Dear Parents,

We start with a couple of dates for your diary. Firstly on Friday 4th February, we are supporting NSPCC National Number Day. This gives children the chance to enjoy number games and maths activities, while learning about the work of the NSPCC and raising a little money to support them. On this day, we invite all children to wear something with a number on it, or use their imagination to dress up as a digit, and to bring a small donation for the NSPCC.

The week beginning 7th February is themed around the topic of communication. This coincides with the 100th anniversary of the world's first regular radio broadcast for entertainment, which was made from Writtle on 14 February 1922 and led to the birth of the BBC. We have been working with local partners on this project and the children will have sessions with storytellers and singers based around this event. There will be a parade from the school to the village green for families that wish to join us on 11th February after school at 4.30pm. The organisers have suggested 1920s dress for the parade, so to make it easier for parents we are suggesting the children come to school in 1920s dress that day. Please don't go to any great expense however: simple accessories like a fan, a feather headband, a bow-tie or a flat cap would all be suitable. The parade is not a school event, as it is planned by members of the local community, but we are very keen to support it. Children will need to be picked up at the normal time of 3.10pm and meet at the school later and they must be accompanied by an adult as they are not under the care of the school for this event. I will give further details nearer the time.

Thank you so much for testing and isolating where necessary. We have had a record 14 Covid cases this week, with others awaiting test results, or with family members who are positive, so it really helps us to protect our vulnerable children and members of staff. While the government is lifting the expectation to wear masks in schools and next week in public places, please continue to wear them when coming into school for the time being, as we have a very high number of cases.

Please can messages about absences, pick ups, etc. go to parents@writtleinfantschool.com or by phone call to the office. We are seeing more messages of this kind go to class emails and Tapestry and these cannot always be monitored during the school day, as teachers are with children. Apologies that our phone line was down for a day this week!

Lateness - I am so sorry to moan yet again but we have had up to 12 children coming in late on a given day this week. Learning starts as soon as the children are in class. While we appreciate that everyone gets held up sometimes, the late numbers are the highest for some time, so please try to be punctual.

Best wishes and stay safe.
Helen Castell

This week we have really studied the Moon Dragons text. They have participated in some echo reading, practised reading with expression, discussed what they liked and disliked about the story, continually referring to the text. They also commented on anything that was still puzzling them. We have explored the King’s character and had the opportunity to act out a scene from the story. We had no idea that we have so many budding actors!

In Maths, we are mastering the 5 and 10 times tables. The children’s recall of facts is improving and we are also developing reasoning and problem solving skills for those who are ready. Next week, we begin division and we’ll obviously make lots of links to the work they have already done in multiplication.

The future is looking bright for all of our Year 2s as they become more proficient than us at computer programming and understanding simple algorithms. We are using Scratch for this which you can access at home.

Click here for this week's home learning.

Our email addresses are dolphins@writtleinfantschool.com and sharks@writtleinfantschool.com.

We introduced our new story ‘The Last Wolf’ in English. We wrote some fantastic descriptive sentences of the forests, by using adjectives. We made predictions and inferences of the story as to what we think the author meant by some words and phrases used in the story. We continued our addition and subtraction within 20 and solved some related number facts. In the afternoons, we learned about types of animals and their diets. We continued our Little Red Riding Hood virtual books on the iPads and they are really starting to come together.

Click the link for this week's home learning.

Our email addresses are parrots@writtleinfantschool.com and turtles@writtleinfantschool.com.

This week our poem was called 'A Little House'. We have really enjoyed listening to a variety of 'Three Little Pig' stories. We were amazed to find a letter from the Three Little Pigs! They told us they needed our help to make a 'wolf proof' house. So we quickly got to work on designing our own houses. We discussed the best materials to use and also set traps to catch the wolf if needed! Many children used materials around our garden and classroom to make houses too! The children also talked about the types of homes they live in and they drew their own. Lots of them could remember the number on their front door. We did our first formal PE session in the hall and made up some dances to the story of 'The Three Little Pigs'. The children enjoyed being in the hall and tried hard to listen to and follow the instructions. In maths we have been looking at the composition of 5 (all the different ways we can make 5) and in Phonics we have been using the phonemes x, y, z and zz. Have a great weekend!