who help us every day such a postmen/ladies and lollipop people. We will be posting letters using stamps and envelopes and will be practising crossing the road safely, using our zebra crossing and road sign toys in the outside area.

A big thank you to everyone who attended curriculum evening yesterday! I hope that it was helpful to you all and has given you a little more of an idea about what we get up to each day here in Class One! Next week will be our first cake day of the year (on Friday). Children are welcome to leave their usual snack at home on this day and bring in either 25p for one cake, or 50p for 2. Children must bring their money in a named envelope please, to ensure we have no missing coins throughout the day.

Happy weekend!

Miss Ingle, Mrs Holmes and Mrs Sabri.

Here we are at the end of our second week back and Class One is now complete with all 30 children now in class. We are all feeling very proud of the new cohort in the way they have conducted themselves around school and in the kind and sensible way they carry out their learning each day and it has been lovely this week to watch them begin to form friendships with new children and get stuck into the many activities we have had planned for them this week.

This week, your child has very busy taking part in…

• Circle times to discuss likes and dislikes
• Painting in the art corner
• Trying out some number games on the class computers
• Learning single letter phonic sounds and forming them without taking our pen off of the whiteboard/ moving the pen in the correct direction.

A thank you once again for your patience at the gate during home-time and morning drop offs as we learn all of your names and faces. As you can imagine, learning parents, grandparents, child-minders, aunties and other family friends for each child is not an easy task but we hope to get a little quicker at this soon. In the meantime, please continue to inform a member of office staff or class adult if someone new is picking up your child, as we will be unable to let your child leave unless we have had consent and notification of this.

Lastly, you may notice that over the course of the year, your child may come home wearing a badge on a Friday afternoon. These are from our Friday awards assembly in which your child can win a values, effort or achievement award. Your child will be able to wear their badge for the whole week but will hand it back in the following Friday morning so that it can be given to the next person. We ask kindly that children look after their badges each week and that parents ensure that the children bring it back in on the following Friday. Thank you for your cooperation.

Enjoy your weekend everyone,

Miss Ingle, Mrs Holmes, Mrs Gemmell and Mrs Sabri

What a successful week we have had in Class One this week! All children have settled extremely well into their new routine and it has been a joy to get to know some of our new intake over the course of the week. The children have been up to many different and exciting activities including rainbow sand mark-making, painting, PE lessons with our amazing sports coaches Mr Jefferies and Mr Smith, number work, phonics sessions and even creating their own mud-recipes in our brand new mud kitchen! It is also really lovely to see so many children coming in to the classroom independently now; we are very proud of them and how positively they are entering the classroom each day.

A big thank you to all parents for being so patient at the gate as we learn all of your names and faces and also for ensuring that all school uniform is clearly named’. This has made things much easier for us all this week and is very much appreciated!

Reminders.

• A reminder to all parents that children’s reading books will be changed each Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Your child will be heard read by the class adults throughout the week so please ensure these come into school each day in book-bags.
• Water bottles should contain still, unflavoured water only. Your child may also bring in one fruit or vegetable item each day to eat at their snack-time. We ask that you do not send in cereal bars/ crackers/ yoghurt covered fruit/ / fruit winders or other similar items please.
• As part of the Early Years Curriculum, children are encouraged to work and learn outside as part of an ‘extended classroom’ in out outside area. We have a saying in Reception that there is no such thing as the wrong weather, only wrong clothing! We therefore ask that children bring in some wellington boots to keep in class each day, so that they are suitably dressed for all weathers. Some of our best learning and experimenting comes from playing in the rain and with puddles!
• Lastly, all children are expected to change for PE at school with a level of independence. Whilst we will always help those who need it, we encourage children to ‘have a go’ at doing up/ undoing buttons and ties, before seeking help from a grown up. We therefore ask that you practise this at home with your child over the next half term or so, so that they can get used to dressing and undressing with confidence.

Thank you to all for a great first week, it has been lovely chatting to some of you at the gate and I look forward to getting to know you and the children more over the coming year!

Miss Ingle, Mrs Holmes (Nursery Nurse), Mrs Sabri and Mrs Gemmell (Class TAs)

What an exciting week we have had in Class One! We have completed a whole week of crazy science activities, starting qwith an experiment into materials. We investigated the school to find as many materials as we could and had great fun looking at where materials came from. The children were very knowledgable about where paper comes from and this led into a great discussion all about recycling and looking after the environment. Our recycling bo has never looked so full! Later in the week, we investigated how materials change when they are heated or frozen. We put kernals into the microwave to watch how they change and even got to try the end product which was very tasty! As well as looking at materials, we also conducted experiments into floating and sinking and had a competition to see who could build the best pirate ship. We had lots of fun making our ships using differen materials and even more fun testing them out to see which would keep our pirates the driest and safest. Other science actvitiies we have done this week include, minibeast hunting in our school nature area, looking at optical illusions, making raisins dance in glasses of lemonade, meeting Jules Howard, a real zoologist and learning all about fossils, meeting our visitor from ‘mad science’ who showed us how to make real rockets blast off and investigating the stretchiest underpants with Mrs Archer! All in all a great week with lots of brilliant learning going on. If you haven’t already, make sure you check the school gallery page above to have a look at our science week activities! Reminders. We are very low of badges once again for our showing assemblies each Friday. If you have any at home, please can these be returned to the school office ASAP please, to ensure they can be passed on to the next child each week. Please ensure that children bring their library books in each Monday, so that they can return it and choose another one to borrow for the week. Thank you and have a good weekend everyone!

This week in Class One, have been learning all about mini beasts and began the week by reading Julia Donaldson’s story, Superworm. Next, we welcomed some new additions to class…. 30 wriggly worms! The class have worked together to create a fantastic wormery complete with soil and layers of colourful sand and we have had great fun naming our new pets. Some of the names include Sparkle, Cutie, Mr Crazy Head, Squiggly and of course…. Dave! In other news this week, we have been doing lots of worm inspired learning such as measuring pieces of string, making ‘bookworm’ finger spaces, using spaghetti to make letters and words in phonics and even using non-fiction books to find out about minibeasts.

Reminders.

A big thank you to Mrs Smith (Arthur’s mummy), for our class visit last week. It was lovely to hear all about the needs of animals at the veterinary surgery and the children thoroughly enjoyed having the chance to bandage up the cuddly dog toys!

Next week, we will be having a week of mad science inspired lessons, in preparation for our school science days.

Enjoy your weekends and see you all on Monday!

Class One