Friday 5th November

 

Dear Squirrels,

It was lovely to see you all again after half term. I'm sure you have all grown in your week off!

As always, it's been a busy week settling back into our learning in the Squirrels' class. 

In Mantle of the Expert

The Mayor's mere suggestion that the 'ancient old oak tree' is no longer safe and requires cutting down has outraged the children. As a result, they decided to write a letter to the Mayor to persuade him NOT TO CUT DOWN THE TREE! The children had many valid reasons to support their argument... 

• The reduction in oxygen and the increase in carbon dioxide was of concern to some children.  
• Concerns for the inhabitants of the tree. 
• How the local villagers would feel about cutting down a tree that has been a part of their families heritage

With these concerns in mind the children took 'posh' pens to paper and wrote a persuasive letter to the Mayor.

In Maths

Having completed our chapter on place value, column addition and column subtraction we are now moving on to a new chapter which is multiplication:

• Making equal groups.
• Identifying how many are in each group.
• Drawing equal groups (can be simple dots).
• Writing repeated addition number sentences and multiplication number sentences. 

As this is a new chapter, much the work the children have been doing has been using concrete apparatus and pictorial representations.

Please continue to work on your times tables, spellings and reading at home. 

Year 2: 2, 5 and 10 times tables

Year 3: 3, 4 and 8 times tables

Please remember that doodle maths is available for you to practise the maths we have been learning in class. DoodleLearning | Personalised Online Maths & English  

Children are welcome to change their reading books in class at the end of the day. 

Each child in class is heard by a teacher every week. This term we are working on comprehension, retrieval and inference of text which you will find pointers to on your parent teacher meeting email. 

Those children that received a KS1 (Year 2) work booklet before half term please continue to work through it and feel free to bring it in to show me when you have finished. 

Guy Fawkes: I thought some of you may like to listen to the gunpowder plot story and learn about the history of bonfire night as it is Friday 5th November.

Why did The Gunpowder Plot happen? | History KS1| BBC Teach - YouTube

On Thursday this week the children celebrated Diwali, the festival of light. The children made Rangoli patterns and learnt about the story of Rama and Sita.

You can share the story together here.

Finally, I will leave you with a glowing fire to keep you warm now that the temperature has dropped. 

See you all on Monday.

Have a super weekend!

From Miss Swain and Daphne