The Chronicle

This week in French Junior 6 have been practising key French vocabulary as they prepare for meeting their French pen-pals via Teams. In particular, the children have been playing a game where they were tasked with finding the person who had the correct answer to their question using only what they have learned in lesson! The children’s letters have been sent off and we are all now eagerly awaiting a response and the chance to talk face-to-face and learn more about what life might be like for children on the other side of the Channel. Keep up the hard work Junior 6, Bon travail!

Junior 5 are raring to go with their reading this term. The excitement was palpable when they used their personalised reading ZPD range to choose from a range of many new books in our satellite classroom library. The children are very good at ensuring that they read for at least 20 minutes at home every day plus also recording each session into their reading records ready for their English teacher to check daily. Some children have even finished their books and have taken a quiz about their book. Beatrice scored a whopping 100% on her first quiz. Well done, Beatrice!

Junior 4 have been busy engaging in an ice cube investigation, where they’ve been trying to keep an ice cube solid for as long as possible. The pupils had to learn a variety of key facts, such as the temperatures of the classroom, and what an insulator is, to keep the cube as cool as possible. We had a lot of fun investigating this and most of our cubes impressively lasted for hours! Well done to, Malachi and Felix as theirs lasted the longest. We are all looking forward to our next Junior 4 investigation…which type of chocolate melts the fastest and why?

This week, Junior 3 have been looking at and recognising different psalms in RE lessons with Mrs Jackson-Mayne. The children worked collaboratively in their small groups to put actions to a psalm. They worked so well in their teams, suggesting actions that helped them to memorise the words and after some practise, performed their psalms to the other groups. Mrs Jackson-Mayne was so impressed with the children’s performances, they will be showcasing them to the rest of the school in our Mission Assembly on Monday.

We have also been getting to grips with some tricky 2-digit multiplication and have enjoyed using our trusty place value counters to represent equal groups of tens and ones, before recombining to solve our calculations.

Year 2 continued to work hard this week. In Maths we are working on recognising and using money. In English we continue to look at The Magic Paintbrush by Julia Donaldson. The children have wowed us creating imaginative expanded noun phrases, with some children even adding similes to their sentences. In Art we have drawn incredible dragons and created bright lanterns - decorating our room ready for Chinese new year.

This week we have been very busy mathematicians in Junior 1. We learnt how to add by counting on, using different resources and number lines to help us. It took some practice to realise that you don’t need to count the first group of objects if you know how many there are already; you just need to count on from the first number or the first group of objects. What a revelation! Our English lessons have also been lots of fun as we have started our new story, Mrs Armitage on Wheels by Quentin Blake. The children loved the humour of the book and there was lots of laughter ringing out in both classrooms. We are really looking forward to finding out more about the story next week. In Science, we have begun our topic of Polar Regions by looking more closely at Antarctica. We all loved learning so many new scientific facts this week!

This week Reception have been learning all about keeping pet animals. They have been thinking about which animals would make good pets and most agreed they would prefer a tabby cat to a lion, and a dog to a hyena. The children have been thinking about what each animal would need, and have linked this back to their own experiences and what they need to grow to be healthy and happy. The children have also enjoyed playing in the ‘Vets’ role play area this week.

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