Reading/Phonics

Thank you to those parents who were able to make the phonics meeting on 18th October 2022. If you were unable to attend the slides are below and if you required any further information please do not hesitate to speak to your childs class teacher. 

Lets get reading! 

We have had a super busy final week filled with lots of festive fun.

On Wednesday, we enjoyed spending time in our house teams, creating beautiful placemats to enjoy with our Christmas lunch. We thoroughly enjoyed pulling crackers and sharing lunch with children across the school.

The weather this week has been so cold that our water tray keeps freezing, every night, no matter how often we defrost it. This has meant we could enjoy cracking some ice, using warm water to melt it and sweep it up to make sure it doesn't become too slippery.

We enjoyed wrapping things up in the home corner using plenty of paper! While in the creative area we enjoyed printing our own Christmas cards and wrapping paper.

To end the term, we enjoyed singing at our Carols Around the Tree celebration assembly- our acapella version of 'When Santa Got Stuck Up The Chimney' was brilliant.

Our WOW wall shows just how far we have come since starting school.

As you can see, the children deserve a well-earned rest, as do you as families.

"It's a party, everybody!"- Well done to all the children for everything they have achieved this week, it certainly is a reason to celebrate.

We have had two amazing Nativity performances to our families and the children should be so proud of themselves, as I am sure you all are. Their singing was clear, they learned so many actions and words off by heart and their improved confidence was evident. To quote one of our Marwell grandparents, "I've seen a lot of Nativities, but this one is up there." You can't beat that for praise so well done everyone.

Following on from our superhero week, a real life hero joined us- Dr Kidd! She taught us so much about becoming a doctor and what knowledge we would need such as: how to use medicine to heal our illnesses, specific body parts including the skeleton and what equipment and uniform Drs need. We thoroughly enjoyed treating Mr Flynn for his many ailments. We owe her special thanks for our white doctor coats, headwear and bandages. Our most important part was what to do now, if we want to become doctors: worked hard at school and always be kind. Thank you Dr Kidd- we had a fantastic afternoon.

In between all the excitement of these special events, we continue to explore and make progress in our learning through discovery time and phonics. We are better writers, better readers and our fine motor skills are coming along brilliantly so we can make ore complex crafts.

Elsie shared a fabulous story aloud to the class that she created at home. The children gave constructive feedback saying they enjoyed all the hearts and the chocolate bit and next time, they would like a story with a Christmas tree in it.  Elsie shared her work so confidently.

Ending the week with a super celebration of how far we've come couldn't be more fitting. Thank you to everyone who joined us and enjoyed sharing our environment and discovering with us. Also to those parents for sharing our live phonics lesson- you were all star pupils.

This week has been all about Superheroes and real heroes, as well as all the other exciting events going on this week at school.

We have been enjoying the role play area and dressing up as medical staff. We have been practicing for our special visit next Wednesday.

We have been exploring the sand tray and which containers can hold the most sand. We especially enjoyed showing our 'collaboration' value.

We are continuing to enjoy some football themed activities now England are through to the next round of the World Cup. All the children took part in our House Football Tournament where each team had representatives to play, whilst others cheered and celebrated. Look at our super flags we made!

Finally, we really tested our resilience during our STEM afternoon to make grabbers out of plastic bottles. We never gave up and demonstrated fantastic patience and sharing. This was super tricky so well done to all the children for keeping going!

Supertato to the rescue! This week has been linked to our class' favourite story- Supertato and his veggie friends.

We have enjoyed using different skills to create a Supertato, including using real vegetables.
In the outside area, we were introduced to stock cubes and how we can use them to make vegetable soup in the water tray.

In maths, we have been building towers to talk about one more and one less up to 10. We even passed the super challenge of "what is one more than ten?" 

In other areas of learning, we have been developing our co-ordination skills in PE, doing throwing and catching. (Just in case we come across any dangerous flying objects during our superhero work!) As well as this, we have been using our motor skills to build traps to capture the evil pea!

Some of us have been taking good care of the classroom and showing lots of respect to our environment. Good to see our school values in action.

We have have a SUPER week and look forward to learning more about superheroes next week.

We have had a kindness theme this week linked to anti-bullying which culminated in our very spotty and stripey Children in Need day.

Lots of fabulous ideas came from the children during circle time about being kind- they were full of ideas such as huggles, waving, smiling, sharing, helping someone when they are hurt and playing with someone if they are lonely.

We have enjoyed sharing two special books this week "Mr Big" by Ed Vere and "Perfect Fit". We put ourselves in Mr Big's shoes and enjoyed having fun at a cafe as well as writing invitations to include our friends in a '(pretend) party. We have also enjoyed looking at the different 2D shapes and how difference can still work together.

In the creative area, we have developped our finger painting skills to create hearts and Pudsey bandanas and crowns. We enjoyed using our senses to paint.

In our morning maths tasks, we have demonstrated how well we can order numbers using a range of resources. Our recognition of numbers in their digit form is coming along really well.

Well done to those children who have been working hard to read on Bug Club and use Numbots for maths. Keep it up!

Lots of whizz, pop and bang excitement in Marwell this week!

We experienced holding real sparklers and we can do this safely. This inspired our learning for the week where we created our own firework pictures, threading beads on sparklers sticks and dancing with ribbons.

With fireworks comes fire so of course, we talked about being firefighters and shared a fabulous story called Fred the Firefighter. From this we built fire stations, fire engines and pretended to put out some dangerous fires. Some of us were officers and recorded where the emergencies were.

In PE, we started to learn how to play traditional games such as 'What's the time Mr Wolf?' and we then played it later in discovery time. We have worked brilliantly together this week, showing kindness and great turn-taking skills.

Reading Update- Today, all of your children have been assigned books with words in that correspond to the sounds we have learned so far. We are looking forward to sharing them over the weekend.

Lovely to have back all the super smiley children ready and eager to learn. Thank you to everyone for attending parent's evening, it was a pleasure to share how well the children have settled into school life.

This week, we have been focusing on the theme of "Pumpkins".

This included:
- scooping out the insides of real pumpkins and collecting the seeds
- thinking about how pumpkins were different on the outside but were they the same in the middle?
- reading pumpkin stories such as 'Pumpkin Soup by Helen Cooper
- drawing instructions for making our own pumpkin soup at home
- playing in the water tray, imagining we were making our own pumpkin soup
- exploring the home corner and using pumpkins to cook recipes
- colour mixing in the creative area to make the right colour for our pumpkins. Ask us which colours we need to mix to make orange!

This week, we have also started learning our Phase 2 phonics and so far we have covered 's, a, t and p'. We have identified the sounds in words at the beginning, middle and end as well as think about what things we know that start with those sounds. Most of us are also exploring how to write these sounds. Don't forget to go on Bug Club to read so we can practice our newly learned sounds.

We have thoroughly enjoyed sharing some of our Halloween activities from home including your super pumpkin carvings- we voted for our favourites.