Spring Week 9: A sporty, castley week.

 Hello Class 2 Parents,

I hope your week has been as good as our one!

It started with the Rhino Multisports event at Hanslope Primary School on Monday. The children were in two teams and competed against 6 teams from other schools. They took part in seven events, including 'Floor is Lava', axe throwing, a penalty shoot out and a basketball challenge. We had a great morning and it was very well run by Rhino. Our teams came 5th and 6th out of 7, so it was a very good day for 'it's the taking part that counts'! The children were fantastic and showed great sportsmanship throughout. 

The rest of our week has been fairly ordinary - 

In maths the Year 1 children have continued their work on subtraction; using a number line to count back, and subtracting by 'finding the difference' between two numbers. 

The Year 2 children have been learning that the division symbol has two meanings:
'divided into groups of'
'shared equally between'

For example,  12 divided into groups of 3 equals 4 groups, and 12 shared equally between 3 equals 4 each. 

We've been doing a lot of practical division using counters. 

Year 1 homework is here and will be in their folders. 
Year 2 homework is here and will be in their folders. 

In phonics the children have been looking at trigraphs: air (as in chair) and are (as in stare), and ore (as in more) and oor (as in door). They are really enjoying phonics play games at the moment so it would be good if they could practise reading real and alien words containing these sounds using Picnic on Pluto or Buried Treasure. 

In spellings the children have learnt how to add the past tense suffix -ed to a word ending in y - they have to chop off the y and add an i. For example, try - tried, cry - cried.  I have added this week's spellings to The Spelling Shed. 

In our story, having reached Scotland and found the perfect location for a castle the children designed some castles to show the queen. They learnt about motte and bailey castles and stone keep castles, and decided that (while it would take longer to build) a stone keep castle was the best option. Working in groups, they created some example castles for the queen, featuring such useful things as thick stone walls, arrow loops, crenellations, moats and drawbridges. 

Here are the finished castles: 

Finally, at Forest School this week...
We had a lovely morning toasting marshmallows, playing 'Floor is Lava' and 'Wolf Hide and Seek' and making mud creatures. 

Note: The children completed their maths challenges on Thursday morning and I have put them into their purple folders. If they were confident in their particular maths facts, I've ticked them off on their maths cards. 

Have a good weekend!

Mrs Simpson