Welcome back,

I hope you had a lovely Christmas break and are ready for a busy term.

I am delighted to be back with Conkers and look forward to celebrating the children's achievements this term.

Don't forget to always have a warm coat this term as the weather is bound to be cold and wet and we still plan to go outside for both playtimes and learning times.

Look at the spelling pages each week for the spelling words and sounds we are learning and don't forget to practise these at home regularly.

Mrs Ord

We hope you all have a lovely summer break.

Just a few reminders about September....
Remember your PE kit on first day back.
Ensure that everything is named so that we can quickly return your clothing to you.
If you can, bring in some wellies for our outdoor learning lessons (and also have these named).
We would be grateful if rucksacks were not brought in to school as there is limited room in our cloakroom which doubles up as a learning area.
You will need a book bag though.

I look forward to welcoming you all in September,

Happy hols!
​Mrs Ord

What a busy few weeks of learning and having fun we have had. The children have shown a great attitude to learning across the curriculum. The  progress they've made is evident in their learning books, the classroom and in their amazing knowledge shared in class discussions.
At the moment the children are really enjoying learning about the Monarchy. They have been busy identifying kings, queens, sultans and emperors from history and from stories and films too! This has helped us understand our British values as we have been learning about rules and democracy through discussion and debates.
The children have been enthusiastically learning about our new characters from the class text, The Beasties. Meeting Weevil, Floot and Ferdinand has sparked their magical storytelling skills using their imagination and treasures to create their very own stories.
Maths has been fun too with the children investigating measuring weight, length and capacity, 2d and 2d shapes and fractions of shape and amounts. This hands on learning has enabled us to use our skills with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division to find answers to problems.
In computing the children have been developing their programming skills. You can access 'Scratch' on the internet to have a go at some algorithms (instructions) to make a 'sprite' move and make noises. You can also create an exciting background stage too. 
Through RE we are talking about how stories change people. In class we are reading Bible stories which we are able to link the characters and morals to other stories that we reading. As a class we are reading some of the plays by Shakespeare. The children loved the story of Midsummers Night's Dream and are really fascinated by the much darker tragedy of Macbeth.
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Remember to supply welly boots, long trousers and a waterproof coat to stay in school as we get outside rain or shine finding lots of ways to use the outdoors to extend our learning.

14th June: Curriculum day. Parents welcome to join us from 2:30pm.
20th June: Sports day (22nd -reserve sports day)
27th June: Outdoor activity morning with year3 followed with a visit to the Jewish synagogue in Oxford. (Kindly funded by the PTA)
30th June: Small Schools Festival at The Buckingham School. (Transport provided by TBS)

Please see The Really Useful Card for other whole school dates.

Don't forget that the new term will begin on Tuesday 12th April. We are looking forward to hearing about all that you have been getting up to over the holidays. 
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Please remember to bring to school:

• Reading book and reading record.
• Library book (many children have left them in school ready to exchange).
• Named water bottle.
• Named outdoor clothes - long trousers, long sleeved top, welly boots.

Please do come in and check that your wellies still fit.

• PE kit including jogging bottoms or leggings.

Please check that everything still fits and that everything is named.
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The children have been invited to take part in an arts and crafts home learning activity. Please create your own Easter garden in a shoe box. You can be as creative as you like and this can be completed instead of the home learning grid task. Each box will be displayed with our Easter arts and writing during the Easter experience week.

Wednesday 9th March 2016
2pm

We look forward to seeing you.

The children have been busy in the classroom with lots of challenging learning activities across the curriculum. Maths has shown children demonstrating confidence solving addition and subtraction problems: Year 1 children have been finding missing numbers using different methods to help them visualise the calculation; Year 2 children have been building on their previous understanding of place value and partitioning to add and subtract two and three digit numbers, using a number line as support.

In English we have learned a new text about a young Muslim girl who creates imaginary situations with her mother's Hijaab. The children's use vocabulary has been impressive and their knowledge and understanding of adjectives, nouns and verbs is shining through.

World Book Day was a great success! Thank you to all the parents and carers for support in helping to create outfits for the day. The children absolutely loved listening to the teachers of Great Horwood when they popped in to read their favourite story. The teachers all remarked on their good learning behaviour.

The children have been excellent learners and are clearly proud of themselves for making such progress with their writing this week. They have created some superb stories using extended sentences and adventurous vocabulary. Well done Conkers!
In topic the children have been drawing aerial views which were well thought through.
In dance this week we have been using country dancing steps to begin learning how to use the maypole. The next few weeks are going to be lots of fun with most of us getting tangled up in the ribbons..hahaha.

Science day was really exciting and we were particularly proud of our class who worked really well in their teams and showed great scientific thinking, applying their knowledge and understanding to improve their investigations and question the outcomes.

We have been busy this week developing and using our thinking skills in all sorts of ways:
In maths the children have been finding the fractions of shapes and using their knowledge of half to divide amounts in two. Learning to divide is quite tricky but the children worked hard, showing our value of perseverance.
In English the children have been innovating the story of The Enormous Crocodile. We have had all types of animals being described, using lots of adventurous adjectives. The children have learned the story off by heart and are getting ready to perform the whole story with the help of actions, expression and our wonderful story cloaks!
Our topic this term is 'Finding Our Way' and we have made a start on this by looking at maps and aerial views. Some of the children have completed a home learning task by choosing to create a map of where they live and I have hung their examples on the wall for all to see.

In PE this term we are learning country dancing. Soon we will be getting the maypole out and we can't wait! The music we listen to is played on an accordion and we were lucky enough to have Mr Thompson pop in to show us how this is played. He also brought along a mandolin which the children had great fun playing.

This week the children have been busy learning about finding the fractions of a shape and amount. We had fun finding 1/2, 1/4, 2/4, 3/4 and a whole. On Friday we showed our understanding by covering a rectangle slice of bread with Nutella (yum!). We also used marshmallows to find half of a quantity. The children certainly enjoyed this style of learning.

We also showed off our writing skills by describing the characters from The Enormous Crocodile. The children worked in pairs to use the computers to type up their sentences and changed the size and type of font. Great work Conkers!

We have a very musical class of children who have shown confidence writing musical notation. The children are able to identify crotchets, quavers and minims and play the chime bars and xylophones to demonstrate this.