Half Term for Base 2!

Hello again!

Well, we have made it through our first half term as Base 2! I cannot believe how fast this half term has gone! Looking back at all the work we have done and the progress we have made since the start of September is wonderful!

I am so proud of all of the children for settling in so well to a new class with me as their new teacher. All of the children have done brilliantly and I am very pleased with each one of them.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the children, parents and staff for making me feel so welcome and appreciated at Wrenbury Primary School. I feel like I am developing good pupil- teacher and parent-teacher relationships and I am thankful for that, as I truely believe this impacts on the progress of the children.

We had a lovely time at Harvest Festival and the children were great in their performance of 'Happy Autumn Days'. Well done to all of Base 2 for working so hard and for putting on such a good show!

We have worked very hard this half term on building the foundations for a fantastic Base 2 team. We have focused on friendships,respect and teamwork in our PHSE lessons, even making a web of kindness from a ball of wool! We also made a class contract which all of us (including Mrs Everall and I) signed to acknowledge our commitment to making Base 2 the best it can be.

In PE we have taken part in relays and team games to help promote the idea of team spirit and encouraging others. It has been great to have the fine weather so far enabling us to enjoy as much of the outdoors as possible.

I think we have made huge progress in literacy. We have been concentrating on the basics like full stops, capital letters and handwriting skills. The Year 1 children are much more confident at independent writing and can apply the basics to their writing. All of us have worked hard on adding adjectives and conjunctions such as and, but, so, if and because. The Year 2's are now being challenged to focus on varying sentence starters and using more interesting vocabulary. Our class word jail has been a success, with children using better words for 'big', for example enormous.

In Maths we have focused on counting and addition. We have worked on number lines and number squares getting the children used to different maths equiptment and how they would use it to answer given questions. We have extended the use of addition into word problems and progressed from using concrete objects such as counters, to using pictures and finally to using the abstract (our mental maths skills). All of this has boosted the childrens' confidence and they love maths lessons. It has been a very interesting half term, getting to know how to challenge the children and introducing the phase 'convince me'. This gets the children to explain why they have answered a maths question the way they have and explain how they have worked out the answer. In the last couple of weeks we have learned about subtraction and we will continue this in the first week back before moving on.

I look forward to next half term in Base 2.

Have a fabulous half term!

Miss Davies