Amethyst, Diamond & Emerald Blog - Friday 14th January 2022

 Happy Friday everybody! It has been a very busy beginning of the Spring Term in KS1 - we have been looking at a range of traditional tales in English and been re-telling and revising the stories of "Jack & The Beanstalk" and "The Gingerbread Man." In Maths, we have been looking at reasoning about number and exploring fractions of shapes and amounts. But now on to an exciting announcement!

Colchester Castle - Tuesday 15th March

As part of our new project, "The Quest," we will be visiting Colchester Castle! This is a great opportunity to provide a real life experience to underpin all our learning about castles and knights. We made the same trip 2 years ago and know that it is a valuable and highly enjoyable day for the children in Year 1 and 2. We will send a letter out with further details before half term but thought you might like to put the date in your diary now for everyone to look forward to!

For more details about the work we cover in this term's project, feel free to have a look at our knowledge organisers on our class webpage; here is a link:

https://sites.google.com/downhallprimary.com/year1-2/our-projects/year-a-spring-the-quest?authuser=0

Phonics & Comprehension Homework

Thank you to everyone who completed the first page of these new homework books. Because, for the Year 2's, there are different books for different children, we will not be able to say "do page x" so we ask you just to do a page/task per week and then ask your child to hand the book in by Wednesday/Thursday for us to mark  ready to hand out again on Friday.

If you have any questions about these new books, please send us an email and we will get back to you.

Maths Homework

This week we would like you to look at pages 32-33.

For Year 1's this is looking at multiplication. Initially this is practised by counting on in steps e.g. 2, 4, 6, 8 etc. It is also important to understand how 2 x 4 for example is 2 groups of 4 objects. Try making collections of objects in 2's or tens and then relate these to a multiplication statement.

For Year 2's this is continuing to look at multiplication. Here we are relating multiplication with the idea of repeated addition. Just like reading, practising these times tables little and often helps embed understanding. There are lots of games on Top Marks to further explore these ideas:

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/5-7-years/times-tables

Don't forget to keep up all your fantastic efforts with your reading at home. We are still updating the Big Cat online library for all our children as they move up reading levels, so don't forget to use this resource if it is useful to you.

As always, we are available on our Key Stage 1 email. However, we are also available if you have any quick questions at the end of the day on the playground. Just give us a wave and we will pop over! 

ks1@downhallprimary.com

Have a lovely weekend!

Best wishes

Mr Jude, Mrs Yuille, Mrs O'Connor & Miss Langley