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_{What a busy week we have had in Class One! Firstly, a big thank you to all who were able to attend on Monday for family week, it was wonderful to watch the children thrive and show you all what they do in a day. The treasure hunt seemed to be a firm favourite and I hope you were all able to decode our hidden word.}

_{In RE we have been working towards our big question, "show us what you know about the Holy Trinity- God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit."} 

_{The children have been drawing their interpretations of this big question and have come up with some wonderful thoughts and ideas. They have also been making some beautiful stained glass windows which you will be able to see displayed.}

_{In PE the children have been working on their gymnastic skills, balancing and forward rolling and impressing us all with their coordination. They work really hard in PE and getting dressed and undresses has become a lot quicker.Could I please ask all parents to name all the children's clothing and encourage the children to practice getting dressed at home. Many thanks.}

_{In Maths we have been looking at 3D shapes, the children have been counting faces and corners (vertices). We have had a look around the classroom to spot as many shapes as we can.}

_{Our mini topic currently is dinosaurs and the excitement is over flowing now we have a "real life dinosaur egg" in class. We have been writing warning signs and danger signs to notify others to beware. I hear that the egg may hatch one day next week...watch this space! Class One have looked at all animals and what they eat, making them Herbivores, Omnivores or Carnivores. What long words for them to remember but the children have been super stars.  Well done for a huge learning week class one. Let's see what we can discover next week.}

_Reminders

_{- You may find an envelope inside your child's book bag this weekend.  This contains the lines for our Christmas Nativity!  We ask kindly that you practise these at home with your child so that your child can use their biggest, clearest voice! (Please note, not all children have lines)}

_{Enjoy your weekend,}

_{Class One!}

This week in Class One, we were very excited to have a visit from the Hitchin Fire Brigade!  We were lucky enough to meet five fire fighters and test out some of our knowledge from our ‘People Who Help Us’ topic from last half term.  The firefighters answered lots of questions in class and Miss Ingle even got to be dressed up in a fire-fighting outfit which was very funny!  We had a look at some real jaws of life and found out that they are strong enough to lift up 18 cars and even cut through metal.  Next, we went out to the playground where we saw a real fire engine/ ‘the appliance’.  We were shown the sirens and hoses and we all had a go at squirting them onto the playground; it was great fun!  Photos are inside each child’s learning journeys so you will be able to see your child in role as a real firefighter!

In other news this week, we have started a short mini-topic all about dinosaurs.  We have been using books and technology to find out information and were amazed to learn how to use SIRI.  We have all enjoyed asking it questions about dinosaurs and have been busy recording the answers on fact sheets.  We have also been thinking about what dinosaurs eat and learnt all about carnivores, omnivores and herbivores.  Test us at home to see if we can remember some of these tricky words!

Reminders.

. Don’t forget that next Monday is Class One’s turn at family week.  All parents are invited to spend the afternoon in Class One where we have a variety of activities for you to try out.  There will be paint out, an outside task and an afternoon play so you may wish to wear comfortable shoes and some layers for this!

. Friday will be the next school cake day (this time run by Class Four).  We ask that children bring in 25p or 50p only wherever possible, to avoid lost change.  Also, please ensure your child brings their money in wrapped in paper or a small envelope/ purse/ wallet/ sandwich bag.  Unfortunately due to lots of lost money last time, we did have a few children who were unable to buy a cake.

Thank you and have a good weekend.

Class One.

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. We look forward to you seeing some of these soon during Family Week and Parents Evening.

We hope you all have a safe and happy fireworks weekend. 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.

Thank you also for some of the lovely homework we have had in! We hope you have all had a sheet in your child's book bag this week; if anyone is missing a homework grid, please let us know in class.

Well here we are at the end of our first half term of school, and what a half term it has been!  This week we have been thinking about police officers and the children have been having great fun in role as ‘cops and robbers’ this week…we have even had a few traffic officers handing out speeding tickets to scooters in our outside area so watch out!  We have also had a great time learning all about the festival of Diwali yesterday.  The children dressed up in beautiful Indian clothing, created their own Diva lamps using clay, learnt the story of Rama and Sita and even created their own Rangoli patterns using coloured sand, powder and powder paint.  Watch out for some of our lovely Diwali learning in our learning journeys soon!

Half term tasks

Over the half term, we ask that you can support your children in the following ways, by encouraging them to practise the following…

1. Children to practise forming each letter from the alphabet; both capital and lower case. Make sure they know the name of each letter as well as the sound it makes.
2. Children to recognise and write their numbers to 20.  Want a challenge?  Practise writing numbers to 100!
3. Children to learn one more and less than a number.
4. Learn how to pay for items using small coin amounts.

5. Please sure your child knows how to write their name!  We are finding lots of children are having difficulty with this, this year.

6. Have some fun!

Thank you all for your continued support this half term.  Wishing you all a great half term break!

Miss Ingle

This week in Class One, we have been thinking about people who keep us healthy.  We watched a children’s video about hospital workers and learnt some great terminology, including the words paramedic, pharmacist, NHS and radiographer.  We have had fun looking at X Rays and even using Mr Bony the skeleton, to identify and name the different bones and parts of the body.  We have been singing the ‘skeleton dance song’ to help us with this and you can sing it too, by finding it on YouTube!

As well as the role of doctors and nurses, we have also been thinking about dentists and ways to keep our teeth clean.  We practised brushing our teeth for two whole minutes, using music to help us identify when our time was up and we were surprised to learn what a long time this felt like.  We have enjoyed brushing the dirt off of the pretend teeth and have loved being dentists in our role play area.

Next week we will be completing our topic of ‘People Who Help Us’ with a week on the police force and on Thursday, we will be learning all about the celebration on Diwali. Please feel free to research these over the weekend or make some fun things linked to the topic, to bring in for show and tell!

Happy Hedgehog Day from Class One!  We have had a fantastic day today thanks to our visit from Hetty’s Hedgehog sanctuary and loved having the baby Hoglets in Class One.  We learnt lots about how to look after Hedgehogs and learnt lots of new facts.  Did you know for example that hedgehogs have up to 7000 spines on their backs or that they are born bald but grow their first spines within their first few hours!  Along with our visit today, we also made paper-plate hedgehogs and iced hedgehog cakes, complete with chocolate button spikes!  We hope you enjoy them tonight.

In other news this week, we have been learning all about people who keep us safe.  We have been learning about the role of lollipop lady, learning about road signs and even conducting our own traffic survey!  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 also learnt about how the fire-service keep us safe too, learnt what to do if the fire-alarm goes off and have been learning about what it is like to be a fire-fighter.  The children were all very sensible as we practised what would happen if there were a real fire-alarm and we even practised how to make a 999 call in class, should there ever be an emergency.

Thank you for all of the WOW forms that we have had this week!  We have some very talented children in class.  Enjoy your weekend,

Miss Ingle, Mrs Holmes and Mrs Sabri.

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 him 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

• Next Friday will be 'hedgehog day' here at St Ippolyts!  We will be having some special visitors come to school to see us and be having a themed day of hedgehog crafts.  Can you help us to research some interesting hedgehog facts over the weekend in preparation?
• Thank you for some of the WOW forms we have had in so far.  It is lovely to celebrate your children’s successes with the class and we look forward to seeing some more!  More WOW forms to be handed out soon.

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 this week!  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 annual Harvest Festival at the church so we hope to see lots of you there.

Happy weekend! 

Miss Ingle, Mrs Holmes and Mrs Sabri.

Here we are at the end of our second week back and Class One is 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
• Making ‘stick men’ based on the Julia Donaldson story
• Learning about Autumnal changes and spotting signs of Autumn around the school
• Collecting autumn leaves to create their own ‘leaf hedgehogs’
• 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.

 Reminders

We are very proud of all the children who have been leaving their parents at the gate and walking in completely independently.  Children are encouraged to enter the classroom independently in the morning and so we ask that you could reinforce this and remain at the gate during drop off times; the children will be greeted with lots of praise if they are able to do so and even earn stickers!  Obviously if your child is very distressed, we appreciate that you may wish to walk your child into class still over the next week.

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 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 Mr Jefferies, 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 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 bad 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

We have had a fantastic first few days here in Class One and Miss Ingle and the class adults have all been left feeling very impressed with how well all of the children have settled into their new routine and environment!  Thank you also to all parents who have made morning time easy and have been encouraging children to enter the classroom independently, the children seem very happy to be in school!

For our first few days, we have been doing lots of fun activities, to get the children settled and encourage them to explore their new classroom.  Some of the activities your child has been doing include, paint portraits and hand prints, dinosaur small world role play, junk modelling, scooter racing, dressing up, construction actitivies such as the marble run and lego and lots of fun counting activities and songs; it has been great fun!

Your child's book bags are still a little empty this weekend, however next week your children will begin to bring home an independent reading book to share with you, as well as their first school reading record.  A letter will come out with these, to explain them in more detail.

Thank you also for ensuring all new uniforms are clearly labelled; it has been a great help this week already!  Class One will begin their PE lessons next week and these will take place on a Thursday and Friday so please ensure all children have their PE kits in school for these days.

Enjoy your weekend and see you all on Monday ready for our next intake of children! 

For our last animation club on Wednesday the 18th, we will be using the 'lego animate' app to record a short movie, using the Ipads.  If your child is in this club and would like to bring some lego figures from home for this, they are more than welcome to do so.  Please ensure they come into school in a named sandwich bag/ envelope/ container to prevent any missing items!  No more than 4 or 5 per child.

Thank you,

Miss Ingle.

GUNG HAY FAT CHOY (Happy Chinese New Year) for yesterday!  We have loved taking part in our school arts days this week based on our theme of Chinese New Year. We started the week by learning about the Chinese New Year story and acting it out using animal masks in class.  We then enjoyed making some delicious spring rolls in the cooking room on Tuesday.  It was a little tricky to use the thin filo pastry so we had to be very delicate when rolling our spring rolls, but we all did extremely well.  Lots of us could name some of the healthy ingredients we put inside and we measured them out carefully into our ingredient bowls using our counting and measuring skills.

Our art days ran on Wednesday and Thursday and we all really enjoyed being taught by the different teachers throughout the school.  We even had a visit from a Chinese dragon workshop; we enjoyed looking at the huge lion puppet and making his eyes blink!

Some of the other activities we took part in included making Chinese lanterns, learning Chinese songs, painting plates and chinese symbols, finger print blossom trees and many many more... if you haven't done so already then please take a look at the gallery page above, to see some of our fantastic work.

REMINDERS-

A plea from Miss Ingle and our class teachers; we are finding many lost gloves, scarves etc around at the moment.  If all adults could write your children's names on the labels inside these, it should help us return them much easier to their owners.  Thank you.

Welcome back everyone!  As always, we have been very busy this week in Class One and we are already getting stuck into our new topic of ‘in the dark dark night’.

Our focus this week has been monsters.  We read the story of ‘Wriggly Squiggly’ by Jeane Willis which featured some funny monsters; the year one children then researched adjectives and similies to create their own monsters.  In reception, we also made our own monster books full of funny descriptions; needless to say we have made up some very interesting characters indeed! Reception have also been using their model making skills to bring their creatures and robots to life and have been using lots of excellent language to describe them.

In maths our focus this week has been on subtraction and counting back.  We learnt the words to a great subtraction song on youtube called ‘when you subtract with a pirate’ and this taught us lots of different ways of saying ‘take-away’. We now know that minus, subtract and difference all mean the same thing. Year One have been solving lots of worded problems but had to remember to put the largest number first and then subtract the smallest.

In science this week, we have been learning about the features of humans.  We discovered interesting facts about why we need skeletons and we thought about things that make all humans similar and different.  Next week we will be thinking more about human senses.

REMINDERS

• Show and tell will be carried forward to Monday of next week; unfortunately we ran out of time today so please feel free to bring your items in again next week.

• Library books will also be changed on Monday.

• A reminder that reception reading books will now be changed daily.

• Spellings for Year One children will be tested on Monday.

What a jam-packed week it has been!  Parent’s evenings, Christmas decoration making, sewing and lots of Nativity rehearsals!

We are doing well with our nativity songs, lots of us are remembering to sing in a big voice without shouting and we are using lots of actions to be expressive!

We are also getting a little better at remembering our cues to speak; some of us are still having some trouble remembering our lines so please continue to practise with us at home and check we can recall our lines without the cards in front of us and that we are reading in full sentences.

Costumes for the play have all been sorted and tried on and the stage is ready to go; we were very excited to get our first glimpses of what it looks like and to practise walking on and off of the steps.  Thank you to all who have bought in their tights, t-shirts and smart narrator clothing from home for the nativity

Our Christmas stockings have now been completed.  It was a tricky process first drawing around templates and cutting out the two pieces and then sewing them both together but we all did very well. We have now decorated them and they are hanging proudly in our class role-play ready for when we can take them home on the last day of half term.

REMINDERS/ OTHER.

Our Christmas nativity is next Thursday afternoon!  We look forward to seeing you all there.

Can you please ensure that water-bottles are not being kept inside books bags; we have had quite a few leaks over the last couple of weeks and books/ belongings getting rather soggy.

 Thank you for your Christmas Fair donations and to all those who came along to parents evenings.  Enjoy you weekend. J

Christmas has arrived in Class 1 this week and we have all been very busy, preparing for this Year’s Nativity called, ‘The Sleepy Shepherd!’ The children are all very excited and they enjoyed being able to pick their parts; we have shepherds, a donkey, lots of cheeky sheep and of course Mary, Joseph and Kings all raring to go with rehearsals over the next few weeks. Costumes will all be supplied by the school for the Reception Children so you will not need to supply these. Nearer the time, Year One children may bring in smart clothes from home for their narrator roles but you may keep them at home for now until we begin dress rehearsals.

This week, we have been looking at traditional tales. We learnt that traditional tales are very old stories, usually told from person to person. We also learnt that most traditional tales have similar features…1. They usually contain a wolf or other talking animal. 2. They have a part that repeats (usually 3 times) 3. They contain a moral for children to learn from and 4. They usually happen in a wood, village or jungle. We have enjoyed re-enacting some of our favourite stories and some of us performed a brilliant version of ‘The Gingerbread Man’ to the rest of the class. We have also been in role as the wolf and Little Red Riding Hood in our outside wendy house and making our own gingerbread men using dough and cutters and the Year One children did some excellent rhyming, based on the gingerbread man!

We have also been thinking all about adding doubles this week. We performed our own doubles rap to help us remember. If you want to find it at home, just type ‘Doubles Doubles (I Can Add Doubles!)’ into youtube. We doubled so many things in class, cups of water in the water area, cubes, made models with double instructions and even double dance moves! In preparation for Christmas, we have been busy creating our own fabric stockings. We found that using templates can be very tricky and when we came to cut out our two pieces using felt, we really had to concentrate on our scissor skills. Next week, we will begin to sew the front and back together so we can then decorate them.

Reminders.

Inside some of the book bags, some of you have words for the Christmas Nativity. These are for you to keep at home and learn. Remember to try to use your BIG voices and expression as you read them and practise them whenever you get the chance!

We are also missing library books from Class 1 children; if you happen to have one at home, could you please return it so that your child can then swap it for a new library book. Thank you.

We have had lots of lovely WOW forms in this week; they have been a joy to read and share to the class and we appreciate you sharing them with us.

In our literacy this week, we have been having lots of fun, continuing our theme of poetry.  We learnt a poem all about winter, which was full of onomatopoeias and some of us even added our own actions to it. We have enjoyed talking about the poems that some of the reception children researched at home and reading some of them in class, especially ‘I scream for ice-cream’ which was John’s favourite, ‘The peanut’ from Elliot, ‘The Spider and the fly’ from Oliver and ‘The chubby snowman’ from Romey.  Another one we liked was Ella’s favourite, called ‘sting a ling’ by Roald Dahl and this started off some great discussion work about scorpions. We looked up lots of facts about them on the computer and talked about some other dangerous animals.

In Maths in Year One, we have been solving investigations all week.  Our favourite one was called ‘Maisie’s maze’’ where we had to navigate a mouse around the maze in as many different ways as possible.  We knew that there were six ways of doing it but the tricky part was working in order, so that we didn’t repeat any of the possibile routes.  We also tried hard to find shortcuts in our workings.

In Science, we have started our new topic of ‘seasonal changes’.  We learnt that the sun is a star, we designed our own hats  and sun gadgets to protect our skin from it and we also went on a ‘shadow hunt’, to investigate sun light.  It was interesting to see that we only had shadows where the sun couldn’t reach and that they became longer at different points throughout the day.  We have also been creating our own ‘shadow dens’ in the classroom and some us of in reception were investigating what happens when we put coloured filters in front of the torch; we especially liked the green filter to make our faces look spooky!

Thank you to all of you for your kind 'Children in Need' contributions today.  We have loved being heroes for the day!

No Reminders this week.

Wow, what a fun filled, busy first half term it has been.  The children have come so far already and it is fantastic to see how well they have settled into their new school/ routines. 

This week our focus has been on 'people who help us when we are poorly' and we were lucky enough to have a visit on Wednesday from a real life nurse, Miss Fletcher.  The children were full of questions to ask her and they particulary enjoyed trying on all of her hospital uniforms; we had a class full of nurses, radiographers and even surgeons!  We also had a few 'injured patients' who enjoyed being wrapped up in bandages and wearing pretend slings on their arm, it has been a joy to see them all acting in role in our hospital role-play throughout the week. A special thank you to both Miss Fletcher and Mrs Fletcher-Deuchar for arranging the visit for the children.

We also thoroughly enjoyed having you all in for family week on Tuesday.  It was great to see so many of you attend and we hope you enjoyed some of the activities as much as the children did.  The 'X-ray' pictures you made with your children have been hanging proudly in Class 1 all week and we have also been lucky enough to look at some real X-rays, thanks to Ella's father, Mr Foster, who provided the class with these for us to look at.

As you may have noticed from your child's book-bags, all home-learning books have been kept in school over the half term and there is no home-work set for Class 1 and Class 2.  We hope that this will give the children (and yourselves) a break and chance to enjoy their half term after a long and busy half term.

After half term, our topic will be changing to 'Changing Seasons'.  Our Arctic role play is now all set up and ready to go for the children when they return to school.  If you have any items at home which you would like to lend the class for our Arctic role play area, such as old winter scarves and gloves or stuffed toys, they would be very much appreciated.

Wishing you all a happy and safe half term!

Miss Ingle.

In our learning this week, we have been continuing our topic of ‘people who keep us safe’.  Our week got off to an interesting start when we came into school to find police tape and pictures of robbers hidden all around the school!  We decided to use our detective skills and go on a police-search to find them all.  We took our clip boards with us and created a tally chart; we had to try to remember to ‘cross the gate’ when we got to number 5.   We then counted up each line to find totals, we had lots of fun doing this.

The adventure continued on Tuesday when we discovered that lots of our teddies and toy money had gone missing.  Even Mrs Jones’ lunch had disappeared!  We decided that it would be a good idea to make WANTED posters to catch any robbers and so we drew what we thought they may look like and wrote what we should do if we see anything suspicious.

In Year 1 History, we have been learning all about the British monarchy and we all researched our favourite member of the Royal family.  Most of us chose to find out about Kate or baby George but some of us also found out a little about Henry 8^th and we decided that royals these days are much nicer!  One of our favourite things this week was when we made our own cardboard castle in the outside area.  We had to work as a team, to check we had delegated fairly.  We added, ramparts along the top of the castle, a drawbridge, a moat, arrow slits and even a portcullis!  We also discovered that the safest part of the castle is the tallest tower; sometimes called a ‘Keep’.

Reminders/ AOB:

*  We look forward to seeing you all on Tuesday for a fun filled afternoon of activities.  We will be doing some arts and crafts as well as some other exciting things.

*  Now that it is getting cold, can all parents/ carers ensure that children are coming to school with some form of coat/ waterproof or their St Ippolyts fleece every day please.  As part of the early years curriculum, the outside area is considered part of the classroom and should be accessible to children in all weathers!  This also applies to the Year One children in Class 1 who still use this area. Wellies are very welcome should you wish your children to have a pair at school.

*  Well done to all for your effort with the home-learning tasks this half term.  The police artefacts were outstanding and the children have been using them all week in their learning.  There will be no home-learning set in KS1 and Early Years throughout the school next week, to give children (and parents) a chance to relax and enjoy their half term.

*  A reminder that all show and tell items should be linked to our half termly topic OR of a special significance please. 

This week, we have been starting our topic of ‘people who keep us safe’, which will last until the end of half term.  We started the week by thinking about fire-engines and we added our own labels to say some of the things we would find inside.  We discovered that fire-fighters need a pump, hose, a first aid kit, sirens and special cutting tools which are sometimes called ‘the Jaws of Life’!

The Year One children have also been writing instructions this week and have been trying our best to use ‘bossy’ verbs such as ‘put’, ‘walk’, ‘make’, ‘stay’, to write a set of instructions of what to do in the event of a fire.

In Reception, we have been doing some excellent role play to do with the fire-service.  Some of us decided to transform a huge cardboard box, into our own fire-engine; we drew on blue circles for sirens and wheeled out the tyres for either side so it looked real.  We also made some cup and string telephones and made 999 calls; we had to remember our address and to ask for the correct service.

One of the most exciting parts of the week was our visit from a real fireman.  We enjoyed trying on his safety clothing and we learnt that the proper name for a fire-engine is a ‘fire-appliance’.  We tested out some of our question words on him and many of us now want to become fire-fighters!  Thank you to our visitor for sparing the time to come in and also to Mrs Laws-Randall who kindly organised the visit for Class 1.

Another thing we have been doing this week is going money-mad!  We have been learning the shapes and colours of coins in England and understanding that some amounts can only be made by adding coins, (for example there is no such thing as a 3p coin but we can make 3p using other coins).

We have been trying hard to tap twice on 2p coins and 5 times on 5p coins, to understand the value of each.  We also found it really interesting that some of the smaller coins are actually worth more than some of the larger coins!

Some of us made up our own shop in the outside area to use coins in a real context and most of us can now even count in 2ps by tapping on the coin twice!  We noticed that some of the money in class was real and some was fake so some of us were very clever and used magnets to find all of the real money.

This week has also been friendship week.  Each day we have had a different focus and we have been doing lots of fun activities to help us think about positive behaviour and how to be a good friend.  One of our favourites was making ‘friendship pie’, where we mixed up ingredients to create the perfect friend.  You may have noticed ‘friendship tokens’ in our pockets or book-bags; we have earned these throughout the week each time we have been spotted being a good friend to others.

No reminders this week, just a big thank you to all for your continued support with home-learning, spellings (Yr 1) and reading at home, so far this half term!