Lego Celebration Event 

Congratulations to Puffins and Penguins who have completed the Cargo Connect Lego Discover Programme!  This week was the final session, and we held a celebration event. The children made a vehicle to transport packages to different destinations. They reflected on the vehicles they had made in the past and improved and innovated their designs. Over the last ten weeks the children have impressed us with the skills of teamwork, communication, resilience, critical thinking, and creativity. Through the Lego programme they have been able to develop and rehearse these skills. They have acquired knowledge of engineering and have explored how packages are transported, sorted, and delivered. They are familiar with the vocabulary journey, packages, load, unload, transportation, destination, vehicle, innovate and improve. The children have had fun exploring and creating in each weekly challenge that has been set for them. Their models have been amazing!

As part of the celebration event, each child was presented with a certificate to commemorate their achievements. They also received an engineering story book for them to keep, called ‘Porty’s Whizzing Recovery’. We will be posting a celebration video on Seesaw for parents to view.                     

Traditional Stories

Drama

This week the children have been working in groups to finalise their drama based on the stories of The Three Little Pigs, The Gingerbread Man, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, and The Magic Porridge Pot. The children worked in small groups to sequence and act out the different stories. They demonstrated teamwork to organise roles, decide on staging and support one another. We have created a short video montage of this unit, comprising of the initial finding of clues in the woods, listening to traditional stories, creating story maps and the drama work. We will share their wonderful work with you on Seesaw.  

Writing

The children have also been working on their writing to retell part of The Gingerbread Man story. They used their phonics knowledge to help them to independently spell words, so you may well see the main character’s name written as ‘jin j bred man’ – this is absolutely fine and shows that your child has been able to sound out and use graphemes to represent the sounds in unfamiliar words. Some pupils have been working on their sentence writing and have been using finger spaces and full stops or exclamation marks to punctuate their work. We will upload a photo of your child’s writing on Seesaw so that you can see their progress – we will also include their ‘next step’ targets.

Making and Baking

The children are becoming very familiar with the Design, Make, Evaluate model and using this in their learning. This was evident when we made our own gingerbread. The children helped to mix the dough, roll it out and use a cookie cutter to cut out a gingerbread person. Once the gingerbread was baked, we designed how we would decorate our biscuit. We had lots of fun with the icing sugar, jelly tots and raisins! Luckily none of our gingerbread people ran away and we got to take them home to show to our family. We had some spare gingerbread, so we were able to taste and evaluate our final product. Puffins and Penguins also made a paper gingerbread person with moving parts. They had to cut out the body parts and join them together using split pins. In year one the children will continue to use the Design, Make, Evaluate model and will use split pins to make pivots.

Read Write Inc 

We have been carrying out assessments over the past week to review your child’s reading level and measure their progress. We have been so impressed with all of the children! Thank you for listening to your child read at home and supporting them in their development. Today, we have sent home some books for your child to read over the Easter break. New RWI groups will start on the first day back.

There is a presentation on Seesaw giving you more information about how we teach phonics in school. It talks about spelling with ‘Fred fingers’, how children progress through the colour groups and short videos demonstrating a RWI lesson.

Library books

A reminder that we do not expect your child to read the library book that they choose each week. Instead, this is a book for you to share together and will most likely be above your child’s own reading ability. This is a book which you could read to your child at bedtime or one which they can enjoy looking at the illustrations. Children select this book independently, based on their own interests.

Handwriting booklet

Your child has a set one handwriting booklet in their book bag. Although your child may already know these sounds, we would like you to focus on supporting their accurate letter formation. In Year 1, your child will begin to join their writing, so it is important that they are forming the letters correctly now.

Maths

In Maths this week, Puffins and Penguins continued to explore mathematical stories using the words ‘first’, ‘then’ and ‘now’, but this time linking them to the part, part, whole model (cherry model).

This helped us to see the two separate parts in the addition stories and showed how we could combine the two amounts to find the total. Some of us wrote number sentences to record our stories, e.g. 3 + 6 = 9.

In addition to this, some children have been working on their understanding of doubles and multiples. They were challenged to come up with their own way efficient way to calculate and then to record the amount of legs in an animal group, e.g. 4 starfish could be shown by 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 = 20 or 4 x 5 = 20 or double 10 is 20.

Easter

In our RE lesson this week, we learnt about the Christian celebration of Easter. We listened to the Easter story and discussed new vocabulary including incarnation. Christians celebrate Easter because it is when Jesus died and came back to life, and good triumphed over evil. We talked about all the different ways Easter is celebrated today, and the symbolism of Easter eggs and hot cross buns.

To celebrate Easter, we went to the woodland camp for an Easter egg hunt. Imagine our surprise when we saw that the Easter Bunny was there! We had an easter egg hunt around the woods – we had to find all the pictures of eggs and bunnies that she had hidden. As a reward, the Easter bunny gave us all a chocolate egg which we ate as a morning snack. Yum!

FOPPS

A special ‘thank you’ to FOPPS, our PTA, for providing all of the children with a creme egg which they will bring home today in their book bag.

Emma - Civic Award

One of our year 6 pupils, Emma, is trying to achieve her Civic Award. This award is for Year 6 pupils who have to prove their involvement in five distinct areas, one of them being ‘Active Citizenship in the school community’. This week, Emma read to a group of Foundation children. She chose our reading shed as the location for this event and read the story ‘Underpants Thunderpants’, which the children thought was very funny! Thank you very much, Emma.

Quotes from the children:

Ralph: I liked it when Emma read to me. I got comfy on the cushions. The dog was hanging the underpants washing on the line. It was funny!

Grace H: I like it when the aliens put the pants on each other. It was so funny!

Alice: Do you think Emma will come another day? I would like her to come and read another story to me!

Home Learning

• Enjoy the traditional story on Seesaw, ‘The Elves and The Shoemaker’, read by Mrs Clague. 
• Check Seesaw and your book bag for this week’s RWI books and activities. Practise reading your book at least 3 times in the holidays.
• Use Ten Town to practice numbers 1-10.
• Adults - Listen to the RWI phonic presentation on Seesaw.

Activity clubs

If you have signed your child up for one of the activity clubs (Construction or Multi-sports), a reminder that these will start in the first week back after the Easter break. Please collect your child from outside the main office at 4:15pm.

Dates

• Monday 11^th April to Friday 22^nd April - Easter holidays.
• Monday 25^th April - Return to school.
• Week beginning Monday 25^th April – Activity clubs start.
• Monday 2^nd May – Bank holiday.

Contacts

• Please contact the school office by email admin@preston.torbay.sch.uk or phone 01803 607075 with any questions or queries, including breakfast or after school club queries, or if your child is being collected by a different adult to usual.
• In the event of your child being poorly, please call our absence line on 01803 607589 where you can leave a message.
• There is also lots of useful information, as well as event dates and term dates, on our school website  https://www.preston.torbay.sch.uk/

We hope you have a lovely Easter break.

From Mrs Bastin, Mrs Clague and the Foundation Stage Team