Welcome to Class 1 - Jellyfish Class 

A very warm welcome to Autumn term 1!

Please do not hesitate to come and see me after school, or give me an email if you have any questions. My email address is b.bramhill@consortiumtrust.org.uk

Important information:

-Your child needs their own named plastic water bottle to keep in class, which they can access and top up during the day.

-Please bring wellies, labelled for wet weather and muddy ground.

-Please also ensure your child brings trainers every day to change into for the Golden Mile run round the field to help keep our carpets mud-free.

-They may also wish to bring a healthy snack (fruit or veg/crackers etc) for morning break which they can eat at the beginning of play time. They also will have the option to have a school-provided snack (fruit or veg) and milk in the afternoon. 

-Please label every part of your child's uniform so that if they misplace it, we will know it's theirs.

- Feel free to join the Class 1 parents Whatsapp group if you want to- ask other parents to add you in. This can  help to find missing bits of uniform at the end of the day if the wrong children take them home!

- I will send you a class newsletter every week with any reminders and information you need as well as updates on the children's learning that week. I will only send pictures of your child(ren) if they have got consent for this via Arbor. 

-Please encourage your child to bring in something or have a song ready to sing/a joke ready to tell/ a picture they have made every Monday for 'show and tell' with Mr Barlow. Thank you.

Homework:

-You will receive phonics flashcards in the Autumn term and these need to be practised everyday please. Once your child has learnt the sound, I will tick it at school. Please don't tick it at home. I will then replace with new sounds at school once each sound has got three ticks. Once your child has progressed and learnt all the red level sounds, they can take a library book home to read. They need to read this twice before changing it, this is to help with fluency and comprehension. The government guidance states that Early Years and Key Stage One children should read a book 10 minutes everyday at home to maintain a good level of progress. This can be done at bedtime or at any point in the morning or evening, a routine really does help to get into the rhythm of fitting this in. We ask that you sign their reading diary each time to say what book they read, the page number they are on and any comments. We will listen to them read 1:1 at least once a week as well as doing their flashcards daily at school. 

Our exciting learning this term...

Morning activities: Reception will be practising our motor skills such as pencil grip, cutting, painting, writing skills through a number of activities like squeezing, rolling, poking using play dough, tweezers, weaving string, using sand to mark-make in preparation for writing. 

Phonics: 

This term, some reception children are learning about how to listen carefully through fun games such as 'Teddy in the jungle' where one child hides a teddy in the classroom or outside and plays a drum noise for the rest of the class if anyone gets close to the teddy. We will wear our big listening ear headbands and go outside to see what sounds we can hear e.g. birds, cars, tractors, rain on the gutters. We will then move on to learning how each letter sounds and how it has a corresponding grapheme (how you see it written on paper).

Please encourage your child to engage in listening to story-telling and joining in with key events, explaining what has happened so far, predicting what might happen next every day. 

Eventually, your child will be able to move onto library level books that are on our 'Accelerated Reader' system. This usually happens in Class 2. This means that they can take a comprehension quiz on a tablet at school to see their understanding of what happened in the book; the children find this very exciting! They can then move on to another book. 

See below the early learning goal and our rhymes that we use to teach the children each sound and the saying we use when we are forming each letter. For example the letter 'm' looks like two mountains so when we are doing each arch of the letter we say mountain.

h

Literacy:

Reception children will be looking at the story 'Bug Hotel'. We will be talking about how this book is non-fiction and enjoying making our own bug hotels.

We will also be enjoying reading lots of fiction books, enjoying story telling, practising actions and roleplay to go with them and eventually having a go at drawing our own story maps with pictures and symbols to represent parts of the story. We will be looking at The Gruffalo, Sulwe, Baby Mouse, The Colour Monster, Pattan Pumpkin and Room on the Broom.

We will also be learning rhymes and poems to expand our vocabulary and consolidate our communication and language skills. Towards the end of the year, the children will look at how to create simple sentences that include capital letters, full stops and interesting words like adjectives. 

Whole Class Reading: 

We will be looking at a variety of high-quality books and enjoying them together.We will be developing our reading VIPER skills: vocabulary, inferencing, predicting, explaining, retrieving and sequencing. This will be done through lots of discussion, drawings and roleplay at the end of everyday before home time. We will read a range of non-fiction and fiction books as well as watching some story animations on videos like The Gruffalo's child, Stick Man on BBC iPlayer. 

Maths:

Reception children will be looking at matching objects, learning nursery rhymes, ordering numbers to 10, making patterns like ABAB- teddy, frog, teddy, frog, learning how to sort objects by features like colour and shape, compare length and height by building towers, looking at height of children and whether objects are big or small, comparing groups of objects and talking about which group has more and which has less, looking at one ot one correspondence- does each child have a snack? Everyday we count how many children are in our class and write down the number on our maths display. We will have fun opportunities to do baking cupcakes and making playdough, using weighing scales and measuring liquids and talking about quantities of each ingredient. 

Science/Understanding the World:

In EYFS we will be doing lots of outdoor learning, we will be learning about how to explore the natural world around us, describing what we can see, hear and feel whilst outside. We will aim to understand the effect of the changing seasons on the natural world around us.

Topic: Our topic this term is 'Marvellous Me'. See the medium term plan/knowledge organiser below:

See below some of the early learning goals that will be learnt during our topic:

Music: We will be learning lots of nursery rhymes, enjoying listening to different genres of music, begginning to identify the beat and discuss if we like the music.

We will also be doing lots of practice for the harvest festival this term.

Art: We will be learning how to do self-portraits and about artists who did self portraits like Vincent Van Gogh, Andy Warhol and Picasso. We will be constructing self portraits using materials like play dough and progressing onto clay as well. 

RE: We will be looking at some different religions and beliefs including: 

Diwali

We will look at other cultures through learning focusses like Chinese new Year, tasting Chinese foods.

PSED: We will be looking at our mental health and wellbeing, continuing to use our emotions chart throughout the day to explain how we are feeling and why. We will be learning how to use strategies for when we are feeling sad, cross, angry and what we an do when we are feeling happy. We will be developing our skills on how to share and take turns when playing, go to the toilet and get dressed independently. 

Welcome to Seahorses - Year 2

History

Our History topic will be the Gun Powder Plot. During this topic we will learn what happened, what led to Guy Fawkes being involved with the Gun Power Plot and how he was arrested. We will find out about the legacy of this event as we head towards Bonfire night. 

Science

This term we will learn about animals and will develop our knowledge of different classification groups of animals such as reptiles, mammals, amphibians etc. We will also consider what  environments are best for these animals to live in and which animals will be ideal pets for a  range of enviroment.s

English

This term we will look at a range of story texts such as Mr Gumpy's Motor Car and The Storm Whale. We will also build our descriptive skills as we describe fruits and vegetables grown in the UK for our Harvest Celebration. These topics will allow the children to build their writing stamina, learn to use a range of adjectives and to build their editing skills. We will then move on to writing non-fiction texts about the Gun Power Plot. We will finish the term looking at poetry. 

Reading

Each afternoon in school we spend half an hour developing our reading skills. We learn skills such as identifying vocabulary in the text, making inferences based on the text we've read, predicting what is going to happen, retreiving information from the text, explaining about what we 

Maths

In Maths lessons we follow the White Rose Scheme of learning. This term we are going to learn place value and addition.

PE

Year 2 children do PE on a Wednesday afternoon with Mr Hopkinson.

Computing

Mr Barlow teaches Computing on a Wednesday afternoon.

Your child needs their own named plastic water bottle to keep in class.

-They may also wish to bring a healthy snack for morning break which they can eat at the beginning of play time. They also will have the option to have a school-provided snack in the afternoon and some have milk.

-Please also label every part of your child's uniform so that if they misplace it, we will know it's theirs. Please also bring wellies labelled for wet weather and muddy ground.

-Please ensure your child brings trainers every day to change into after the Golden Mile to help keep our carpets mud-free.

Please speak to Miss Way if you have any questions.

Welcome to Dolphins Class (Year 3 and 4)                                    

Mrs Townshend and Ms Jary teach in Class 3 with Mrs Ponton and Mr Barlow as class TAs. Please do not hesitate to come and see us after school if you have any questions or queries

Your child needs their own named plastic water bottle to keep in class, which they can access and top up during the day and a small pencil case which will fit in their tray. They may also wish to bring a healthy snack for morning break which they then eat at the beginning of play time. 

Class News

Welcome back to an exciting Autumn Term. We hope you are refreshed and ready to learn!            

Our History/Geography topic this term is Rainforests

Our Science topic is Plants

(Don't forget to use Curriculum Visions for extra research at home-ask if you've forgotten your login)  

In English this term, we will be reading and studying 'Explorer' by Katherine Rundall, 'Where the Forest Meets the Sea' by Jeannie Baker, 'The Great Kapok Tree' by Lynne Cherry and 'Jungle Book' dvd.to inspire children's writing and encourage the children's love of reading. 

In Maths we will continue to follow the White Rose scheme of work and use Times Tables Rockstars to help with learning times tables. All children are required by the government to know their times tables up to 12x12 before they reach Yr 5. We have a Rainforest display so that the children know which times tables they are learning next, please feel free to ask more about this system. Times tables tests are on Fridays. On completing a times tables test successfully, the children then move onto the next number, but the tests each week also cover numbers previously learnt to constantly consolidate the children’s learning.

Trips/Visits

Kew Gardens 17.9.24

Music at Ipswich School 4.10.24 Body Percussion

                                          10.10.24 Jazz concert

Harvest Festival at Henley Church 16.10.24

Carol Service at Henley Church 19.12.24

Class information 

  Spellings

Spellings will be learnt in school and will be tested at the end of each unit. We will be revisiting the words regularly in class in order to embed the spelling rules and patterns.

Times Tables
We learn times tables in a certain order. (Please feel free to come in and see our times tables display.) Everyone will start with 2s in September and then move up through the chosen order until they reach 'The Moon'. Children will be tested each week and will move up or be re-tested. Please practise times tables as much as possible over the holidays - car journeys are the perfect time.Times Tables Rock stars is a new and exciting way to learn times tables. Your child has his/her own password.Please encourage your child to use it as much as possible.

Reading
Please listen to your child read as often as you can. Just ten minutes every night can really help your child to progress in their reading. (Even fluent readers may need help with difficult words.)

When you have listened to your child, please sign and date the pages read. Reading diaries will be checked weekly by Mrs Ponton and a raffle ticket will be awarded if your child has read five times or more in a week.

Independence
One of the important roles in Class 3 is to develop your child's independence. Being ready for lessons with the appropriate equipment in their own pencil case and having appropriate clothes for the weather that day is all part of this.

PE/ICT timetable

Monday ICT with Mr Barlow

Wednesday PE with Mr Hopkinson

PE kit. T-shirt in the house colour, navy shorts, navy tracksuit, plimsolls, plain trainers. If your child wears tights to school that day, they will need white socks to change into.Long hair will also need to be tied back and earrings removed.

Please make sure your child has:
1. A book bag/ folder to protect school library books and reading diaries.
2. Sports kit
3. A pencil case with a selection of HB pencils for writing and drawing, a few coloured crayons, ruler, rubber, pencil sharpener etc. Please make sure that the pencil case is small enough to fit in your child's drawer in the classroom.
4. Wellies.

Please make sure that all items of clothing are clearly labelled.

Welcome to Barracuda Class

Mr Hempenstall and Mrs Dod teach Barracudas. Please do not hesitate to come and see us after school if you have any questions or queries.

Here is our topic overview so you can see all the wonderful things that we will be learning this term.

Reading

Every child in Barracuda Class is asked to read every night. They will receive raffle tickets for every week they can show that they have read for five nights. The more raffle tickets they receive, the greater chance they have of winning the end-of- term prize. 

Spelling

In school, we use the spelling scheme of syllables and sounds to help children to become competent spellers. When writing at home, please encourage your child to split the word into syllables and then focus on the sounds they can hear in each syllable. They can identify the tricky sounds that they hear and use their sound mat for support to choose the correct sound. When writing at home, children should be encouraged to use a sound mat that will be sent home.

Upcoming Events

As part of our World War II topic, we will be visiting the Imperial War Museum in Doxford on Friday 18th October 2024. 

We also have the following events to look forward to:

Music at Ipswich School 4.10.24 Body Percussion

                                           10.10.24 Jazz concert

Harvest Festival at Henley Church 16.10.24

Carol Service at Henley Church 19.12.24

Click here for PE & Outdoor Learning Kit required for Physical Activity
 

PE Lessons

P.E lessons are on Wednesdays. Children are permitted to come to school in the correct P.E kit on P.E days. 

In school, we have set up a reward system which celebrates the effort, behaviour and resilience of children in school. These are given to children for using good manners, looking out for their friends, helping others, helping visitors etc. Children earn points which then in turn can be exchanged for prizes from the reward cabinet. Prizes have been donated by the Friends of Henley School and are updated regularly to keep up with trends and fads, maintaining the interest of the children.

The behaviour points are also added together for the house totals every half term, together with house points which are awarded for achievement and attainment in class. House points are awarded for academic achievement in school and at home for improvements to work quality, outstanding presentation etc.

As well as these reward systems, staff use sticker charts in class, celebrate with certificates and notes home and our Head Teacher certificates are awarded in assembly each week. Other certificates in school include Accelerated Reader and Maths timetables achievements.

We also have a WOW! Board in the school corridor which celebrates achievements beyond the immediate school environment. Children can bring in photographs of their activities and awards to share their successes at clubs outside of school. These have previously included karate competitions, scouting, ballet and dance shows, beekeeping experiences and music awards.

We really like to see what the children accomplish outside of school and share in their successes and achievements.