Hurlford Primary School and Early Childhood Centre

Good morning, it was good to get out for some outdoor learning on Thursday afternoon, but it is definitely getting a bit cooler so please ensure that your children are wearing warm clothes that will keep them dry and are easily washed, thanks. Both classes worked very well, and enjoyed throwing and catching, playing with hoops and getting very confident at hitting the target, even some targets set with hoops being held up in the air! Yesterday unfortunately wasn’t nice enough to use the sand but still had lots of fun in the Ozone – climbing and exploring.

In literacy we are continuing to revise and learn our initial sounds and this week we have been learning all about the letter Ff examining both sounds f and ff. This gave us the opportunity to look at ‘The Rainbow Fish’ and the children all recognised the importance of sharing deduced from the story. Using the theme of the Rainbow Fish, we have been fishing for letters to make 3 letter words. We also created a farm with construction building enclosures for the sheep, pigs and goats. The children have enjoyed being word detectives skimming and scanning some super books for this week’s common words using finger torches. They were also noting down words beginning with f.

Please could you support your child with their reading. The children are continually learning skills in blending letters together to read words they are not familiar with by using their knowledge of the initial sounds. Thanks this will be really helpful.

In maths this week we were looking more closely at 2D shapes and patterns and symmetry. We have created lovely patterns on our Rainbow Fish. The main focus this week has however been symmetry. Making 2D symmetrical pictures using pattern blocks and also colouring butterflies. Today we will draw Pudsey and see if we can make his spots symmetrical but we will need to leave off his headband.

Please continue to discuss 3D shape names if you get any deliveries this week in boxes or look at the containers and food in your kitchen cupboards to see if you can spot any cubes, cuboids, cylinders, spheres, pyramids or if anyone is lucky enough to have a Toblerone bar then triangular prisms. Enjoy playing spot the shape.

For health and wellbeing, we are continuing to explore social wellbeing through Elmer stories. This week we shared the story about Elmer and Aunt Zelda, who is an old, deaf elephant. This has helped the children build empathy and reinforce their understanding of the importance of being helpful and kind in particular with others who need it. Children in need today will certainly reinforce this week’s work and allow our children to see this on a much wider scale. The children will be involved in lots of teamwork games and activities to support Pudsey today enhancing this learning. In turn, these activities are successfully helping the development of good listening skills for learning and in turn being responsible citizens and overall demonstrating kindness towards each other in all that we do.

Thanks again for supporting your children with their homework tasks and all that you do at home to help them learn.

Wishing you a lovely relaxing week ahead.

Mrs Carey.

What a week! Here is what we’ve been up to in P5:

In literacy, we explored the “ff” phoneme and used various active spelling strategies to help us learn our words. We also practised our proof reading skills and have improved identifying and fixing mistakes in punctuation. For writing, we were writing instructions on how to make a lava lamp which was brilliant fun! Next week we will also be writing a set of instructions but will focus on another context.

In maths, we have continued to develop our skills with measuring. We focused on capacity and volume this week and had to take care when working in teams! Our pupils are more confident measuring length and capacity and we will be moving on to addition and subtraction.

In other areas, we continued our topic of Africa and got to ask our Big Questions. We also identified the 7 continents and explored maps in an atlas. We were able to identify various features of the African landscape and discussed the climate zones. We found out that Africa had a mix of a tropical and warm climate.

We all learned what roles we would be playing in our Disney production and the excitement was enormous! Our pupils were all so supportive and enthusiastic of their roles and we got started on learning our special lines, dances and songs.

This week was Mr Allen’s last week in P5 and we will all miss him! Huge thank you to Mr Allen for all his help over the last few weeks.

Thanks again to all your support from home, have a lovely weekend!

-Miss Frew