Welcome to the Greenfinches Class! 

Newsletter

Food Glorious Food

We have had a great half term in the Greenfinches class.

We have all made excellent progress with our sentence writing using the colourful semantics approach in English and we have begun to transfer those skills to write about things we have learned in other subject areas, remembering to use a capital letter to start a sentence and a full stop to end it, sometimes when prompted but mostly independently. In Phonics, we have begun to remember to say and blend the sounds in new words to help us with our reading and spellings.

In Maths, we have worked on naming and recognising 3D shapes. We have also matched the shapes to objects and things (eg. a square based pyramid is the shape of a pyramid in Egypt and a cone is the shape of an ice cream cone). In our number work we have been partitioning numbers within 99. We have tried so hard to recognise the tens and ones within these numbers. (eg. 75 = 70 + 5 or 7 tens and 5 ones). We have discovered that things get easier the more we practise them.

We have enjoyed planting mixed seeds in Science. It has been fascinating watching them grow and trying to predict whether they would grow into sunflowers, herbs or grass. We have begun to recognise that plants need good soil, water and sunlight to grow into healthy plants.

For RE, we have been learning about the story of ‘The Creation’. We have begun to recall the order in which God made the world and have made our own artistic representations to show what the story means to us. Through some class discussion, we have given a lot of thought to what God did and whether we think it was an easy or hard job to do. We have talked about what humans have done to develop it since and whether we think it is all good. We have also been learning about the story of Easter and why we celebrate it.

In our Music sessions we have been listening to different pieces of music and seeing if we can recognise what style they are. It isn’t easy but some of us are getting good at recognising classical and blues music; we have also listened to Rock, Folk, Latin, Baroque, Funk and Bhangra styles. We have explored finding the pulse and the beat of the music, clapped and sung back simple rhythms and melodic rifts and begun to recognise the intro, verse, chorus, instrumental solo and coda/ending sections of the music we have heard and the songs we have learned. We have been improvising melodies and rhythms to accompany our song ‘In the Groove’. We have also learned that a composer is the person who creates/writes music and have begun using sounds cards to compose our own music too.

We have tasted different fruits, deciding what we do and do not like and choosing our favourites to make fruit kebabs in D & T. In Geography we have been finding and naming the four countries in the United Kingdom on a map. In Art we have explored the work of Claes Oldenburg and made a sculpture of a piece of fruit of our choice.

We have been thinking about our families and who helps to look after us and keep us happy and healthy in PSHE. We have also been thinking about appropriate touch and personal space through the So Safe programme. 

We have been lucky enough to work with Jordan from the Manchester United Foundation in PE this term. During our sessions, we have been developing our balance, agility and co-ordination skills following agility circuits and playing games where we must tag or dodge our opponents. 

We have all worked hard and the adults who have worked with us this term are very proud of all we have achieved. We are proud of ourselves too. We are now looking forward to a good rest and recharge ready for a busy summer term. Our topic next half term is ‘The World in my Town’.

We wish you all a very ‘Happy Easter’.

Love from The Greenfinches.