2KA December Learning

December, and the run up to Christmas, is always my favourite time of the year in school. Everybody is so excited by all of the celebrations and special times we share, and this year was no exception. We even managed to fit in some learning!!!

English

In English, the children completed their final piece of writing for our Traditional Tales unit, spending a week planning and writing their own story. The children and I were amazed by how much their writing has developed since September. I asked them to compare their first piece of writing with their story. It was so lovely to hear the children celebrating their own success with each other and feeling a real sense of pride at their achievements. One of my favourite comments was 'In September, I wrote like a baby, but now I have big boy writing!'

Maths

In maths, we have continued to develop multiplication and division skills. The children were very excited when I gave them permission to write on the tables to help them solve tricky problems with their team! It was fantastic to see the children working together to put their knowledge into use and the novelty of writing on the tables gave them extra confidence to have a go. (Don't worry though, we cleaned the tables afterwards!)

We also moved on to begin our topic on measure, learning about measuring height and length in cm and m.

Creative Curriculum

In Creative Curriculum, we completed a short mini topic called 'Home and Away'. In this topic, we practised our Geography skills, thinking about what we like a dislike about our local area and things which make Coventry special. We also learned the names, locations and capital cities of the other countries of the United Kingdom. 

In RE, we began to focus on Christianity and in particular the celebration of Christmas. We learned the story of the nativity and discovered why Jesus' birth is so important to Christians. We explored the different ways Christians celebrate at Christmas and compared them to the celebrations we have at home. Some children don't celebrate Christmas at home, we thought about the reasons for this and shared the different celebrations they have at home throughout the year.

As part of our learning linked to aspirations, the children thought about different and unusual jobs which are more in demand at this time of year. Some of the children spoke about their parents and about how the jobs they do are often busier in December. One child said he felt sorry for his mum because mum's are really busy getting things ready for Christmas and he thought about ways he could help her - I guess he'll be on the 'good list' this year! The children created some fantastic posters for display to share their thoughts about jobs during this busy period. Alannah-Rae won a goodie-bag for her thoughtful work on busy animal shelters.

Christmas Fun Times!

Obviously, the start of December marks the beginning of advent and the arrival of the naughty Christmas elves! The children worked really hard to make decorations for our classroom and every child added a decoration to our Christmas tree. Can you spot any of the JC value characters in there?

I was very sad to not be at school in person for some of the Christmas celebrations, but I was very excited to join the class on zoom every day to see what they were up to and share some stories and activities with them. The children loved my daily choice of hat, although they often caused quite a lot of excitment when I 'zoomed in'!

There were so many fun Christmas activities going on in school, it would take me forever to list them all, but some of the highlights were definitely: Spanish Day - where the children explored how Christmas is celebrated in Mexico and learned how to sing Jingle Bells in Spanish; meeting Father Christmas, his reindeer and elves; receiving a present from Father Christmas ad making reindeer food. You can tell by the pictures just how much fun everybody had!