Dear parents,

We have had an exciting first week back after half term. This week the whole school have been doing ‘Theme Week’ where all the children explore a focus within a theme. The theme this year is ‘Jobs’. In Kites we focused on people we would call in an emergency! Some jobs that we looked at include: paramedics, first responders, doctors, vets, environmental agency, RNLI and mountain rescue teams. We started off the week by brainstorming what we knew about emergencies and who can help us in an emergency, the children had lots of great ideas, which we delved into throughout the week. We have been using the home corner to role play Doctors and Vets. We have been learning about what happens when the RNLI get a call and the team that are involved from the phone call to the rescue. We then created our own life boats using different materials, tested our boats in the water tray to see whether they could rescue the small world people successfully. We have been putting out ‘fires’ in Kites garden and saving the ‘cat’ from the tree! We have been doing some caption writing to describe the emergency photos. We have had visits from doctors, first responders and a police man this week to tell us all about their jobs.

We have also been looking at emergency vehicles and have worked together to create a giant fire engine! Which the children have enjoyed using and pretending to rescue people from fires.

On Thursday, we spoke about D-Day and what it is and why we celebrate it on the 6th June. We spoke about how people how to ration food during the war and had limited access to different foods and so, in cooking we made oat biscuits as all the ingredients we used would have mostly been available.

In Maths, we have looked at weight and height. Here is a fun video to watch all about height. 

We have been using key words like heavier, lighter, heaviest, lightest and balanced to describe different objects and use balance scales to compare the weights and sorting them from heaviest to lightest. We have been using measuring tapes and meter sticks to measure how tall we are and comparing our heights.

Next week we are exploring maps and journeys. We will be creating our own treasure maps for our friends and hiding gems in the garden for the children to follow the map and find the treasure! We will be creating graphs to learn how each other get to school and analysing the results to see which is the most common form of transport for getting to school. We will be getting the BeeBots out to programme their journeys. In Maths we will be looking at manipulating and decomposing shapes and using positional language to describe routes.

Challenge: Can your child draw their journey/map of how they get to school? If you have any maps or atlases at home, it would be gerat if you could bring them in to share and for us to discuss different types of maps. These could be: a map of the local area, the school, map of a theme park or zoo…

Reminders: As we are practising for sports day this term, please can you make sure your child has trainers in their PE kit or you can send them in with trainers on a Thursday.

Thanks for your continued support and have a lovely weekend.

The Kites Team.