Clubs

The summer term is always a busy time for the Infant Gardening Club. We have been planting out lots of summer flowers, tended to the watering and weeding on a regular basis, and have enjoyed watching our potatoes, pumpkins, tomatoes and garlic grow!

The weather really has made our job a little tricky over the last two months. The rain has made the weeds quite a problem in our vegetable patch but we have worked hard each session to keep them at bay.

As we were coming to the end of the school year once again, a big thank you goes out to all the children who have worked so hard to tend to the Infant School garden. We have had lots of lovely comments about how wonderful the flowers have looked and the minibeasts have certainly enjoyed visiting the wild flower bed. Well done gardeners!

Our debate this half term was inspired by the Euros.

‘Do professional footballers get paid too much?’

The session began as always with a discussion about what a debate is and what rules we might need in place to ensure that our debate runs smoothly. We looked at our British Values poster and discussed ‘Respect and Tolerance’. During our debate we agreed that everyone’s opinions would be listened to (whether we agree with them or not), and as a group we would respect each other. Our debate question had no wrong or right answer.

The children got into two groups (for and against), discussed their ideas, and decided which ones they should use to get their views across. Once we started our debate the children took turns to speak and respond creating some interesting discussions, with some children confidently challenging their peers and swaying their opinion. The debate was really interesting with lots of good points made, comparing job responsibility with the wages received. The children approached this topic in such a mature manner.

Those children that could not attend the club left their vote at the two voting stations in the KS1 corridor.

Here are some of the comments made during the debate. What do you think?

“It is not fair if other people don’t get this money but work just as hard.”

“If you are a professional footballer you must be really good and you deserve that money.”

“Football is fun and they are getting paid for having fun. It’s not fair on other people who are doing jobs that they don’t enjoy.”

“It’s just a job like any other job.”

“I think careers should get more money than footballers because they look after people.”

“Yes because they have to save their money for when they don’t play anymore.”

“If they train for a long time they deserve that money.”

Children from Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 have participated in a maths club this half term. Each week the children had different activities and resources to help them build on their maths skills. Some examples of the resources we explored are; counting objects, money, clocks, peg boards (to create patterns, board games and elastic band boards to create shapes and patterns. They really enjoyed having the opportunity to use a variety of resources and made requests of different things they would like to try in the following weeks.

At the end of each session we finished with a fun BBC Supermovers song. This helped them to think about different maths concepts while singing and dancing! These would be fun to complete at home too, they can be found at the following link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/supermovers

By having a variety of resources and tasks available the children could choose to practise the skills they wanted to build on. Some of the reception children liked subitising with objects and recording the number as a numeral on the whiteboards. The year 2 children asked for a calculation challenge station. The year 1 and 2 children enjoyed role playing shops with the different coins and items for sale.

Some children from Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 have participated in a fine motor club this half term. Each week the children had different activities that would help get their fingers moving! We used peg boards, counters, pens, lego and follow the line colouring. They really enjoyed these selected games and activities and some even said that they had practised at home too!

At the end of each session we finished with a finger gym video to follow. It was great to see all of the children concentrating and working hard on their fine motor skills and handwriting.

For our final week we did our own dough disco and created our own objects from the playdough – we had everything from cars to apples, monkeys to towers!

The Infant school gardeners were very excited to get started again this term and despite the cold, wet weather got to work straight away. The children got stuck into weeding our raised beds and preparing them for the summer term.  Our garlic that was planted in the autumn is coming along nicely and we all enjoyed admiring the lovely daffodils that have popped up in our spring flower bed.

The children this year have asked to grow potatoes, carrots, beans and pumpkins. We have starting to see blossom on our apple trees and on the Jubilee tree which is fantastic. We can’t wait to get back outside in the summer term to plant up our wild flower bed and get our vegetables underway.

Some children from Year 1 and 2 have participated in a Computing club this half term. The children have explored lots of digital technologies and have used them to do different things. They have programmed beebots and carbots, used tablets to play on TTR, Phonics Play and Purple Mash and draw pictures, have been on desktop computer and laptops on Dojo Islands.

The children really enjoyed this club, Jasper from Year 1 said “this is so fun” when playing on Dojo Islands. Stephen from Year 1 liked making the carbot do donuts around obstacles and Lewis from Year 2 enjoyed playing on TTR.

A group of children from Reception to Year 2 have enjoyed attending a film club this half term. The children have been able to watch the film Dog Gone Trouble, and have enjoyed discussing the film as well as predicting what will come next at the end of each session. Some children even enjoyed role-playing some of the scenes from the film in their lunch time and break time play with other children from their year group.

The children at the end of the club completed a film review, talking about their favourite character, as well as their favourite scene.

The infant school debate club met this month for another interesting debate – ‘Should everyone be treated the same’.

The session began with a discussion about what a debate is and what rules we might need in place to ensure that our debate runs smoothly. We looked at our British Values poster and discussed ‘Respect and Tolerance’. During our debate we agreed that everyone’s opinions would be listened to and whether we agree with them or not, as a group we would respect each other. Our debate question had no wrong or right answer.

The children got into two groups (for and against), discussed their ideas, and decided which ones they should use to get their views across. Once we started our debate the children took turns to speak and respond creating some interesting discussions, with some children confidently challenging their peers and swaying their opinion. The debate was really interesting with lots of good points made and references to some of the recent things we have been learning in class about Black History Month.

For those children that could not attend the club they left their vote at the two voting stations in the KS1 corridor.

Here are some of the comments made during the debate. What do you think?

“We should treat others the way we want to be treated.” Yr2

“We are all different and that is fine, it doesn’t affect me what matters is being nice and not hurting others.” Yr2

“If people treat everyone the same then everyone will feel happy and play together and be friends.” Yr1

“Treating everyone the same makes it fair.” Yr2