Welcome to Badger Class!

We are very excited to welcome our new Reception class to St Nicholas School!

Badger Class is our Reception class, where Miss Pistell and Mrs Hedges are the class teachers and Mrs Dyer is our teaching assistant.

We will regularly update this page with news and photos of the exciting learning we have been doing at school.  Also, please check your child's book bag on a daily basis.

Our PE days are Tuesday and Thursday.  Please come to school in your PE kit on Tuesday for outdoor PE.  On Thursday we will doing indoor PE and will change at school.

Please follow the link below to access our Topic Web, Maths Medium Term Plan and Yearly Topic Planning.  You will also find spelling and reading lists for Reception alongside other material for you to assist your child in their learning.

Term 1

For Term 1 our topic is 'All About Me'.  During this term, we will be learning all about ourselves, getting to know each other and learning the school rules and routines.  In phonics, we will begin with listening games before introducing some letter sounds.  We will keep you updated of which sounds have been taught each week, to enable you support your child at home.  Once the children have settled at school, we will be sending home reading books, initially books without words, followed by books and reading material which matches the sounds the children have learned.   In maths, we will be concentrating on counting with one to one correspondence before beginning number of the week activities towards the end of the term.  We will be talking about ourselves and families and the things that make us all special.  We will also be thinking about the seasons and walking around our lovely school grounds, recognising the last signs of summer before our season changes.

Badger Buddies

We are thrilled to be able to have Badger Buddies again this year.  Each child in Badger class has been paired with a Year 6 child from Owl class to be their Badger Buddy.  We will often link up and the Owl children will help the Badger children to feel settled, safe and secure at school.  They will also listen to them read and help with other activities where many hands help.  We have had a couple of lovely sessions with our Badger Buddies, playing with them and getting to know each other and the Owls have enjoyed listening to the Badgers telling their stories from their reading books and showing us their classroom.

Week 8

What a busy last two days of term! On Monday we had our Resourcefulness Day and we did lots of fun activities to show teamwork, independence, kindness and perseverance. We passed around a hula hoop without breaking the chain and worked together to keep a balloon off the ground. We also created a beautiful rainbow - we made a couple of pieces each and then put them altogether.

Then on Tuesday as part of our class treat for filling the marble jar we had a Gingerbread Man Day! We made our own gingerbread and had lots of fun making gingerbread men playdoh and designing our own bridges for the gingerbread man to cross over safely. Have a lovely half term! 

Week 7

We've had another busy week as we've reached the final full week of our first term at school.  This week, we have been learning the rules of counting:

1. Count everything once

2. Say the numbers in the correct order

3.  The last number is how many you have

We've also had fun playing schools, mark making in glitter and enjoying our new giant numicon.  We also had a visit from The Bridge Project, who regularly visit our school for Christian workshops.  This week we continued our learning about creation.  We also got to use our bikes for the first time on the playground.  Thank you to all the parents who came to look around our classroom and joined our phonics session.

Week 6

This week we have been reading the book 'Whoever You Are' and talking about things that are the same as others and things that are different.  We then chose our favourite colour to create a handprint and created a display for the book.  We have also enjoyed examining the sunflower seeds and playing on the play trail.

Week 5

This week we have been creating our own self portraits, planting daffodils with the rest of the school, learning the sounds some letters make, finding matching pairs and ordering objects by size.  We've also been for a walk around the school grounds looking for the last signs of summer and enjoying observing the insects we found - we also used these for counting groups and finding the total of 2 groups.

Week 4

We've had another busy week with yet more new experiences.  This week we've been sorting items in different ways in maths and enjoying the books 'The Tiger Who Came to Tea' and 'You Choose' in English.  We've also experienced our first fire drill, our first full worship, school photos and show and tell - we earned lots of marbles for our jar for how well we have managed these new activities and earned a reward of an extra play on the playtrail. We have also been examining sunflowers and enjoyed reading to our Badger buddies again.

Week 3

We've had a fantastic week with the children managing so well in their first week of full days.  We had lots of new experiences, such as PE, Badger Buddies and our first worship.  We've even enjoyed the cows visiting us in the field next door.

Week 2

We've had lots of fun during our first full week of school, and I'm sure the children are feeling tired.  We've celebrated another birthday in our class this week!  On Thursday we wore our class waterproof jackets to play in the rain.  All children have now been given a reading book, please share this book with your child. Next Monday the children will meet on the playground in the morning and line up with the rest of the school.  

Week 1

We have had a wonderful beginning to our school year, with the children making lots of new friends and enjoying exploring our school environment.  We've even celebrated a birthday this week.

Sports Day

Please use our link to the gallery to see lots of photos from our EYFS and KS1 sports day.  We had a wonderful morning, with the children making up for the lack of spectators with lots of cheering for their friends.  

Bump Up Day

We had a lovely afternoon visiting Squirrel class.  We made our own rockets and decorated them, then fired them into the air and measured how far they went.

Football

We all have our fingers crossed that England will win the Euro 2020 this evening, or at least do their best, just like Badgers did when we were playing football last week. 

Creative Day

Today we held the first of our Curriculum days to launch our Global Explorer Curriculum. We kept asking the question 'What ideas have you shared today?' and we found that we had lots of ideas that we can share with each other to work together.

We began the day by making Leaf Mandalas.  We collected leaves, stones, bark, chippings, sticks, daisies and other natural materials we found.  We then worked in groups of 2 or 3 to create our own mandalas on large pieces of paper.  Our creations were wonderful and we enjoyed learning about each others mandalas. 

After that we enjoyed listening to some Folk Music by Dovetail Trio, where we learned about different instruments, learned some new songs and even enjoyed a bit of country dancing.

After break we made some paper lanterns, spending lots of time on colouring our lanterns and carefully cutting them. 

During the afternoon, we made wands, by cutting out shapes for the top and gluing them around a willow stick, before decorating the wands. 

Finally we made crowns, cutting the shapes at the top and decorating them. 

RE Day

Today we spent the day concentrating on RE.  We talked about the schools Christian Values, concentrating on the value 'Thankfulness'.  We talked about what we are thankful for - parents you will be pleased to know that lots of children mentioned that they were thankful for their 'Mums and Dads' and 'family'.  'School', 'teachers' and 'food' were also mentioned.

We spent some time learning the story of The Ten Lepers from the bible, which demonstrates 'Thankfulness'.  We all contributed to a collage of the story, which will be put up in the hall, as well as doing our own images and acting out the story.  We then performed our story to Mrs Smith and Squirrel and Hedgehog Classes during worship at the end of the day.

Bug Ball

During our topic on Eric Carle, we read lots of stories involving insects that he had written, including The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Very Busy Spider and the The Bad Tempered Ladybird.  To celebrate the end of the topic we held a Bug Ball, where we made masks to wear before enjoying some party games, such as Bug, Bug, Beetle (Duck, Duck, Goose), musical statues and balloon games and enjoying some bug inspired snacks - some vegetables that insects like to eat like cucumber and carrots and some food that looked like insects like our grape beetles and raisin flies.  

Fire Safety Session

On Thursday, we had a zoom visit from Wiltshire Fire Service, where we learned about what a firefighter does and things that are safe for us to play with and things that are not safe.  We had some fun joining a firefighter for some Wake and Shake activities.

World Book Day

We had lots of fun dressing up as book characters and learning about the characters from James and the Giant Peach.  We watched videos of real bugs, then made ladybirds using paper plates, spiders by printing using tubes and drawing grasshoppers using step by step instructions.  We caught bugs from our own magic similar to the magic left by the Old Man in the story James and the Giant Peach.  We also had the opportunity to look at books!

Christmas

We have had a lovely couple of weeks in Badger Class getting ready to celebrate Christmas, with our nativity, Christmas lunch wearing our festive jumpers, a visit from Father Christmas and then enjoying the wonderful playground gifts he bought.

Term 2 

This term, we have enjoyed lots of firework activities on Thursday 5th November, celebrated Remembrance Day and have had fun playing estate agents linked to our topic on Homes.  We have also made houses using shapes and wooden bricks.  We have been learning about different materials through the story of The Three Little Pigs.  We have attempted to make houses using straws, sticks and bricks, with differing levels of success.  We have also enjoyed painting fingerprint leaves on our tree.  We have enjoyed lots of Christmas activities, sorting wrapped numicon pieces to unwrapped pieces, creating Christmas trees using numicon pieces and creating baubles on a Christmas tree by dropping coloured vinegar onto Christmas trees created from bicarbonate of soda. 

Phonics Training

Thank you to those parents that were able to join us for our phonics training.  Please find a PDF of the powerpoint used in the training - if you have any questions, please ask.

Badger Class Learning

Have a look at the learning we will be doing this year by following the link below.

Reading

The children in Badger Class will now be bringing reading books home.  To begin with books have no words and are used to encourage children to talk about what is happening in the pictures.  We will listen to your child read at least once a week, but in order for your child to make progress in their reading, we need you to support them and listen to them read at least 5 times a week.

Making Friends

The children have settled really well at school and have enjoyed exploring all the different areas of the classroom, both indoors and outdoors.  They have all been learning to make friends and cooperate with each other, taking turns and sharing.  We are very proud of the way they have adapted to school life at St Nicholas CE (VA) Primary School. 

Help

As our topic is All About Me, we would really like to give the children the opportunity to share something they enjoy doing with the class.  If you have one or two photos of your child taking part in a hobby or something that they would like to share with their friends, please email office@stnicholas.wilts.sch.uk and head it Badger Photo. You may like to add a little information to enable us to help your child share their photo with their class.

Thank you.

Class Reward

We have already earned our first class reward and went for a walk in our school woods.