Beckers Green School Blogs

This week we are looking at the story 'Elmer' by David McKee. We have been enjoying retelling the story using props and have been painting our own patchwork elephants and will be making models to bring home next week. We will also be mixing colours and continuing to copy and make patterns.

We have started providing breakfast each day in class from 8:40 onwards if your child would like to join us just come, no need to book in advance.

Thank you again for your snack contributions. If you have not yet paid we are asking for £7 this term as a contribution towards snack costs. Please send this in as soon as possible in a named envelope or handed to a member of staff. Thank you.

Today the children will be coming home with a Readathon chart with some fun challengers for the children to complete at home. There are some lovely ideas to vary the reading you do at home and the children will receive a certificate for reaching the Bronze, Silver and Gold stage as well as for completing the whole 'Readathon challenge. We hope you will enjoy completing the challenges with your child.

Have a good week

The Antelopes Team

This is our second week looking at the story of Rainbow Fish as part of our Colour and Pattern topic. We have been doing some lovely artwork using pencils, pastels, printing and painting, as well as playdough, and this week will be making clay fish and decorating these with colourful and shiny scales! We will be reading and  writing colour words and describing what different fish look like, as well as writing about the Rainbow Fish. In maths we are working on subtraction. We have tried subtraction smash (with playdough) and subtraction snip (cutting strips of dots) and this week will try taking away towers (Duplo) and subtraction using cardboard hands.

We are loving our Outdoor Learning sessions again and Miss Brown says the Antelopes are a lovely class to have in the copse! Although it is cold we are wrapping up and keeping warm by moving about lots. Sorry about the muddy clothes!

Thank you for your contributions of £7 towards snack this term. If you have not already paid this please use the envelope attached to the letter, or hand money to a member of staff in Antelopes class. We have had a few staff changes in the Antelopes and Bears classes so the Antelopes support staff are now:

Mrs Geall, Miss Wright and Miss Baker

Mrs Fenn - Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday mornings.

Mrs Smith - Tuesday, Thursday and Friday mornings.

Mrs Steele and Mrs Earle will still be joining us on some afternoons.

Best wishes from the Antelopes team, have a good week!

Today we had the dress rehearsal for our Nativity! The rest of the school came to watch us and we showed them what we have been working so hard on. Everyone did a great job and looked fabulous in their costumes. We are looking forward to sharing it with you on Thursday morning at 9:30. Please remember that younger siblings will not be allowed to watch. If you would like your child to be looked after in our free of charge crèche then please let me know so I can add their name to our list.

Tomorrow we will be walking to St.Paul's church for our carol concert. We have had a practise last week at the church and are looking forward to you watching. After the concert all children will need to walk back to school so you can collect them at the end of the day.

Thank you to those of you who have already sent in a box and jar for your child for end of term craft work. If you have not already sent these in, please send in a named shoebox-sized box and a clean jar with a lid.

Last Friday we sold lots of reindeer food at the Christmas fair, but still have some left over. If you would like a bag we will be selling them after school for 50p a bag.

Thank you and hope to see you at our performances tomorrow and Thursday!

The Antelopes team

Christmas has well and truly arrived in the Antelopes class this week! We have looked at the story of the Jolly Christmas Postman and have been writing our own letters and cards. Our role paly area is now a post office so we can post parcels and cards and we have enjoyed dressing up in uniforms and using the postbag.

We have made a winter display in class by making collage snowmen, printing little robins and making paper snowflakes with glitter. We have also learnt how to use rulers to draw lines and have cut along these to make strips to make paper chains. We have enjoyed seeing our chains grow longer and some of us have worked together to join short chains. they look very pretty in our classroom. We also have made igloos for arctic animals by balancing marshmallows and sugar cubes and have filled drinks bottles with cotton wool and foam pieces to make a snowman, so we have been using our hand muscles lots!

Our carol concert practise at St. Paul's church went very smoothly. all the Antelopes walked there and back sensibly and luckily it wasn't raining. We hope for dry weather next Wednesday (12th) when we will perform our concert for you to watch.

We have been rehearsing for our Nativity lots and would like to thank you for the lovely costumes you have sent in. The children looked lovely dressed up and we have sent a photograph to the Braintree and Witham Times. Our performance will be at 9:30 on Thursday 13th. Please see me to book at place at the crèche if you have not yet done so as younger siblings will not be allowed to watch.

We have also made reindeer food this week to sell at the Christmas Fayre tomorrow (Friday 7th), which is after school. We hope to see you there!

The Antelopes team

We are having fun in the Antelopes class this week as we find out about carnivals and fayres. In our role play area we have dressing up clothes to wear and lots of exciting activities to do including juggling, plate spinning, skittles and hoopla! We have been trying out new skills and have kept on trying even if the plates do keep falling off the stick, or rolling away!

We have been working on one more and one less in maths and are getting really confident at this now. we will be starting simple addition later in the week using addition machines and counters.

We have moved onto phase 3 in phonics now and will soon be bringing home new tricky words and sounds to start to practise. We are using the phonics we know already to start to read and write simple words and are working hard to trace over or copy letters to write our names and words.

You may have seen a sign on our windows about grapes. We have noticed that some children are bringing whole grapes to school, which can be a choking hazard. please could you cut grapes in half lengthways if you include these in your child's lunchbox.

Finally, thank you to those of you have already sent in costumes for the Nativity play. Please send these in by Monday 3rd December as we will need to wear costumes for a photograph to send to the newspaper. Thank you.

Have a good week,

The Antelopes team

We are looking at how people celebrate weddings this week and have set up a wedding party scene in our role play area. We have been enjoying dressing up and pretending to toast the bride and groom with plastic champagne glasses! We are also using scissors and hole punches to make confetti and making invitations, lists and cards.

Yesterday was Dental Health day in school and following an assembly the children visited each classroom in EYFS and Key Stage 1 and did a different activity about teeth in each room. They had lots of fun and learnt a lot about looking after their teeth including foods that are good and bad for teeth, brushing properly twice a day and visiting the dentist.

Now that the weather is getting chillier please send your child in with hat, scarf and gloves and make sure they have a jumper or cardigan. Children do go out in all weathers in EYFS during the day, plus they are out for break time and lunchtime, and need to be dressed appropriately. Please name all items so we can match them up with each child!

You have now had a letter about what part your child will be in our nativity play. Costumes MUST be in by Monday 3rd December as we need to dress children up and take a photograph of all the children on Tuesday 4th December to send to the Braintree and Witham Times to be a part of the Christmas photo special. If you have previously requested that your child's photo is not used in newspapers we will of course ensure your child is not in the photograph.

Have a good week

The Antelopes team

This week we are continuing our topic about Celebrations and Festivals by looking at Birthdays. Our role play corner has been decorated with balloons, bunting and banners and has a table set for a birthday tea! We have been wrapping pretend presents (empty boxes!) and giving them to our friends playing in the role play corner for them to unwrap. We are also making pretend cakes from sand and sticklebricks and will also be using playdough later in the week. On our Funky Fingers area we have cakes to cut out and we are then making these into birthday cards and practising writing our names as well as 'to', 'love' and 'from', which could be useful for writing Christmas cards!

We are well underway with practising our Christmas songs for both our Nativity and singing at St Paul's Church and you may want to note down the dates and times of these:

Wednesday 12th December at 1:45 EYFS and KS1 carols at St. Paul's Church.

Thursday 13th December at 9:30 EYFS Nativity in the school hall.

We will let you know about costume details for your child on Friday this week.

As ever, if you have any questions please do not hesitate to ask us,

The Antelopes team

We are having a colourful and exciting week finding out about the Hindu festival of lights called Diwali! We have been making rangoli patterns using rice and seeds, pastels and even Numicon and will be doing mendhi hand patterns with felt tips and icing pens later in the week. Fireworks are part of Diwali celebrations and as it was Bonfire Night yesterday as well, we have drawn and written about the fireworks we saw and heard. We have also started practising our Christmas songs and are busy learning the words and actions!

As the weather has now turned chillier, many children have been bringing in new coats, hats, gloves, scarves and earmuffs. Please could you try to name these if at all possible as it makes it much easier for us to match them with the right owner at the end of the day!

Thank you to all of you who completed the den making as our October Home Learning Challenge - we hope you had fun building them. Today a new Home Learning Challenge for November has been posted on Tapestry, so log in to find out the fun activity to complete during November.

Miss Wheatley and the Antelopes team

Hope you all enjoyed half term and the children have had a rest - they were certainly very tired by the end of their first half term at school! All the children came back happily and were soon busy with our new activities.

This term our topic is Festivals and Celebrations and we will be finding out about different ways people celebrate. This week we are starting with Fireworks. Our role play corner has become a bonfire party with pretend marshmallows and hot chocolate to enjoy around a cardboard tube and tissue paper bonfire! The children loved working together to decorate the background using coloured chalks and glitter on black paper to make our pretend firework display, and will be doing lots of colourful and sparkly artwork.

Thank you for returning the children's PE kits today - almost everything came back in, which was great as we had a PE session this afternoon instead of Outdoor Learning, which is finished for our class until after Christmas.

Thank you for your continued support with reading at home, and to those of you who have completed the October Home Learning Challenge of building a den with your child. It has been fun to see photos of the children on Tapestry enjoying their creations!

As ever, please let us know if you have any queries or questions,

The Antelopes team

Hope you all had a nice weekend and have been enjoying the very end of the summer! Now it's October and the weather will be turning colder please could you send your child in with a coat each day as they do spend a lot of time outside at break and lunchtimes plus they can choose when to play in the outside area and it can be a bit chilly already. We will have some 'how to put your coat on' sessions so the children can be more independent with zips and buttons!

Tomorrow's outdoor learning session is in the morning instead of the afternoon. Please could you send your child in to school wearing their outdoor learning clothes and put their uniform in a named bag for them to change into at lunchtime. We have been working on getting changed more quickly for outdoor learning and P.E. so we can have more time to play! Please encourage your child to dress and undress as independently as possible at home. This will really help the children, and the adults in school, and will help the children be more independent at home too! We are hoping to take some good photos outside tomorrow which we can share with you on Tapestry.

Thank you for your donations of money and cakes on Friday for our cake sale. Mrs Geall did some baking at home and brought in a banana cake for each of the children to eat at snack time, which they really enjoyed.

As ever, if you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.

Miss Wheatley

We have had another busy week and are focussing this week on our families. We have been having fun painting portraits of ourselves and will be painting pictures of our families too. Perhaps you would like to add a photo of your family to your child's Tapestry page so we can compare it to the children's paintings!

Last week we started outdoor learning sessions. These will be every Tuesday in the afternoons. On Tuesdays please send your child in wearing their school uniform and a named bag with a long sleeved top and long bottoms. We are happy to store wellies in school or these will need to be brought in each week. Please name all items as children are often uncertain about which things are theirs.

Thank you to those who attended our parents meeting - we hope you found the information useful. We will be sending home copies of the PowerPoint over the next week to those who were unable to attend so please ask if you have any questions.

If you have not yet sent in your snack donation money, please do so when possible.

Hope you have a lovely week and as always, any questions please ask!

Miss Wheatley

Just a reminder that tomorrow (Thursday 8th February) is a superhero dressing up day for the whole school, therefore Crocodiles will not be going into the copse for outdoor learning and will not need to come to school dressed for outdoor learning or bring uniform to change into. Crocodiles may come to school dressed as superheroes for the day instead!

Thank you to those of you who have already given us donations of cakes to sell tomorrow. We would be grateful for any further donations tomorrow to help us to raise money for children with cancer.

Also thank you to all of you who joined us for our class assembly on Monday afternoon. The children have been working hard on their song and dance and enjoyed sharing their learning with you. We have sent home their clay diva lamps today and hope they arrived home in one piece!

Thank you

Crocodiles class

We have now finished our Great Fire of London topic and have started our last topic of 2017 - Christmas!

This week we have been finding out about what people do to prepare for Christmas during Advent and the children thought about what happens in their houses to get ready. Hopefully the children will you help out a bit as we talked about what a busy time it is for grown-ups.

We are also busy in Crocodiles class preparing for Christmas. This week we have been writing letters to Father Christmas and tomorrow we will be putting them into envelopes, sticking on the address label and stamp, and walking to the postbox to post them! We have also sent home a copy of the final draft of the letters the children wrote so you can see what they have written.

We are looking forward to lots of festive events starting with the Christmas fayre tomorrow. We hope you can join us from 3:30 for lots of fun and games on the playground.

Best wishes from the Crocodiles team

We have been very busy in Crocodiles class finding out about the Great Fire of London. The children have been really interested about what happened in 1666, and hopefully they have been telling you some of the facts they have learnt, or singing 'London's Burning'.

In History we have been looking at how we know about the Great Fire of London and what we can find out by looking at different clues. We have watched some videos about the timeline of when the fire started in Pudding Lane and how it spread. One of them was a time travelling Magic Grandad programme about Samuel Pepys and his famous diary.

In Geography we have looked at maps of London as it is today and how it looked in 1666. We pretended to go on a bus tour around London to see the famous landmarks there and can recognise and name lots of them now!

We have also been doing lots of artwork to show what we think the fire looked like. We used tissue paper and black paper to make a collage of the fire, and have used chalks on black paper. We even used the Colour Magic programme on the computer to create and print out a picture of flames in the night sky.

We have another week of this topic before we move onto Christmas, which is certainly approaching very fast!

Thank you for your continued support with reading at home, practising words, and homework. Just a reminder that reading diaries and books should be in school every day, and homework books should be returned on a Thursday so new homework can be added before books are given out on a Friday.

Regards, the Crocodiles team - Miss Wheatley, Miss Thorogood and Miss Phillips.

Welcome back to Crocodiles Class!

We are really looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow and hearing about all the exciting things you have been doing over the summer holidays!

Just a reminder that you all need to bring your school bags, (we have got most of your reading books from before the summer holidays, if you still have yours please bring it in), and P.E. bags tomorrow. Our P.E. days will be Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Mrs Christian and Miss Thorogood will meet you at the door in the morning and I will be in later in the morning.

We welcome Miss Phillips to Beckers Green and hope she will enjoy being a Crocodile! 

The Crocodile Team - Miss Wheatley, Miss Thorogood and Miss Phillips

Welcome back to the last half term of the year!

Today we have started our new topic about Pirates. The children have already been excited to draw their ideas of what a pirate might look like and to share ideas about what pirates do, where they live, and what they eat and drink. We have had some very interesting ideas, and a few pirate impressions too!

This will be a busy week, including Sports Day! For Crocodiles Class this is on Wednesday 7th June, starting at 9:30. Of course this is weather permitting, so we will be hoping for a dry day! Your child will need to wear their usual P.E. kit, which should be in school, and they will need to bring a sun hat. Please apply sun cream before your child comes to school. We will be supplying a bottle of water for each child to drink while on the field. The children have been practising for their events in P.E. lessons and are looking forward to showing you what they can do, so we hope you can join us.

Just a reminder that school will be closed on Thursday 8th June due to the school being used as a polling station.

From the Crocodiles Team

Miss Wheatley, Mrs Amos and Mrs Steele.

We have had another busy week this week. We have continued to look at transport in the past and have enjoyed looking at photographs and pictures of very old cars, trains, boats, bicycles and aeroplanes, and comparing these to modern ones.

In maths we have been working on pairs of numbers to total 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10, and have then used this to help us find pairs to total 20. We have been writing addition and subtraction sums and have got quite excited about finding all the different combinations to make the different totals!

On Monday 10th July at 2 pm the Crocodiles will be doing a class assembly in the hall, and would like to invite you to join us for this event. It will give the children an opportunity for the children to show you what they have learnt this year and to share their achievements.

Homework this week will include some questions that we would like the children to ask parents and grandparents about what life was like when they were children. We will look at your responses and see if we can find images and videos about these on the internet so children can compare the past with the present. We hope you will enjoy going down memory lane remembering your childhoods!

Enjoy the long weekend,

Miss Wheatley

This has been a busy term and the children have been working really hard. They have enjoyed our topic about Plants and John Ray, and we have had fun growing beans and exploring plants around school. We have welcomed Mrs Steele to the Crocodiles team during the mornings as Miss White has moved to a new school.

This week we had our final Outdoor Learning session in the copse, and celebrated with a campfire and making and eating S'mores, which are made by heating marshmallows then sandwiching them between chocolate digestive biscuits! The children certainly enjoyed making them, and liked eating them even more! At the end of the session the children each poured some water over the fire to put it out, and as they did, they said something they have really enjoyed about Outdoor Learning. It was a lovely way to end the sessions, which the children have thoroughly enjoyed. A big thank you to Miss Brown who has organised and led the sessions, and given the children so many opportunities for exploration, learning and fun!

It has been lovely to share the efforts and achievements of the children with you during Parent Consultations this week. The children have been really excited to share what they have been learning and work they are proud of. Thank you all for your support with reading and homework activities, which helps children to become more involved in their learning and practise their skills.

We wish you a happy and restful holiday, and will see you on Tuesday 18th April.

The Crocodiles team - Miss Wheatley, Mrs Amos and Mrs Steele

Last week was a very busy one for the Crocodiles. Our Outdoor Learning session was on Shrove Tuesday so while in the copse,the children ate pancakes, which had been cooked on the fire! As usual they had a lovely time in the copse and have been exploring some new areas including the Copse Café. In our session tomorrow we will be looking at plants and especially the trees which grow in the copse.

On Thursday we celebrated World Book Day. The children looked lovely dressed as their favourite characters! We took photos of them all and are writing speech bubbles about our characters to display in our book area. We also became authors ourselves when we wrote our own stories based on a picture from the book 'The Mysteries of Harris Burdick'.

On Friday last week we visited Braintree Museum as part of our topic on plants and John Ray. We had already used clues in class to find out about John Ray and why he is famous and has a statue outside the museum, so the children were really excited to see this. We had three different workshops during the day to find out about grouping and classifying plants and animals and how John Ray's work is still important today.

Finally just to remind you that tomorrow (Tuesday) is Outdoor Learning so children will need to wear old clothes as usual and bring their uniform please. We have recently sent out invitations for parents to join us in an Outdoor Learning session on Friday 28th April, so if you would like to join us please return the slip at the bottom of the letter. Also Parent Consultation week is fast approaching and we will be organising appointment times soon. If you have not yet sent in your slip requesting an appointment with me, please do so.

Thank you for your continued support,

The Crocodiles Team

G'day from the Crocodiles!

We have been having so much fun finding out about Australia for our topic. We have pretended to fly to Australia from an aeroplane made of chairs in our classroom while we watched a video of a plane taking off then landing in Sydney. We watched a tourist film to see what people like to do in Sydney, and mimed what we would like to do. Lots of us enjoyed surfing, swimming and sunbathing!

We have been finding out about the different features of the Australian landscape and thinking about how it is different from the UK. Mr Deason, who is a volunteer reader with our class, has visited Australia and took some wonderful photographs while he was there, which he copied for us to look at in class. It would be great if children could bring in any books they have at home about Australia, or perhaps you could go to a travel agents and collect a travel brochure to bring in.

In outdoor learning sessions we the Australian theme has continued. The children have been exploring Aboriginal art patterns and have used cotton wool buds to paint the dotty patterns to decorate didgeridoos and boomerangs. The highlight of the week was Miss Brown throwing a real boomerang on the field (which didn't come back!), and playing the didgeridoo - which sounded brilliant!

As usual, thank you for you continued support with homework and reading. Please do come to see us if you have any queries,

The Crocodiles team - Miss Wheatley, Mrs Amos and Miss White.