Junior Department Notices and Reminders

Parents’ Evenings

As you know, Junior Department parents’ evenings are next week at the below times:

• Tuesday 28 February 1600-1800
• Thursday 1 March 1700-1900

Please arrive 10 minutes before your appointment so that you have time to look at your child’s books and see their work.  Thank you, we look forward to seeing you then!

Open Classrooms – Thursday 16 March

Following the success of a similar event in the Middle Department, we will be holding an Open Classroom Session on Thursday 16 March from 0815 – 0915 – do come along and have a look around out classrooms!

World Book Day – Thursday 2 March

Thursday 2 March is World Book Day! We are celebrating this national event by transforming the Drawing Room and the Junior Hall into two huge bookshops provided by the Travelling Book Company. Pupils will have the chance to browse the books and make purchases.

As part of this national celebration of reading, each pupil will receive a £1 book token, redeemable against any book purchased on 2 March.

As in previous years, we invite all pupils and staff to dress up as their favourite character from a book, and we ask that £1 is donated to the World Book Day charity via this link   Thank you to everyone who has already donated to this wonderful cause.

Message from Mrs McIntosh

Welcome back to the second half of the Lent Term;  I trust that you and the children all enjoyed your half term break. Junior Department pupils have returned to School full of the joys of spring and ready to learn.

We have hit the ground running as usual and Year 1 have already enjoyed an amazing African drumming workshop – what a truly wonderful experience for them all. The photos and videos on our various social media channels show how engaged and focused the children were. Indeed, the leaders of the workshop commented that they had never had such beautifully behaved children, who followed instructions so carefully, even stopping as soon as they were asked. The Year 1 team and I were exceptionally proud of them. Thank you to Mrs. Johnston for organising it all.  

As a Junior Department staff team, we have decided to slightly alter the way that we share our news with you in the newsletter. Each week the Junior Department Notices will appear first so that you know what to expect in the weeks to come and can find this information more easily.

The next section will focus on a different area of the curriculum from now until the end of the year, so that you get a real picture of the breadth of what the children experience each week here at Beechwood, as well as being able to see how to children progress and develop from Reception to Year 2.

We also hope to include lots more photos as we know you enjoy these the most! 

To kick us off we are starting with phonics as we have all been reinvigorated by some staff training at the start of this term.

Natalie from Woodlands gave an amazing talk to parents yesterday about all that comes before children actually learn their letter sounds. These early skills are the key to what comes next.

Once the children are ready we begin to teach them the initial sounds c, i, h, m, s, a, p, x etc. In our phonics scheme, Monster Phonics, these are called “black cat letters”. After they have learnt the first six to eight sounds, they can begin to blend these sounds together to make simple words e.g. ham, sip, let. In the early days, they may not be able to hear the word that they are sounding out so might say h-a-m – map! For the majority though they quickly begin to say the sounds more quickly and can then say the word correctly. Once they have mastered the initial “black cat” sounds they move onto digraphs (two letters making one sound) and trigraphs (three letters making one sound). In Monster Phonics these are grouped into families, each with a different monster: 

Angry red ‘a’ 

Green froggy 

    Yellow I 

  Miss oh no 

     Cool blue 

U hoo! 

Brown owl  

Silent Ghosts 

Tricky witch 

For each of these monsters there are multiple graphemes (the written representation of the sound). The children are introduced to these in order of the frequency with which they appear in the English language. They learn them either individually or alongside some of the other graphemes. Phonics lessons in Year 1 and throughout most of Year 2 are spent learning the different ways they these can be spelt as it is complicated, as you can see from the chart below! 

There are some patterns and some generalisations we can make to help the children know which one might be correct but English is a language full of inconsistencies and exceptions as the following poem demonstrates.  

I could talk about phonics for a long time, I love teaching it to children and about it to parents but, I shall leave it there for now.

We hope to provide our own parent engagement and education talks on this and other topics in the near future so look out for those. 

We look forward to seeing you at Parent Consultations next week. 

Mrs McIntosh
Head of Junior Department

This Week in the Junior Department – Phonics Focus

Every day children in the Junior Department receive focused phonics teaching to practise the important skills they need to be successful readers and writers. All year groups use Monster Phonics to teach phonics which creates familiarity, ensures consistency and enables good coverage and progression.  

This week Reception are using the story Red Riding Hood to explore the digraph ‘ow’ (Brown Owl); identifying words containing ‘ow’ and spelling ‘ow’ words correctly with the help of phoneme frames.  

Year One have been learning how the grapheme ‘ue’ can make a “Cool Blue” sound ue (oo) or a Yoo-Hoo sound ue (you). The children have read and written examples of both in words and sentences and have also began to sort words into groups by the sounds the grapheme makes in a given word.   

This term Year Two have continued investigating alternative graphemes. In the photos you can see how the children created words for a display representing each grapheme with a different colour to aid memory.   Also included in our gallery below are photos of Year Two pupils teaching Year Ones about passing and catching – Junior Department collaboration at its best!

Year 1 African Drumming Workshop

This tailored workshop was a perfect start to a Wednesday morning for our Year 1 pupils. Children learnt the percussion techniques, songs and African rhythms, during their session they all gradually built up their knowledge and were able to put it all together into a structured piece of music. You could see they were engaged and they all thoroughly enjoyed this immersive experience led by HartBeat, an external professional African Drumming company.

Interviewing Mr Outson

From the Junior Library

A Day in the Life of an Astronaut, Mars and the Distant Stars by Mike Barfield & Jess Bradley

Following on from Blue Peter winner ‘A Day in the Life of a Poo, a Gnu and You’, Barfield and Bradley’s new Space book is a fantastically engaging non-fiction book.

Brightly illustrated, the pages are packed with information – perfect for a quick ‘dip-in’ or alternatively a lengthy ‘delve’.

Importantly, the book has lots of levels of detail meaning it will last as children grow.

The Library Team

Head’s Commendations

Congratulations to this week’s recipients of Mrs Cussans’ Commendations: