Friday Headlines
the weekly newsletter from EHS
Nursery to Year Six Highlights
15 November 2024
It has been another wonderful week in Nursery, Kindergarten and Prep, packed with creativity, exploration and fun. The teachers have shared some of the exciting activities the girls have enjoyed this week. Don’t forget to take a look at the gallery below for pictures!
The Colour Purple
In Nursery, the colour of the week was purple. The girls excitedly brought in purple items from home, which they proudly displayed in the classroom. They also explored the magic of colour mixing by combining red and blue paint with their hands – and voilà, they created purple! Outside, the children went on a stick hunt and used their fine motor skills to carefully thread leaves onto the sticks they found. It has been a fantastic week of exploration and creativity, with lots of opportunities for hands-on learning.
Night Time Wonders
Kindergarten girls have been thinking about night time to support their learning of the phoneme ‘n’. Many of them have been out in the dark looking for the moon and stars! They have investigated nocturnal and diurnal animals in the classroom through the sharing of non-fiction books. They were interested to learn that owls, hedgehogs, toads, cats, badgers, bats, and foxes are all nocturnal animals! The children were a lot more familiar with diurnal animals such as bees, dogs and farm animals. They also loved being birds for a day as they foraged around in their giant nest looking for worms!
Spellbinding Phonics Lessons
In Reception, phonics lessons help girls develop reading skills, and teaching ‘tricky words’ is an essential part of this process. Tricky words are words that do not follow regular phonetic patterns and therefore cannot be sounded out in the usual way, such as, ‘the’, ‘was’ and ‘you’. Instead, girls are taught to recognise these words by sight. We have just started to introduce these words using engaging, multisensory ways. We turn the lessons into magic sessions; pupils enjoy being magicians and conjuring the words out of a hat. This approach makes learning the ‘tricky words’ enjoyable and aids retention.
The Enormous Turnip
This week Year One have begun work on story telling. Girls listened to the story of The Enormous Turnip before teaming up with their friends to retell it with puppets. The girls had to remember to use actions alongside expression and their BIG voices when they performed their version of the story to the class at the end of the lesson. Well done girls! There are definitely some aspiring actors among you!
Exploring Taste Buds
This term Year Two have been learning about their senses in Science. They have explored their sense of touch, smell and sight and this week they investigated their sense of taste. The girls were asked to taste six different vegan jelly flavours, but could only use their sense of taste to guess which flavour they were eating. The girls didn’t like all of the flavours, but willingly tried every one, which was made more difficult as they were wearing blindfolds and had to carefully guide their wobbly jelly on a spoon into their mouths.
Fascinating World of Maps
Year Three girls have been exploring the fascinating world of maps this term. They began by learning about the importance of scale on a map. To get hands-on experience, they first created a map of their classroom without using scale, and then remade the same map to scale, comparing the two and discussing the differences.
They then ventured around the school, labelling a map of the school buildings. Through this activity, they discovered that symbols are a more effective way to represent features on a map. Each pupil designed their own set of symbols to label different parts of the school.
Looking ahead, the class will continue to develop their map-reading skills by working with grid references, understanding directions, and exploring contour lines. By the end of the term, all students will have a solid understanding of how to read maps.
Creative Poppies
Year Four took on the challenge of designing and decorating poppies for Remembrance Day. They used all sorts of collage materials and particularly enjoyed the glitter! We put the finished poppies up around the door to remind us of the day.
Enchanting Macbeth workshop
Our Year Six students were thrilled to dive into the world of Shakespeare during a captivating Macbeth workshop led by the Young Shakespeare Company. The girls were shocked, delighted, and entertained in equal measure, fully embracing the immersive experience. The workshop brought Macbeth to life in a dynamic “in the round” setting, allowing pupils to feel right at the heart of the action.
From taking on the roles of characters to creating spine-tingling sound effects, the students became an integral part of the performance. This hands-on experience provided a vivid introduction to Shakespeare's themes of ambition, power, and fate, igniting enthusiasm for their upcoming studies of Macbeth.
This engaging start to their work on Shakespeare has left the girls eager to explore the text further, inspired by this memorable introduction to one of literature's most
haunting tales.
Nursery to Year Six Highlights
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