Year 1

We have really enjoyed STEM week in year 1. We have been busy being scientists and mathematicians and exploring which STEM skills we use everyday. Thank you to all the children who sent in their STEM selfies. We loved sharing them with our classes and explaining what amazing STEM learning we had done at home. 

We had a go at 4 different science experiments this week and carefully discussed the equipment we would need, the scientific skills we were using and the steps we needed to follow. It was so lovely to see all the children engaged in their science learning and being amazed by the experiments. 

We had a special maths lesson all about the mathematician ‘M C Escher’ who made his own tessellations. We had a go at making our own tessellations using paper triangles then used 2D shapes, lego and numicon to make our own. We loved spotting tessellations in our school environment around us and there were lots to be found in our learning garden!

In our maths lesson, we have been thinking about using time connectives and ordering. We had fun drawing our own comic strip of what we do in our day and wrote sentences next to it to describe what happened first, next and then. We made sure to be really careful and neat with the presentation in our maths books.

  

  

Key Messages

• Festival of Sport: Tuesday 9th July at 1.45pm 

• Key vocab: science, technology, engineering, maths, experiment, tessellation   

• Spelling books and reading folders to be brought in on Mondays. 

• PE days are Wednesday and Friday. 

• For our DT project please bring in a (small) cardboard box next week with your child's name on it

 

Year 2

This week, the fun continued in Year 2… We started the week with a walk to Richmond Green, where we learned all about our local Tudor history, drawing on the knowledge that we acquired from our Hampton Court trip. The children saw the wardrobe, the trumpeter's house, the gatehouse and the chapel. They were shocked to discover how the palace was used over time- with Henry VIII often gifting the palace to his wives. After our walk, the children all got to enjoy a snack on the green before walking back up to school. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we marked STEM week by conducting two experiments. We looked at the importance of time and traced back the history of clocks. Working in teams, the children made their own pendulums, testing the impact of different variables (such as length of string). In English, we immersed ourselves in our new text, ‘House Held Up by Trees’, by creating shape poems. The children worked together to share ideas before creating their own poem independently. On Thursday, the children looked into body parts, learning the scientific names for the different body parts. Finally, in PE, we have been getting ready for the Festival of Sports, practising a range of different skills. The children can’t wait to show you their jumping, throwing, coordination, locomotion and teamwork skills on Tuesday!

  

  

Key messages: 

• Festival of Sport: Tuesday 9th July at 1.45pm 

• Vocabulary: branches, leaves, trunk, vagina, vulva, penis, testicle, gatehouse, palace, security 

• Spelling focus: irregular plurals (o-oes, y-ies, f-ves) 

• KIRF focus: subtraction with exchange (e.g. 45-27=?) 

• Writing focus: capital letters for proper nouns, past tense and ‘so’ 

• Help needed: we are looking for helping hands for our sewing session on the 18th July. If you can help, please let your class rep know.