27.02.23 - This coming week in Early Years

Hello everyone, 

Many thanks for all of the children's sheets about our new project, we made a great start on it this week and are looking forward to continuing to learn more about the Boy and the Penguin next week. 

Please don't forget that this week we have our Parent/Teacher consultations, so therefore there is no drop in again, these will resume next week.

This coming week we will be:

• Sharing and discussing the story "Up and Down", which is another story about the Boy and the Penguin.
• Discussing what it means to be a good friend in our Circle Time session and linking this to what we know about the Boy and the Penguin.
• Learning the last of our Phase 3 sounds in our Phonics sessions and playing Phoneme Bingo again.
• Looking at globes and maps of the world to find the South Pole and comparing it to Rayleigh, as we ran out of time for this last week.
• Starting the phase "Building 9 & 10" in our Mathematics sessions.
• Learning 5 new Vocabulary Ninja words.

Don't forget Thursday is World Book Day. The information about how we are marking this in school can be found here. We are looking forward to finding out about the children's favourite stories. 

Finally, a message from Mrs Hurley:

This year, at Down Hall Primary School, we have had a big focus on Times Tables through our Times Table Programme as well as Times Table Rock Stars. These have both helped the children to become more fluent in their times tables.

On Thursday 9th March, we would like all staff and pupils to take the opportunity to dress up as rock stars for the day. During this day they will take part in a range of maths activities. Prizes for the best dressed rock star will be handed out. There is no cost for dressing up. More details will follow...

Have a lovely weekend

Miss Wakefield, Mrs O'Connor and Miss Langley

20.02.23 - This coming week in Early Years

Hello everyone, 

We hope you have all had a lovely half term break. This week we will starting our new project "Lost and Found" and will be:

• Watching and listening to the story "Lost and Found".
• Learning about the author Oliver Jeffers who wrote and illustrated the story "Lost and Found".
• Sequencing events from the story, using pictures from the film and then creating our own song to tell the story of the Boy and the Penguin.
• Learning the next 4 sounds in our Phonics sessions and recapping the Rainbow Words from Phase 2 and 3.
• Making our own repeating pattern umbrellas like the one belonging to the penguin.
• Creating boats, using the junk modelling materials, to sail in the water tray.

Don't forget the appointments for our Parent/Teacher consultations go live tomorrow. These are taking place on Monday 27th February (Pearl & Quartz), Tuesday 28th February (Pearl only) and Wednesday 1st March (Quartz only). Appointments booked via Scopay, details can be found here. If you have any problems please just ask one of us and we will do our best to help solve it.

See you tomorrow!

Miss Wakefield, Mrs O'Connor and Miss Langley

Wishing you a lovely half term!

Hello everybody, 

Today the children have brought home a letter about our next project "Lost and Found". We really enjoyed finding out the answers to the children's questions about dinosaurs, so it would be lovely to have their ideas once again. If you can't find your child's sheet, they can also be found here. 

We have also made some salt dough fossils this week, again there was a clip to show us what to do, it can be found here. 

We have also enjoyed the coin run today, making really long lines on the playground with all our coins. It was lots of fun!

We hope you all have a lovely half term week, we will see you all on Monday 20th February!

Miss Wakefield, Mrs O'Connor and Miss Langley

06.02.23 - This coming week in Early Years

Hello everyone!

This week we have LOVED seeing the children's matchboxes and seeing how many items they had managed to fit in their boxes. Things did became a little competitive amongst the adults in Early Years with Mrs Holmes managing to fit a staggering 47 objects in her matchbox! If your child would still like to carry out this activity, we would love to see their matchboxes next week.

Also, this week, we have added the Numberblocks 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 to our display in class. We have enjoyed learning about each of these numbers and have talked about how, in each of the episodes we watched, 1 more was added to create the next number. We are planning on creating a dedicated area all about the Numberblocks and have ordered some new resources to support the children's learning.

We also created our own volcano this week, which was exciting, although poor Mrs O'Connor did end up rather covered in vinegar. If you would like to try this at home then the experiment can be found here. 

Now on to our learning for the coming week, we will be:

• Sharing the book "Dinosaur More!". This is a non-fiction version of last week's book "Dinosaur Roar!".
• Learning what non-fiction means and using our book to find out information about the different dinosaurs.
• Labelling the different parts of a dinosaur, using our segmenting skills to help us spell the words.
• Looking at fossils and learning about the job of a Palaeontologist.
• Checking to see if we have answered all of our questions about our Dinosaur project.
• Continuing with our Maths work from last week, working on addition and finding the total using our 10 frames. 
• Enjoying the PTA coin run on Friday. (More information below).

On Friday it is "Wear it like Elmer" day.  The children can wear a coloured item (taking one of Elmer's colours) along with their normal PE kit for a suggested donation of £1. (More information is in the newsletter, which can be found here). They are also asked to bring in some coins to take part in the coin run. Each class will be laying their coins in a long line and the class with the longest line will win a prize! All monies raised will be split between the PTA and raising funds for our elephant.

We hope you have a lovely weekend

Miss Wakefield, Mrs O'Connor and Miss Langley