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In the eyes of God, every child matters, every moment of every day

In the eyes of God, every child matters, every moment of every day

Friday 23rd October 2020

This week’s talk homework is to talk to your adults about Remembrance. Could you please carefully cut the bottom off a plastic bottle (i.e. a Coke or Lemonade Bottle) and bring it into school with you on the first day back? We will be making a whole-school memorial of Poppies on the School fence!

What a busy week we’ve had in Thunberg Class! The children have worked so hard and we are so proud of them :). 

This week has been a very surreal and strange week – Miss Freeman has had to teach us from home! We’ve been working super hard to listen to her teaching inputs via Microsoft Teams and she’s been on our screen all week watching us and supporting from afar! Mrs McDonnell has done an absolutely fantastic job of dealing with this new ‘normal’ by taking the lead in the classroom and helping the children with their in-class learning – it has been quite a tricky week but the children have listened so well and tried really hard, despite the really difficult situation – we still managed to get lots of work done and we loved welcoming Miss Freeman back to school on Friday to spend our last day of the first half term together wearing red!

This week in English we have paused our learning on our Power of Reading text – instead we have been completing quizzes in our English learning on how to spell the Year 1 High Frequency words and have been completing a Dictation activity – Miss Freeman has read two sentences aloud each day and the children have had to use their knowledge of phonics, tricky words and sentence structure to write the sentences independently in their books! The children have been really resilient and worked hard under ‘test’ conditions and we are super proud of them for sharing what they know!

In Maths this week, we have moved onto a new topic of addition and subtraction! We have enjoyed finding number bonds to 10, and using our knowledge of this as well as a range of resources to find number bonds all the way up to 100! Some of the children could even use a 100 square to find a number, count in tens to find the remaining bond to 100 and could share their understanding by writing a number sentence! We’ve then moved onto to use a number line and a place value grid to add a 1s number to a 10s number, i.e. 34 + 8, by counting on a number line and through beginning to look at column addition using dienes and other pictorial representations!

To finish off our Global Learning and in order to meet Goal 15: Life on Land, we have been looking at what makes a good Bug House! We’ve investigated lots of different types of Bug Houses and the materials that are used to make them in order to keep the Bugs comfy, warm and safe from predators. We moved on to design our own Bug House and collected the natural materials we would need to construct it – we had lots of fun finding bark, leaves, twigs, logs, grass and other things outside on the school field! We then finished the week by building our own Bug Houses using string weaved into drilled pieces of wood – we made a triangle shaped house and filled them with our natural materials. We looked at each other’s finished products and wrote compliment slips to say what we liked about each other’s designs and celebrated how hard we all worked to make them!

In Art we have continued to look at shade and tone, light and dark and the children applied everything they knew into constructing a sculpture made from leaves based on the work of Andy Goldsworthy, an artist who makes lots of art from natural materials. We drew and coloured leaves in light and dark shades and organised them to make a sculpture of our own – the children either chose to work independently or in pairs, and we were super impressed with the children’s enthusiasm and teamwork in order to achieve the finished piece!

In French we have been learning the months of the year and the children completed a matching activity where they had to find the matching names of the months in English and French – we were really proud of how hard they worked and how confident they are getting in this!

In P.E. this week we played football cricket with Miss Lizell. The children braved the cold and rain and had lots of fun!

Thank you for all of your support during my first half term at Buckden – the children are so lovely and have really helped me to settle in. It has been a strange end to the half term but I am so proud of how resilient they have been in adapting their school week to the new ‘normal’, they have continued to work really hard and have made me super smiley J. I will miss them lots over the half term, but take the time to take a break, recharge and be ready for our new Global Learning unit and lots of exciting learning opportunities next half term – the countdown to Christmas is on!

Stay safe,
Miss Freeman and Thunberg Class