Pre Prep: Autumn Term Highlights

We have had a fantastic start to the new academic year. It has been lovely to welcome our new starters into the Pre-Prep, and they have all settled in brilliantly. We have only been back for a month, but we have already managed to squeeze in so much!

We enjoyed a lovely coffee afternoon in the Walled Garden, giving parents the opportunity to meet, chat and get to know one another and members of staff. We have also held a new parents’ lunch, bringing together parents from across the school. There is lots to look forward to this term, with the Nativity, of course, being one of the highlights! In the second half of term, the children will also be learning some reels, which they will perform at our Christmas party.

A new approach to phonics teaching has started this term, which we are very excited about. The children are grouped for phonics and reading across the four classes so that we can teach them according to their current stage of learning. We are very fortunate to have six experienced members of staff delivering phonics at these times, allowing us to provide more targeted teaching and ensure that the children are working at an appropriate pace.

For children who have completed the phonics programme, our focus will move to developing reading comprehension skills, including retrieval, sequencing, inference, word meaning and prediction.

At Belhaven, we pride ourselves on the variety of sporting opportunities the children experience, and this term is no exception. Every Thursday, the children take part in a cross-country run, very originally named The Thursday Run! We have been so impressed by their effort and enthusiasm that we decided to celebrate their achievements by hosting our own cross-country event with local schools.

The event was a huge success, with nearly 150 children from Primary 1–4 taking part. The best part of the day was seeing every child smiling and enjoying themselves, with the highlight for many being receiving a medal as they crossed the finish line. It was a fantastic celebration of the children’s enthusiasm, determination and enjoyment of sport.

Music
Pre-Prep Choir is already sounding strong! We’ve started singing rounds earlier than usual, learning to hold our own part while others sing something different. A promising start to the year! Each session begins with movement, vocal warm-ups and exercises for clear diction, alongside relaxed posture to help us sing freely and beautifully. Just two more weeks of exploring repertoire before Nativity songs take over after half-term!

Form 6 have been tackling pitch reading: line and space notes, the musical alphabet, steps and skips, and by half term we should be able to name and understand the alternative names for treble, bass and alto clefs. Ask your child to give you a demonstration! These foundations help them read notes in any clef. After half-term, we’ll add rhythm-reading and consolidate their pitch-reading skills.

Form 7 are exploring orchestral instruments and their families, listening to classical music and identifying the instruments they hear. Try Radio 3 or Classic FM at home and see what your resident expert can tell you!

Form 8 are putting last year’s pulse and pitch skills to work on percussion instruments. Their understanding of solfa (do, re, mi…) is fantastic, and they’re going from strength to strength.

Our new Reception class are getting used to Music with Miss Lloyd! Through singing, moving, rolling balls, jumping into hoops and clapping, they’re absorbing the building blocks of music, often without realising how much they’re learning! They’ve also met Miss Lloyd’s Musical Teddies, including Steggy Staccato and Frank Forte. You’re never too young for musical terminology!

Reception
Literacy
Reception have been settling into the Read Write Inc. (RWI) phonics programme, developing their listening skills, phonological awareness and recognition of initial sounds. Alongside this, the children have been exploring our Foundations of Writing programme, developing the early skills and fine-motor control needed to become confident writers.
Numeracy
Reception have been developing their early mathematical understanding through practical and play-based experiences. They have been exploring matching, sorting and comparing, as well as investigating mass and volume through hands-on activities. The children have also been exploring patterns, noticing, copying and creating their own simple patterns.

Form 8
Literacy
Form 8 have been continuing to develop their phonics knowledge, consolidating their sounds and applying these when reading and writing. A particular focus has been on reading and writing sentences, with children developing their understanding of sentence structure, word choice and punctuation. The children's writing has been based around Ivy and the Lonely Raincloud, focussing on unpicking the story as a group and recording their predictions.
Numeracy
Form 8 have been developing their understanding of place value, exploring the value of digits within numbers and building confidence in representing, reading and working with numbers in different ways.

Across both year groups, the children have been given regular opportunities to learn through play, allowing them to apply and develop their literacy and numeracy skills in meaningful, engaging contexts. Through carefully planned play opportunities, the children have been encouraged to explore, problem-solve, communicate, collaborate and develop their independence, while following their own interests and extending their learning.

Form 7
Literacy
In Literacy this term, our core text is Toby and the Great Fire of London. This story immediately sparked the children's interests and introduced them nicely into this term's topic which will centre around disasters, namely the Great Fire of London. Most recently, the children have been learning to use adjectives to describe. As a class, we generated a word bank of impressive adjectives, which the children then used to write their own independent sentences. Impressively, some of the children are really getting to grips with expanded noun phrases which means they are beginning to use commas in their work, for example, "The dirty, young boy...".

This week, the children used their five senses to imagine what Toby might have seen, heard, smelt, tasted and touched as he made his way through the burning streets of London. It was amazing to see their passion and excitement as they put themselves into Toby's shoes!

Maths
In Maths this term, we have been consolidating our number knowledge through our Place Value topic. The children have been using numbers up to 100 and have enjoyed using a range of concrete materials such as Numicon, counters, counting bears, cubes and poppets (the fidget toy kind) to represent tens and ones.

We have been using a range of pictorial representations in our work too, including part-whole models, tens frames and number lines. At this stage, confidence and fluency are of the utmost importance so we are enjoying playing lots of number games to secure basic number facts.

In Science, the children have been learning about materials, with a particular focus on the suitability of a material for its use. This is linking nicely with our topic, as the children have been discussing one of the reasons why the Great Fire of London spread so quickly – the flammable wooden houses!

Form 6
Literacy
In Literacy this term, we are reading and working from Escape from Pompeii, which links brilliantly with our topic on volcanoes and, in particular, our focus on Pompeii. So far, we have been thinking carefully about the language we use and how choosing the right words can contribute to the meaning and impact of a text. We have used the book to identify nouns and adjectives and have been learning how to ‘uplevel’ our sentences by including expanded noun phrases.

This week, we have been learning all about adverbials and how to spot them in a text. We have then been using these to create sentences with fronted adverbials. This has certainly been a challenge, but the results have been fantastic! I have even challenged the children to go home and ask their parents if they know what a fronted adverbial is, so be prepared to be questioned!

In Spelling Shed, we have been finishing off the Year 2 programme and will be moving on to the Year 3 content next week.

Maths
In Maths, we have been working on our first topic of the year: Place Value. This focuses on understanding numbers and the value of each digit, as well as developing a deeper understanding of number patterns, with numbers up to 1,000. A few children are working on the same concepts but extending their learning to numbers up to 10,000.

Partitioning is an important skill to develop. For example, 345 can be partitioned into 300 + 40 + 5. However, flexible partitioning is the real challenge, where a number can be split in different ways, such as 345 = 200 + 130 + 15. As we move into hundreds, the children are also beginning to understand the important role of zero as a placeholder. For example, if there are no tens in a number, the number does not simply become a two-digit number!

We have also started looking at time, beginning with Roman numerals. Although the main aim is for the children to recognise numbers up to 12, as these are used on a clock face, they have been challenging themselves to make numbers up to 40. We have also started to practise telling the time to the nearest five minutes. This is an area where we are a little rusty, but plenty of repetition and practice will soon help to build confidence.

Topic – Volcanoes
Our topic this term is Volcanoes, and so far we have learned about the layers of the Earth, plate tectonics and how volcanoes erupt. Next, we will be using atlases to locate some of the world’s key volcanoes and learning about the Pacific Ring of Fire.

It has been particularly beneficial to study this topic alongside Escape from Pompeii, as the children are able to draw on their growing knowledge of volcanoes when exploring the events in the story. Later in the term, we will be writing an eyewitness account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. All of the background knowledge we are building now will help the children to bring greater detail and accuracy to their writing.