Shoe Box Afternoon Tea
Thank you so much to everyone who came to our Shoe Box Afternoon Tea on Wednesday 4 February. Your help and support with our elderly guests and the children, and with the refreshments was greatly appreciated and ensured that everything was a wonderful success.
The children thoroughly enjoyed hosting the ‘parties’ in their classrooms and we were really proud of the way they interacted and talked to their guests. They did a superb job entertaining the seniors with their wonderful singing, playing bingo, making a picture and delivering the shoe boxes. It really was lovely to see everyone together for the event.
Service is a big part of the UWCSEA philosophy and it is fantastic that we are able to begin this with our K2 children. We really value your support as the event would not be possible without you.
K2 Arts Festival - Wednesday 25 March 6:00pm RBT
Please make a note of the date and time of our K2 Arts Festival. As it is an integral part of our ‘Telling Tales’ Unit of Study, we would really like all the children to be involved in the production and be able to perform on stage for a large audience.
If you already know that your child will be absent for the show (due to a holiday or other family commitment), please let your child’s teacher know as soon as possible. It will impact directly on the allocation of roles and all of the practices and rehearsals. Children who will not be at school for the Arts Festival performance on 25 March will unfortunately not be able to actively participate in the rehearsals. For this reason, we sincerely hope that all the children will remain at school until the end of Term 2.
NEW UNITS AFTER THE BREAK
Maths
After the break, we will continue to explore addition and subtraction, and the inverse relationship between them.
Children will be developing their strategies to add and subtract, and determining which work best for them. It is important to realise that there is not one correct way to arrive at an answer. As teachers and parents, it is important to understand the strategies the children are using and then move them forward from there.
Word problems are a fun way of developing number skills and awareness. For example:
- There are 8 grapes in your brain food box. You eat 3. How many are left?
- You had 15 stones in your pocket at play time but 2 fell out. How many do you have now?
- Tom was playing with 5 cars. Ben gave him 4 more. How many did Tom have altogether.
The first step is for the child to determine whether he/she needs to add or subtract, and then work out the answer.
We will also be revisiting Measurement and Data Handling in the second half of term.
Writing Workshop - 'Stories'
Children will be explicitly taught to tell organised, structured stories bit by bit in a sequenced cohesive narrative. Children will become accustomed to thinking of a character, a trait and a story, capturing it in drawings and words that span across a number of pages. Children will expand their drawing skills and learn how writers can convey details such as feelings and actions through illustrations. A balance of focus between developed content and conventions will enable children to raise the quality of their work by stretching out words, recording initial, middle and final sounds, rereading their own writing and adding more to a page. Grammar conventions, capitalisation and end punctuation will also be explicitly taught. Rereading and revising will have a constant emphasis throughout the unit.
How can I write stories and write them so people can really read them?
How can I learn to tell my story step by step so people can follow what happened?
How can I include what my characters do, feel and say?
Reading Workshop - 'Readers Get to Know Characters'
Our relationships to characters are one of the most important aspects of reading that keep us returning to a book once we start. Whether we like the character or not we often learn things about ourselves and human nature by thinking about the character. We want them to be inspired by, learn lessons from, and think about the characters in their books.
Initially children learn reading strategies to get to know a character well and to name what that character does in a story. As they become more aware of characters they will learn to think and talk more about characters in their partnerships, growing ideas about them as they make them 'talk' and 'think'.
Unit of Study - 'Telling Tales'
This next unit explores the idea of performance through drama and how we need to be creative, cooperate and collaborate. Key questions will be posed:
What does it look like when we work together?
What is your role/responsibility?
How can you communicate clearly to the audience?
How does it feel when you perform?
How does it feel to be in an audience?
The children will identify and learn about what is needed to put on a show, then work together to develop ideas for a script, scenery, props, costumes and invitations. This will culminate in the K2 Arts Festival performance, in which the children will be 'telling the tales' of Little Red Riding Hood, The Pied Piper, Hansel and Gretel and The Little Red Hen.
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