The Week in Prep

Nursery

There is never a dull moment in Nursery as our days are full of laughter and learning. Just before the holidays, the girls enjoyed finding out about the Lunar New Year and how it is celebrated around the world. They concocted wonderful feasts to celebrate and they made lanterns to hang as decorations in the classroom, as well as flowers to bring good fortune and hope. Some of the girls also shared their family traditions and handed out red enveloped containing lucky coins.

This week, the girls started to find out about pirates and they have enjoyed pretending to sail the seven seas, singing shanties and hiding their treasure along the way. They were also presented with a challenge to make a pirate ship that floats and they showed their engineering skills beautifully. They enjoyed testing the boats to see which pirates would survive the shark-infested waters and which would sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Reception

As part of our topic on traditional tales, Reception read the story of the Billy Goats Gruff. We created trolls using old tights, soil and grass seed and waited for their ‘hair’ to grow. We decorated the trolls giving them unusual features. Some of the trolls look like they need a haircut now!

Year 1

In our Breathe the Wild Air lessons before half term Year 1 were out bird spotting.  The last weekend in January was the RSPB Garden Birdwatch.  Year 1 went around the school grounds and tried to identify the different birds that were seen using our ‘Bird Spotters Guide.’  We saw quite a few magpies and crows, who like to visit the playground after break time!  We talked about why this might be. We also had to be quiet so as not to frighten the birds away!

This week in our lessons we have been learning about how potatoes grow and what you can do with potatoes once they have been harvested.  Our favourite ways to cook potatoes were to mash them or to have jacket potatoes with all sorts of toppings.  We learnt about how potatoes are made into crisps too.  We saw how they were harvested, sliced, cooked, flavoured and then packed into bags for us to buy in the shops and enjoy!

Year 3

On Fridays, Year 3 have been doing Friday Friendship Fun activities. The idea is to get the girls to work as a team, to cooperate and communicate well with each other. Every week is a different task. You can see from the photos that they girls had coloured spots on their back and their mission was to organise themselves into coloured groups – in SILENCE! Another task was to line up in birthday order. The girls got a lot our of these activities, they were actually amazing communicators without their voices. They used body language, pointing and lots of hand gestures to complete the tasks. We talked a lot about how the skills gained from these fun games can be transferred all different parts of our school and lives.

Y3 are currently learning about soil in Science. The girls experimented with the different types of soils by looking at their composition and properties. They looked for organic matter; tested for floating particles, sieved for sandy grains and inspected the samples with a magnifying glass. Ask a member of the Y3 team to tell you about the different types of soil.