Attention and Communication

Happy New Year.
We hope you had a lovely Christmas and New year. It is great to be back and continue our focus on language and Communication. By focusing on engaging the children in our group sessions, their  attention to the activities can then extend to other activities. In the pictures you will see two activities 'Fun with Food' and 'Attention Autism'.

Fun with Food is an actiivty to help focus the children using their senses. The activity starts with a transition song:

Its time for fun with food
Its time for fun with food 
Look, smell, touch and taste 
its time for fun with food

The song helps transition the children into the activity in a fun way. Once seated the children are able to see the food presented and can choose to smell, touch and play. There is no emphasis on tasting the food, althought they are welcome to try some, as the focus is to increase their attention span. For children that struggle with different foods, this can also be a fun way to experience different food without the pressure to taste any of it. A word mat is also produced with symbols and pictures, here words can be introduced to describe the food. 

Attention Autism is also an activity that focuses on maintaining the childrens attention. It is set up in 4 different stages:

Stage 1 - to help focus their attention on adult led, fun objects that often spin, wind or make a noise.
Stage 2 - to help sustain their attention also on an adult - led activity.
Stage 3 - where the children learn to shift their attention within a small group as they take turns in a game.
Stage 4 - children are given individual tasks  to complete after a group demonstration, encouraging independence and the ability to transition between activities while maintaining engagement. 

Currently we are up to Stage 3 and will soon be introducing Stage 4.

It has been a busy week at Brunel full of learning opportunities for our children. Please enjoy browsing through this week's edition of The Brunel Bulletin.

Our class has had a wonderfully busy week, exploring a mix of creative writing, maths mastery, and scientific discovery! In English, pupils have been using a range of sentence types to describe the world of Pandora, adding detail, mood, and excitement to their writing. Year 5 have been working hard on subtracting fractions, while Year 6 have taken on the challenge of dividing fractions-both groups showing great perseverance and progress. In Science, we've been investigating how the Earth's movement creates night and day, sparking lots of curious questions and thoughtful discussion. A quick reminder: we'll be planting at Cotehele on Monday 2nd February, and with showery weather forecast, pupils will need waterproofs and wellies.

Exciting ice sculptures!

What a brilliant week it has been in Tregantle Class!

We thoroughly enjoyed a special session with our KS2 Reading Pioneers. The children were completely immersed in the stories and listened with such focus and excitement. The older children did a fantastic job with their storytelling - they were wonderful role models and made the experience really memorable for our EYFS learners.

This week also brought some very exciting science learning as we unveiled our ice sculptures from the freezer. The children were absolutely delighted with the results and fascinated as they watched the ice melt. They carefully observed how the sculptures changed in shape and consistency, sharing their ideas and predictions as the ice transformed.

We have also seen some amazing writing this week. Many children have become true authors, using their growing phonics skills to write books of their very own. We are so impressed with their enthusiasm, creativity, and confidence - very impressive work indeed!

In maths, we have had some marvellous mathematicians exploring numbers to 8. The children worked hard to find more and less, showing great understanding through practical activities and discussions.

What a wonderful week of learning, curiosity, and achievement. We are so proud of everything the children have accomplished - well done, Tregantle Class!

An Exciting Half-Term of Learning

This half term has been an incredibly busy and exciting one across Nessa and Kensa class, with both groups diving deep into fascinating topics and producing some truly impressive learning.

In Nessa Class, our theme has been Ancient Egypt, and the children have been fully immersed in discovering what life was like thousands of years ago along the River Nile. One of the highlights has certainly been our hands-on projects. The class worked brilliantly together to design and build their very own pyramids, exploring how these iconic structures were engineered and why they were so important in Egyptian culture. Even more impressively, the children created a large cardboard sarcophagus, complete with intricate designs and symbols inspired by the artefacts found inside real ancient tombs.

To bring history to life through creativity, the children also produced their own Egyptian-inspired artwork based on the vibrant and expressive style of contemporary Egyptian artist Hossam Dirar. Their pieces are full of colour, pattern, and personality, and we are incredibly proud of the artistic confidence they have shown.

Of course, no study of Ancient Egypt would be complete without a closer look at the hieroglyphic writing system, ancient burial traditions, and the vital role of the River Nile. The pupils have been intrigued by how people lived, farmed, travelled, and honoured their pharaohs. To add a delicious twist, we even spent time in the kitchen baking and constructing gingerbread pyramids, which brought plenty of excitement-and lovely smells-to the classroom.

Meanwhile, in Kensa Class, the focus has been on the Arctic, with the children exploring one of the most unique and extreme habitats on Earth. They have been researching Arctic animals and using what they have learned to create their own imaginative Arctic creatures. Their creative writing has been particularly impressive this term, with rich descriptions, adventurous plots and beautifully crafted ideas inspired by icy landscapes and wildlife.

Across the school, we have also continued running our popular Nintendo Switch Club, which has once again been a huge hit with pupils. The club offers a fun, social way to build teamwork, problem-solving and communication skills, and it has been wonderful to see so many children enjoying it each week. It has been a fantastic half term full of creativity, curiosity and enthusiasm-well done to everyone involved!

This week in pre-school the children have completed some lovely activities in relation to showing 'Kindness'.  We made our own kindness trees where we gave affirmations of kindness and powerful statements about each other to show how that person made a positive impact on their friendships.  We also wrote for the children their own ideas of how they are kind. We decorated the trees in lots of colourful hearts, and they made such a beautiful display above our big class kindness tree.

In our creative area the water colour paints have been popular to make special cards, and also to paint some pictures of people who can help us. 

This week in our phonics, the focus of our activities was on The Police, we enjoyed sound bingo, sound stories and other phonics games.

The children have really been enthusiastic about using their name mats in the morning to practice their names, and even some of our younger children have shown the beginnings of mark making.  This is a great start in their fine motor development.

Mrs. Butlins' music lesson was enjoyed with reception class; this week we did group songs and nursery rhymes using lots of actions.

Lastly, with an increase in a sickness bug going around the pre-school and school, can I send a polite reminder that it is our policy that it must be 48hours from the last episode of sickness and/or diarrhea before a child returns to pre-school.

This is to eliminate the spread of the bug as soon as possible.

Thank you for your understanding.

The Pre-School Team.

The weather has given us a bit of an unsettled start to the term. We've gone from snow with later starts to the day and storms forcing us to close early. However in between we've managed to fit in lots of learning. Reception have been trying hard to improve their pencil control through drawing club and have created some lovely pictures linked to our class story 'The storm whale'. Our theme this half term is fairytales so we've started with 'Goldilocks and the three bears'. We've made collage bears and retold the story using props. Year 1 having been looking at different houses in DT and have designed and made a house for either a doll or an animal. 

The children all did an amazing job in the nativity. Here are some photos of them looking fantastic in their costumes. They all remembered their lines and said them so loudly and clearly. 

We all had a lovely day at the Eden project. We went straight down to the skating rink and had a play on the ice. We played on the sledges, cars, bikes and in the house and with the diggers. After we had some lunch whilst we watched Jays ice skating. We finished off the day by warming up by walking around the biomes. Whilst in the biomes we hunted for different colours and we managed to find every colour of the rainbow. We also got to see some geckos. The highlight of our day was climbing all the steps up to the viewing platform in the biome. It was so high and all the people below looked really small. 

We've enjoyed a variety of festive activities over the last couple of months. We've made a variety of crafts such as; robins using recycled baubles, hand print Christmas trees with the help of our families, paper chains, bead baubles for the outdoor Christmas tree and Christmas cards for our families. We enjoyed Christmas dinner with the whole school and had a party in our class. We also all had a turn at delivering the Christmas cards around the school.