Dear Parents,

Welcome back! We hope you had a wonderful break. It has been lovely to see your children back in school this week. We have been very busy…

This week we have been thinking about new beginnings. How can we start the new year on the right foot? What might our goals be for this year? We have had some wonderful discussions about our ambitions for the year, as well as the new things we would like to learn. We created a class mind map where we wrote down some of the things we would like to find out about, one of them was Science. With that in mind, inspired by the cold weather this week, on Friday we did a science experiment where we looked at how we can use salt to melt ice and form fantastic ice sculptures.

In phonics this week, we have hit the ground running, recapping the set 1 sounds. Over the next few weeks we will look at regrouping the children to ensure that they are in a group where they can receive the right support for their stage of learning.

In maths this week we have been looking the numbers 11-20. We have been considering how to build these numbers in different ways, sometimes using manipulatives like Numicon, and sometimes writing short number sentences. We have had lots of fun exploding numbers, and we will continue to look at this next week too.

We are looking to start a games club in the classroom, to help the children learn and understand how to play board games together. We wondered whether anyone would be interested in coming into Kites for an hour in an afternoon for a couple of weeks to facilitate some board games with the children. This could be as a one off or as a regular visit, but we would love to have support with this is anyone is interested. Please speak to one of the adults in Kites, if this is something you, or maybe grandparents, would be keen to do.

With this in mind, we have a few upcoming school trips. On the 16th of March we will be going to the Earth Trust, and on the 22nd May we will be going to Bucklebury farm. I know this might seem like a long time in the future, but we will be looking for support on these trips closer to the time. If you think you might be interested in helping on one of these trips, please speak to us, or Mrs Honor in the office, so that we are able to get the necessary paperwork in place in order to enable you to support us on these trips.

Monday 19th January – Weighing and Measuring

Thursday 12th February – School Disco

Friday 13th February – End of term

Have a lovely weekend,

The Kites Team