Rufford Park Primary School and Nursery

Weekly Update-16/6/23

Mr Kyriacou (n.kyriacou) on: Beech Tree Blog

Hello everyone,

This week, in maths, we have continued our work around money, focusing on using all four maths operations when solving one and two step word problems. These problems were a challenge for the children, but it's always great to see such resilience when faced with a challenge and seeing the children applying what they have learnt in order to solve the problems they were faced with.

In our writing, the children have been planning their stories which will revolve around using the same main characters from Stone Age Boy but creating an alternative story for it. The ideas that they have come up with in the planning stage are excellent and I can't wait to see what they produce.

In computing, we are focusing on desktop publishing and we have been looking at how text, images or both together are used (e.g. road signs or invitations) and discussing the advantages and disadvantages of using just text, just images or both. This week, the children were tasked with creating their own digital birthday sign using a word art text graphic generator programme. We discussed how the text had to be legible, how it had to stand out, what images are appropriate to go with it and how it could be set out effectively. They really enjoyed it and produced some lovely pieces.

The children have also been working on their carnival masks, which are for the ALPT art exhibition and will be completed in the early part of next week.

That's all for now,

Mr Kyriacou :)

Weekly Update-9/6/23

Mr Kyriacou (n.kyriacou) on: Beech Tree Blog

Hello everyone,

This week, in our maths work, we have been focusing on money, which has involved converting between pounds and pence, ordering money in ascending and descending order and comparing different amounts. The children have been working really hard, using different strategies with confidence and making rapid progress throughout the week.

In our writing, we are building up towards writing our own alternative story for Stone Age Boy. One of our lessons this week involved describing different characters from the Stone Age who appear in Stone Age Boy. The children were tasked with creating sentences that describe those characters using powerful expanded noun phrases, good conjunctions and to include a relative clause within their sentences. I have to say that the children did a fantastic job with their sentences and provided great description and some super relative clauses to add extra information. I really enjoyed reading those pieces of work :)

In science, our unit of work this half term will revolve around plants. Our first lesson focused on identifying the different parts of a plant and understanding what the role of each part is. The children then made their own mini leaflet which included their own drawing, with the different sections labelled and an explanation about the role of each part. The children produced some lovely and informative pieces of work and it was also great for the class to be able to look closely at the different parts of a plant in person (because they are all growing their own sunflowers) which helped to support their learning, although the sunflowers are not fully grown yet.

Take care,

Mr Kyriacou :)

Weekly Update-26/5/23

Mr Kyriacou (n.kyriacou) on: Beech Tree Blog

Hello everyone,

This week, the children published their setting description writing, which revolved around describing a cave and this links in with our current book, Stone Age Boy. They produced some super work which included a range of features such as personification, expanded noun phrases, fronted adverbials, similes and metaphors. When reading their pieces, I could definitely picture the cave in my mind based on their detailed description. Well done!

We have completed our class reader (Stone Age Boy) and the children did some fantastic inference work based on on how different characters feel at different points in the story and they have also created their own blurb and alternative front covers, which are designed to persuade other children to read Stone Age Boy.

In science, the children were helping a band find out which material is the most soundproof. They were using a decibel meter to record the noise made without any material around it and then they recorded the reduction in noise after placing different materials around the source of the noise. The results were very interesting and we had a nice discussion as to why that was the case.

In PSHE, we have just finished our topic for this half term, which was all about Being My Best. To finish off the topic, the children made posters all about themselves and all the different things required to help them be at their best e.g. a good amount of sleep, healthy eating and lots of exercise. 

In DT, as part of our Edible Garden topic, the children created their own strawberry smoothies this week, They worked very in their groups, communicating well and sharing the jobs between each other. 

I hope you all have a lovely week off and make sure to stay safe.

Mr Kyriacou :)