Welcome to the Autumn Term! 

Croeso i Dymor yr Hydref! 

Welcome to Gwdihw! Croeso i Gwdihw! Our Inquiry Question for this half term will be 'Who am I and what makes me unique'? During the term, children will be focusing on a whole host of ideas all relating to themselves! As a beginning for the new year, we thought it would be lovely for the children and grown ups to get to know each other slightly better 

During the 8 week term, we will be exploring themes of what makes us unique, our amazing body and senses, families and those we care for us, our homes, the similarities and differences of us and everything around us,z and our feelings. Please remind the children when they are home to go over their day and I'm sure they will tell you all we have done! 

During our usual day, the children will focus on our themes around being unique but we will also be very busy! Every day you will find us learning Welsh during our Tric a Chlic sessions and our daily Slot Drilio, we will be continuing with Monster Phonics and also focusing on our Maths! What a busy day we have  

Please see below some pictures and descriptions of what we've been up to each week!

Week 1 

What a brilliant first week! We came back to school after 6 Weeks and really threw ourselves back into learning  I am very proud of each and every single one of you! 

Here we are exploring the new areas in our classroom! What a fun first day 👏🏼✨

Typically, our first day was full of rain! We made the most of it and after a class vote decided we needed some movement! The class vote brought us to Danny Go 🕺🏻💃

Wow 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 Week 1 and the children are asking for written tasks!! We’ve started strong with name writing practice, number writing practise and lots of drawings! We are so proud ❤️

One new change for the children are our Brain Blasts! Each morning, the children will come in before the register and complete a short activity in a small group to prepare them for the day! The activities rotate every day and we will be focusing on different activities each week! We will always have numeracy, literacy, Welsh, Digital and Wellbeing tasks 😀

This morning we wouldn’t believe it!! An alien had landed in our classroom 👽🛸 ! Her name was Beegu and she was trying to find somewhere to belong. To help her, we’ve worked hard today to make crafts to make her belong. We have also made a video showing her around the classroom! We have a great team 👏🏼

Week 2

We kicked off this week with some exploration of how we are unique! We noticed that some of us have different coloured eyes 👀! This was very exciting for the children and we took our time to investigate how the children look different and the different colours we could do. To see which colour was most popular, we made our own pictogram! The children were very excited to work together as a whole class and we made a very big pictogram together! The least popular eye colour in Gwdihw was a very dark brown and the most popular was blue! 

Our Slot Drilio session today was all about dancing and signing in Welsh! We love using the Siani Sionc videos to sing and dance! We were very impressed with the children remembering the words and dancing along! Da iawn pawb 👏🏼

We have started to explore using the iPads this week! Today’s task was to find the camera and to take a selfie! The children found this hilarious 😀 we realised just how unique we all are and how we look very different! We will be using these lovely selfies to label our facial features this week 🙂🙂

We are very proud of the work the children have completed this week 🥰 we have seen lots of writing, maths and incredible effort 👏🏼

Week 3

This week we are learning all about our Incredible Senses ✨✨! We kicked off the week with a hands on lesson where we sat in a circle and talked about how our senses make us different and definitely unique! The children had a challenge, they wore a blind fold and had to use their sense of touch and smell to figure out what they had👏🏼 the children were AMAZING!!! They found it very funny and realised not many of them like the smell of coffee but love the smell of a new candle! 

In maths this week, we are continuing our learning about place value! We completed a wonderful number line activity and practised forming lots of numbers. This is a skill we will be continuing to practise over the next few weeks 🥰✨👏🏼

We had a lovely first introduction to Kerbcraft this week! Our lovely teacher, Nicola and our lovely Mum’s who are volunteering came in for us to learn what we’ll be up to over the next few weeks 🚶 we learnt all about the Golden Rules and that we’ll all be in High-Vis! We are very excited 🥰

A HUGE thank you to Tesco Llansamlet for their very kind donation of fruits for us to try! This week we are learning all our 5 incredible Senses! Last week, we worked ever so hard to write a shopping list of the fruits we would love to try! We explored taste today and discovered lots of healthy fruits that we loved! We are very proud of the children for trying so many different new things!! Da iawn pawb 👏🏼👏🏼 our favourite reaction was that of the children trying lemons!! How funny 😅

Some lovely playing in our class this week, da iawn pawb!! I am ever so proud of you all for playing nicely together, sharing and caring for one another 🥰👏🏼

To end our week, working and learning about our senses, we completed a challenge! We were in partners and one of us had an eye mask on! The other partner had to direct their partner with an eye mask on and make sure they completed some challenges safely! We are very proud of the children for their communication, team work and resilience!

Week 4

This week, we are moving on with our work about how we are all unique by talking about our families. It has been lovely to hear the children sharing interesting facts and stories to our friends about the people we love at home ❤️

We kicked off the week with a family portrait with a twist! The children used the iPads and their HWB account details using JIT to draw their families! We found this took a lot of resilience and determination as we had to be very patient and careful with every touch of the iPad! We will send copies of these home for you at the end of the week 🥰

Here are some lovely pictures of our learning in our focus tasks this week! The children are loving guided reading and working really hard to learn some new reading behaviours! Maths is all about place value and we are working this week on 1 less which is a little tricky! We are getting used to counting backwards 🥰 

A massive congratulations to Amelia and her family for taking part in the Swansea Bay 10K over the weekend! We are very proud of your determination 👏🏼👏🏼

Our first group ready for Kerb Craft on Tuesday morning! We are all loving the High-Vis’! 

Thank you to Piper for bringing in some

apples that grow outside her house! We learnt all about them and what her family have to do to care for them. We used the apples today to paint - we cut them up and printed pictures of our families. Make sure to look out for them drying outside our class next week! 

A wonderful week of hard work! I am very proud of you all! Writing, maths, talking about our families and more! Da iawn pawb 🥰

Week 5

This week we are learning about our homes and the different types of houses around us✨ The children have enjoyed talking, drawing and building models of their homes 🏡 

For PE this half term, we have been learning and developing skills in Gymnastics. We played lots of different games using the shapes we have been making including teddy bear rolls, log rolls, tuck and dish shapes 🤸🏼‍♀️🤸🏾 and we also had some games using sensory equipment! We will be continuing to grow our strength and confidence in these movements over the next few weeks. Look at those smiley faces 🥰

Some pictures of us in provision this week. We really are developing our independence and resilience to challenge ourselves in our classroom areas! 

Thank you Piper for bringing in your lovely creation you made at home! It has inspired us in class to use your creativity and have a go ourselves! This will be available in provision next week ✨ Diolch Piper!

Week 6

🎉🥳 Penblwydd Hapus Georgia! Happy Birthday Georgia 🥳🎉 a big thank you from everyone in class for the birthday treat! Diolch 🤍

This week, we are learning all about the number line in our Maths sessions! In our independent challenges, to reinforce our learning we have asked the children to use the Numicon to order the numbers and to see their value! 

It was a very exciting afternoon on Monday, it was lovely to see and hear the children playing ever so lovely together 💛 we have been saying how in class we are all a big family and that is definitely seen in these photos! 

We are very proud of the children in their efforts in our daily Welsh sessions! We have been learning lots of new vocabulary and started our daily Tric a Chlic sessions, which teaches us how to read in Welsh! The children have learnt a lot of sounds, phrases and words and we have applied these to reading in pairs and as a whole class. We are ever so proud! Da iawn pawb 👏👏

Waw! Look at this writing! We are very proud of all of the children in Gwdihw for writing independently this week to write a list of their favourite foods! We discovered we all like different things and enjoyed writing our list. The children are using their Monster Phonics sounds to phonetically build the words and write independently. What a challenge 👏

A big congratulations to Mollie on her latest badge from swimming! We are all very proud of your excellent achievement👏🥰✨

Guided Reading is becoming one of the children’s favourite time of our day📚! Every day, the groups rotate across 5 different activities. 1 group with Mrs Myatt focusing on developing the reading behaviours, 1 reading with Miss Willimer, 1 group working with Mrs Thomas to recap, write and read the Monster Phonics words of the week, 1 group independently listening to audio books through scanning QR Codes and a final group working independently to go through picture books, complete writing activities and challenging themselves with this weeks Monster Phonics focus sounds. We are very proud of their development and resilience during these challenges! 

During PE today, we challenged the children to work in pairs to create a sequence of movements based on the Gymnastics moves we have been learning over the last few weeks. To conclude the lesson, we performed the sequence of movements to the class. Da iawn pawb 👏

We love to see children using the puzzles in our classroom to challenge themselves and work collaboratively!

Today we are wearing red, yellow and green for Hugs not Handout Day for Faith in Families. We have been talking about kindness, love and how we support each other!

Week 7

What a start to the week 👏🏼👏🏼 we have worked very hard today on lots of different things! We started the day with Monster Phonics and enjoyed learning “ow”, this weeks Brown Owl sound. Then we moved onto, Maths and we recapped all of the work we have done about Place Value to 10! I was so proud of the children for remembering the number facts and strategies we have learnt ✨

During our maths sessions we have 3 groups rotating! One group with Mrs Myatt completing a focus task on a specific topic in our maths sessions, 1 group completing a problem

solving activity with Miss Willimer and 1 group working with Miss Thomas on a practical session. There is always 1 group in class completing independent activities too 🥰

In guided reading, we have been using key words and sounds to build our own sentences. The children are working on remembering capital letters at the beginning of a sentence and that a full stop ends a sentence. 

On Monday afternoon, we created a whole class Pictogram of our favourite fruits! We used the class board to select our favourite fruit and then compared the data we could see. Strawberries was a clear winner!

Our work this week is all about our feelings! We are going to talk about the different feelings we have and come up with some strategies of what we should to if we ever feel feelings we aren’t sure how to express. We started by drawing pictures and labelling different emotions. We are very proud of the independent writing!

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 Shwmae Sumae🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 ! Today we celebrated the special Welsh day and greeted people in Welsh in a variety of different ways! Two children helped direct this video, da iawn!