Challenger Class - Final Week of Term 1
The last week of term is upon us and there is another packed week ahead. Please have a look at what’s on.
Getting out and about this week
There will be an Interhouse Cross Country event for KS1 and Early Years on Tuesday afternoon (weather permitting). This will take place within our school grounds with the wonderful Year 6 acting as marshals, hares and rabbits. Children should wear School PE kit on that day as well as the usual PE days.
On Thursday the Lower School will adventure out on a local ‘Great Outdoors’ walk. Following on from our Science week, we will investigate the different animal habitats in our local area. Children will be wearing PE Kits on Thursday which will be suitable for our walk and they might like to wear waterproof over trousers if they have them. They should wear wellies or sturdy shoes or boots as the ground is likely to be wet and muddy.
In phonics, the new sounds are ey and au. Please encourage your children to look out for these graphemes this week. They might be able to spot them in their reading books or on notices, posters or road signs (Henley on Thames, for example).
Our English lessons will be Halloween-themed. We’ll look at Shakespeare’s Witch’s Song from Macbeth and Julia Donaldson’s Room on the Broom. These two texts which were written some 400 years apart both feature a magic potion. I am sure that Challenger children will make some fantastic ingredient choices when we write our own recipes.
In maths this week the focus is on number bonds. Having a sound knowledge of number bonds (pairs of numbers that add together to make another number) and being able to recall them instantly is a fundamental skill that children learn in Year 1. We start by building knowledge with concrete and pictorial images to model the bonds. The bonds are also expressed as addition number sentences. Children need regular practice to be able to commit these to memory. If children can learn and remember these facts at an early stage, this instant recall frees up the brain for more complicated mathematical thinking. You can help with this at home in many situations; if you have two blue T shirts and four of a different colour in your drawer, how many do you have altogether? Our stem sentence to model this would be ‘ two and four make six, six is made of two and four’.
Have a wonderful week everyone!
Photos from last week
Have a look at our gallery of last week's learning about habitats, mini beast hunting and making playdough bugs. See if you can spot the scorpion which crept in to the modelling session. We didn't actually find one!