Livingstone Primary & Nursery School WK1 OCT 2021

The children are busy sorting out some of the autumn materials they have collected from Hadley Wood. Drita and Yasmin are sorting the conkers from the acorns. They know that conkers are usually round and acorns are usually oval. Good sorting, girls!

We are learning all about autumn creatures. Jaxon is drawing a "spikey hedgehog ... it lives in the garden". Jaxon holds his pen so beautifully and he always takes great care with his drawings. Well done, Jaxon!

This week has been very exciting in Reception! We walked in to a Gruffalo den in the classroom, Gruffalo crumble messy play and all of the soft toy characters to retell the story with. We walked through the 'deep dark' woods and found dens, logpile houses and treetop worlds. We will continue our Gruffalo theme as the children loved it so much and are all now fantastic at retelling their favourite parts. We have also been introduced to our new classroom pets - the stick insects! Some of the children have enjoyed letting them crawl on them. We are continuing to learn a new sound in phonics each day and before half term will be sending home sound books to practise daily. In the meantime, please use the reading diary to record any reading that you are doing at home. Great work Reception!

Nirvani - for always being enthusiastic and eager to learn

Ethan - for being well behaved and always following instructions

This week in Year 2, we have started our wonderful history topic The Great Fire of London. On Monday afternoon, we had a fantastic workshop where we learnt all about the streets of London at the time, we played a game about the plague (an awful disease in London at the time), we acted act how the people of London tried to put out the fire and we also learnt about King Charles 11 who was the king at the time. It was a fabulous workshop where we went back in time!

In Maths, we have been counting in 2s, 5s and 10s to get ourselves ready to start Times Tables Rockstars towards the end of the half term. We have been creating our own number lines in twos outdoors using objects from outside which was great fun! We have also been very busy in Year 2 learning songs for our KS1 Infant Music Festival that will be taking place in November. We have learnt a Japanese song that is in a round. We've been working on keeping the song going as a two part round which has been difficult at times but we are mastering this! We have also started to learn another song 'Tzena, Tzena' which is very fast but we are all really enjoying it. What amazing singers we are in year 2!

This week our first achievement award goes to Junior for his fantastic effort when counting in tens and twos. Keep up the great work Junior.

The second award goes to Lukas for his wonderful writing this week based on the book in his phonics group, the hairy fairy. He used lovely language

Year 3 had their first trip to Waltham Abbey Gardens for a Stone Age discovery day. It was a day full of 'ooo', 'ahhh' and 'wow' moments. The children were able to look at a prehistoric timeline to understand prehistoric dates. Together, we looked at a range of different artefacts to understand what life was like in the Stone Age. In groups, we explored the park to find different plants and participated in some cave drawings. The highlight of the trip was everyone getting the chance to make a fire using iron steels and cotton wool. The children made Livingstone proud with their excellent behaviour and everyone seemed to have a lot of fun.

This week's awards go to Gino for his excellent attitude towards his learning and Charlotte for her great enthusiasm towards all of our subjects.

This week, we have been learning about addition and subtraction in Maths, including how to do the column method and bar models.

In English, the children are loving our new unit on Evol (an adventure about a legendary phoenix being hunted by a mysterious man - with a twist at the end) and have shown a good understanding of complex sentences and personification.

Our Science topic this term is on properties of materials. We have been classifying materials based on their properties and did an investigation to see which material was the most effective thermal insulator.

Parents, we have swimming starting on Monday. Please send your child in with their swimming costume, swimming hat, a towel and goggles (if you've given permission for your child to wear them).

Recommended CGP book pages: Maths pages 11-13 and English pages 14-15

This week's awards go to Alyssa for her excellent attitude to learning, and to Teddy for his effort in English - well done!

In Maths, this week, we have started our new topic, 'Addition and Subtraction'. We have been learning to count in different steps from 0 and used our classroom resources to help with finding number bonds to 10 and using multiples of 10,within 100.

The new topic for English is 'Instructional Writing' and the boys had fun creating and following instructions to decorate biscuits. Little Miss Bossy needed our help when using 'Imperative (Bossy) Verbs' and the children wrote some great 'bossy' sentences of their own! (They can be very bossy when they want to be!) They added time connectives too!!

This week's award goes to Zack, who has been a superstar both in Year 6 and KF2. Zack has created some really impressive work for RE, writing about rites of passage and produced some fabulous art work, experimenting with shading for effect - well done!