​Children can wear their own clothes into school tomorrow.
If they would like to bring a toy in, please make sure that it is not electronic and that it is not too precious to them.
They can bring in a couple of treats and a big drink for little break. There will be no big break as school closes at 12.00.
Merry Christmas.

Didn't they do a great job?  It can be a bit intimidating getting up in front of so many people but they did so well.  Thank you all for coming, your attendance was amazing.  I don't think I have seen the hall quite so packed before.  Thanks to Aisling Soffe for taking photos for me during the show.  If you have anymore that you'd like to share up here, please pop them onto a flash drive and I will upload them and return your drive.

We are doing lots of revision in school over the final few weeks before the holidays.  We are looking back on all of our sounds and sight words.  We are still looking at the same 16 sight words in school and the children are getting on great with most of them.  "The" and "they" are still catching lots of people out so please keep going over them at home.  Take a page in a book and see how many times they can find the word "they" or when you're out shopping see if they can spot how many shops have the word "the" in their name. 
We are working on a new Jolly Phonics sound 'qu.'  Did you know that 'q' is really shy and will only go out when it's friend 'u' goes too?  Here is our song for the week:

Who could forget our really important visitor this week?!  We were still talking about it on Friday!  That's right!  SANTA.  It was such a surprise when we heard that bell ring right outside our room and all of Santa's helpers filed in with him.  The children loved their present, especially their annual and we spent time looking through the pages to find our favourites. 

Finally, school is closing on Thursday the 22nd at 12 and will reopen Monday January 9th.

Don't forget...our Christmas concert is on Friday 16th at 1.15. (That is a 10 minute change to the original time, just to give the classes a chance to come in from yard.) The concert will be on in the hall. If you could please enter the hall from the 2nd class yard. The children have been practicing hard and we are still learning some new songs.  They were full of energy and enthusiasm today for the concert and can't wait for you all to see them in action.

We have been having lots of fun doing art for Christmas.  You might have seen the lovely links that we glued together in a 3 colour pattern.  They are decorating the ceiling. We decorated a picture of a Christmas tree, using marbles rolling through paint and then we cut out the tree ourselves. What a challenge! It was definitely the hardest thing we have cut out in school and the children did really well.  They even put presents under the tree!

We were working on the sound 'x' this week.  It is a hard one because we usually only hear it at the end of a word (as in "box.") We pronounce it 'ks.' Here is the song...

We have been rhyming lots of words, especially our names and seeing what funny words we can make up.  Rhyming is a great pre-reading skill to have. It will help when reading word families and speeds up reading. This is a great game on BBC Bitesize for rhyming words. They will need someone to read the words out for them. www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/ks1/literacy/rhyming_words/play/

We have been working on shapes in maths, especially circles and squares. In the mornings, we also took turns doing the shape and colour matching buttons.  Here is a mixture of photos from morning activities and golden time.

There was some excitement this week with the beginning of December.  We had a very special delivery from Santa.  We are so lucky because he sent us a "Santa Cam" so that he can peek in at the children and see what kind, helpful things they are doing for each other and to see how hard they are working.  I heard he was very impressed with the children so far and hopes they are keeping up the good work at home.

Here are Matthew and Ben speaking in front of the class.  They are doing the weather report for us.  We also tell our news to the class.  It can be very difficult to be patient enough to wait until we hear everyone's news, definitely a work in progress! :) We try to use full sentences also, when answering questions.  (For example, "What day will it be tomorrow?" "Tomorrow will be Tuesday.")

In maths, we are started to look at 2D shapes.  We focussed on circle and square this week.  Most children are very confident when identifiying circles.  We are continuing on with our 3 colour patterns. We are also looking at the written numbers 1-3. You might have spotted this in the mornings, as one of our activities.  We also used dice this week and matched the number of spots to the correct dice number on a page.

Our Jolly Phonics sounds are getting trickier.  This week we were looking at 'V' and 'Y' (as in 'yes' or 'you')  Keep going over them at home and identifying words that start with each sound.  V and F are quite similar, so do correct pronunciation.

We also  started our advent calendar this week.  As we cannot give out food in school, our calendar is full of activities and jokes.  Here we are on Friday doing our activity.  We had to give out 5 hugs and my goodness, it make everyone smile so much.  I think we managed a lot more than 5 hugs!

And finally, here we are enjoying some of our other activities in school.