Another busy week completed! We can’t believe it’s the last full week of November – this term is flying by. 

We have been enjoying finding out more about Victorian life for some children; we were surprised how different it was for some families! We’ve continued thinking about childhood for many Victorians and discussing similarities and differences. 

In literacy, we have been writing something called a recount where we write factually about something that happened to us. We decided to write a recount about our trip to Shire Hall. We used pictures from our trip to remind us what we did in chronological order. As a class, we really liked making the peg dolls and looking at the artefacts. We agreed that Harry Parker would have probably felt very alone and scared in the dark cells.

In maths we have been revisiting our times tables. We have reminded ourselves that times tables is a bit like repeated addition.For example, 3×2 is like adding 2+2+2 (three lots of 2). Building blocks can be useful to show times tables:

Next week is ‘Bling Your Bike Day’. A letter/email went home earlier in the week but here is the headline info: To make cycling to school even more fun, we are having a ‘Bling Your Bike’ day on Tuesday 30th November when we would like to encourage all children to cycle or scoot to school with their bikes or scooters decorated with a Christmas theme!

We work with a charity called ‘Sustrans’ who have this handy bike buying guide too that may be useful:

We’ve been practising and revisiting many of our phonics work that we have learnt in Year 1 and at the start of Year 2. Thank you for your support with the children’s home learning phonics books. We hope that by revisiting the alternative digraphs (e.g. how’ ie’, ‘y’, and’ i_e’, can make the ‘igh’ phoneme in some words), the children will become more familiar and confident with spelling patterns and word recognition etc. 

We have had a great week learning about the Victorians. We have enjoyed learning about Victorian schools and comparing how they are similar/different to schools today. We were particularly fascinated by the fact that many children would have had to work rather than go to school and one of the jobs they would have done would have been chimney sweeping or working with dangerous machines.

We had an amazing trip to Shire Hall and the adults there were so impressed with the children’s knowledge and how polite they were. Thank you to the adults that helped on the trip, your time and support is much appreciated. We spent time learning about the Victorian era and explored the courtroom and cells too. We learnt a lot about a child called Harry Parker and why he was in court at Shire Hall. We are now experts at exploring evidence and deciding whether we have enough grounds to convict someone.

We also had a great time getting crafty and making peg dolls. Some children even used these to tell stories as well. We learnt about Victorian toys and how rich children would have had dolls made from china whilst those from poorer backgrounds would have had homemade toys made from things that were around the house such as wood. There was a crib that was allegedly made from a smuggler’s box with a wooden doll inside.

This week we have also participated in anti-bullying week and looked at the theme of ‘One Kind Word…’. We have thought about what kindness means to us at school and how we can show different acts of kindness, it has been lovely to hear some of the kind acts the class have been sharing with one another. We created some great writing thinking about what kindness is.The children came up with some fantastic ideas: “Kindness is sharing and helping others. Kindness is looking after each other and making sure we use kind words.

Finally, we watched this video all about the kindness ‘boomerang’ effect, you can watch it here (adults please check the link in case of external adverts): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwAYpLVyeFU

Remember, remember the 5th of November! It’s been a chilly but sunny week – we hope you had a restful and happy half term break.

Today we have thought about why Bonfire Night and Fireworks are so common in England at this time of year. We have learnt a little bit about Guy Fawkes. Next week we will also be thinking about why and how people remember others on November 11th with poppies and Remembrance Day (we do a lot of remembering in November don’t we?!).

In maths we have been learning how to use the column method when we add numbers together. We have learnt that we can add without renaming (where the numbers we add don’t make an extra 10) such as 25+32. We have also began looking at when adding does involve renaming such as 17 + 7 or 25+ 26 etc. As one of the children said “we can use our number bonds to help us… if we add the ones and it makes 10 or more, we need to rename the ones into a ten and remember to add it with the tens!”. 

Here are some examples without renaming:

And with renaming:

We used tens and ones (dienes) to help us make the numbers too.

In literacy, we enjoyed finishing off some of our work about Baba Yaga. We thought about noun phrases to describe the witch and the forest where the story is set. For example, The mean, scary witch had a long, twisty nose. She lived in the deep, dark forest. Etc. 

We enjoyed learning some tennis skills in PE this week. We practised how to hold the racket and develop our skill with balancing the ball and how to direct the ball to where we want it to go when we hit it. 

Next week at Damers we are welcoming Jonathan from Sustrans. Jonathan is coming in as Dr Bike to help give our bikes a free check up. Please see the below picture for details.