First full week down and the children have already produced a beautiful, long piece of writing in English. The children stepped into the glass slippers of Cinderella for yesterday’s lesson and wrote a diary entry of the remarkable appearance of her fairy godmother. The children used words with the –ful and –less suffixes and some even attempted to use the possessive apostrophe. The children did a great job of using the past tense consistently, another grammatical focus of the week. The children are still taking a lot of care over their handwriting and there have been crowns circulating for hard work and beautiful handwriting.

In Maths, we have been adding pounds and pence in order to find the total in written calculations and word problems. Following this, we have been finding the change when paying for something in written calculations and word problems. We have been trying to get to grips with the concept of change and using subtraction to find the right answer. Any opportunities you have over the weekend involving buying,  please do involve the children. Any  counting of coins and calculating change would be of great support. We discussed strategies of the number line and the tens and ones frame to calculate the trickier ones.

In Humanities, we recapped our knowledge of where the seven continents are on a world map. Following this, we talked about the weather and climate in Kenya and thought about what we would pack to go on a Kenyan safari and why.

In Science, we thought about which materials are man-made and which come from the natural world. This lead to a discussion around the importance of recycling plastic.

In R.E, we have been identifying the sentence in The Lord’s Prayer ‘Give us today our daily bread’ and understanding trust in the prayer. We also discussed the difference between what we need to live and what we want. We finished with a discussion around why we don’t always get what we want and why that helps us to be better people.

We have been learning the Makaton to ‘On my Way’ in preparation for the class assembly. It is a while away but the children are always on board for a happy song and are doing a great job at learning the signing.

Have a great weekend.

Miss Hall​

Happy New Year!

Thank you all for the many cards and gifts that I was kindly given at the end of term.

Hoberman Class have started 2020 fantastically. We have jumped straight into our learning and lots of it…

In English, after recounting our Christmas holidays, we moved onto Cinderella. We have really enjoyed reading this familiar story and thinking about how each character is feeling at each point in the story. We accompanied this with some more straight forward comprehension to ensure we really thoroughly understood what is happening at each point in the story.

In Maths, we have been doing money. We had some discussion around how money cannot buy you happiness – lots of the children told us about special people in their lives which was really lovely! The children have been counting coins to make amounts. We have been adding pence and pounds, taking care to add the pence and pounds separately, as well as using coins to find different ways to make given amounts. For example, I could make 48p using two 20 pence pieces, one 5 pence piece and three 1 pence pieces. If you have pennies that need counting or have any change that the children could count then that would be a great supporting activity!

In RE we thought about the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer. Lots of us knew the words and could say them confidently but did not know the meanings. So we have started from the top with some discussion around why we call God ‘Father’.

In Science, we have started our materials and their properties topic. The children were using their senses to identify the properties of a range of materials.

We have started our new Humanities topic, ‘Let’s Go on Safari to Kenya’. The children have identified the seven continents of the world as well as the seas and oceans. All the children can locate the continent of Africa on a map and find the country Kenya.

We finished the week with an art lesson looking at Adrian Berg who painted beautiful landscapes of parks and Kew Gardens. Using paint and oil pastels we created a winter scene reflected in water. We then read a story called ‘The Whisperer’ which might be the inspiration for our class assembly. It went down a storm with the children.

To keep up the beautiful handwriting please encourage them in their homework books to sing the ‘handwriting song’ before they begin to make sure they are set up for success!

Happy weekends all round!

Miss Hall

spring 1 week 1

Happy Christmas holidays everybody!

Hoberman class have covered a huge amount of learning this term and have done incredibly well to work hard right up until the end. Besides their hard work, their enthusiasm and kindness have made for a really great first term at St Stephens.

Father Christmas received a flood of beautiful cards from Hoberman class this week. The children did a fantastic job of remembering how to layout a letter and wrote some very thoughtful letters with much more than just a list of requests! Lots of adjectives were used to ensure that Father Christmas doesn’t buy the wrong thing!

In Maths we have been revisiting and revising those tricky addition and subtraction calculations disguised as ‘fun’ word problems.

In Science we have, quite ironically for this time of year, been thinking about what makes a healthy diet and the importance of exercise. The children designed their own meals creating some unusual yet balanced combinations…

We made Christingles in RE reminding ourselves of the meaning of each part as we added them to our orange.

Today we finished the day, Christmas songs on repeat, making our small Christmas gifts of festive baubles which just need the parts sticking on at home.

Finally, a huge thank you for all the kind messages and well wishes that I received today and this week. Such a lovely send off into Christmas.

I wish you all a very Merry Christmas with your friends and families.

See you in the New Year!

Best wishes

Miss Hall

We’ve had such an amazing week in Year 2. The highlight of course being the brilliant Nativity. All of the children did so well to remember lines, songs and dance moves and worked so well together making it such a great performance. Miss Whiting was blown away by the childrens energetic dancing and beautiful voices. We hope you enjoyed every moment as much as we did. It was so lovely to see lots of smiling faces in the audience along with the huge cheers you gave the children. Thanks so much for being so supportive. I know it made the children feel extremely special.

It has been a fun filled week in Hoberman. Around our learning we have been working really hard to perfect the Nativity. Our voices have got stronger and louder and our dancing even more beautiful! We are almost ready for the big performance and cannot wait to show you!

In English we have been looking at lots of different of poems, all with one thing in common – sounds. We learnt a very very long word – ‘onomatopoeia’! We have been collecting onomatopoeic words and gathering them into our ‘sound bag’ we will then use this next week to create our own poem in the style of Roger McGough in his poem ‘The Sound Collector’. Next week the ‘Sound Collector’ will visit St Stephens and will we compose a poem about what sounds he might collect from all corners of the school…

After a triumphant final lesson in subtracting two digit numbers which was very tricky (but all the more satisfying once we had cracked it) we have moved back to one digit numbers. This time we are subtracting three of them. We have also been adding three of them. We have developed different strategies to help us including beads in a table, the number line or even just our fingers.

In RE we looked at Christingles and thought about what each part could represent. We then drew and labelled one which we will be making before the end of term. We ended the lesson by reflecting on what we might want to add to our Christingle and why. We thought about adding a heart to represent the love of God or a crucifix to remind us that Jesus died for us.

A couple of things to note regarding DT day next Thursday. In preparation, the children can plan their small Nativity set as part of their homework. The children need to think about what resources they could find at home and at school which they could use to create a Nativity scene (in one day). The children may do a labelled drawing of their plan on the paper given to them. Find sheet attached along with the homework to the website. In addition, if you have any shoeboxes lying around at home please may you send them in with the children on Monday. Thank you to those parents who have already done so.

Have a lovely weekend and we look forward to seeing (most of) you next week.

Miss Hall