Term 3 

Welcome back to St Thomas' Primary Academy. We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas break and enjoyed time with your families. We are very excited to see the children continue to progress with their learning and take part in lots of exciting opportunities. This term the children will be learning all about superheroes both in fiction and in real life. This will include identifying people who help us in the community and their roles. They will continue to explore numbers to 5 but focus on the composition of numbers and also explore weight and capacity. The children's love for Maths is shining through and all our lessons encourage the children to explain their reasonings and apply their learning in their independent learning time. Throughout our Understanding of the World learning, the children will begin to identify places in the community that are special to them and others, this will include visiting our local church and meeting our Reverend. PE lessons will take place every Wednesday and all children should have both an indoor and outdoor PE kit, this is so the children are able to keep warm throughout the winter weather. 

Safer Strangers 

This week, Love class had a very special visit from a  PCSO who came to talk to the children about how to stay safe and what to do if we met a stranger or found ourselves lost from our parents or family members. The children were able to share their knowledge of safer strangers and people who help us and enjoyed trying on some of the police officer uniform. Throughout this term, the children have shown fantastic knowledge of how to stay safe and identify all the people who help us day to day. 

Safer Internet Day and Children's Mental Health Week 2022

We have had an action packed week this week, looking at both Safer Internet Day and Children's Mental Health Week. The children explored the theme of 'Exploring Respect and Online Relationships' through communication, we looked at all of the ways you can communicate with others using technology, we spoke about what communicate meant and that we only communicate with people we know and we always ask an adults permission to use technology so that they can check it is safe for us to use first. As part of Children's Mental Health Week we have had discussions about feelings throughout the week along with exploring our wellbeing display, the children can use this to reflect on how they are feeling. The children have taken part in different activities each day to support positive mental health such as mindfulness activities, dancing and breathing exercises.

In PE this term the children have been taking part in Gymnastics, the children are exploring their balance, different ways of moving and travelling, jumping, creating body shapes and spatial awareness. Class Love have been showing their core values alongside this, ensuring they are supporting one another and encouraging them to try different pieces of equipment.

We have been exploring the celebration of Chinese New Year, we looked at how it is celebrated and how it compares to some of the occasions which the children celebrate, we found lots of similarities. The children explored the story of the Zodiac to understand how each year is named after an animal, we ended the week by performing a dragon dance along with children playing the drums and small percussion instruments.

The children loved the Jolly Postman story so much we continued with it for another week, this week the children wrote themselves a letter and posted it to themselves. It was extremely exciting walking to the post box and posting our own letter, some of us has never had post before.

This week we have began to look at the community around us and our local area. In Literacy we looked at the story 'The Jolly Postman' this gave us an insight into the role of a postal worker and the important role they have in delivering messages, letters and parcels. The children loved the story and took their enjoyment of it into their independent learning time where they began to draw story maps, talking about the main characters and the different places the Postman visited.

In Maths this week the children have been looking at Capacity, they have explored capacity in different ways such as using water and sand. The children were encouraged to use to vocabulary of full, empty and half full and then compare containers, thinking critically and predicting which container may hold the most or the least. The children have also been comparing weights of different objects, looking at what happens to scales when something is heavy and when something is light.

We have started back with large amounts of enthusiasm to take our learning further. The children have really loved beginning their learning on Superheroes, we particularly enjoyed creating the main characters in both Supertato and Superworm, the children showed their imaginative skills along with their creativity in creating both of these.

In PE the children have been creating some really interesting shapes with their bodies and looking at different ways we can move around the hall.

In Maths the children have been looking at the numbers up to 5 and all the different ways that these numbers can be created using drawings, objects, Numicon and numbers.