W/b 19/01/26
National Handwriting Day
It has been another very busy week in Southern Europe class this week! On Friday, it was National Handwriting Day. In our class we are always encouraged to use our best handwriting, but today we got a chance to focus and show what our best handwriting really looks like. First, we talked about how we do our best handwriting: sitting up straight, having a nice sharp pencil, keeping our paper flat on the table and applying the appropriate amount of pressure when we put pencil to paper. Then, we had a look at some finger exercises to warm up our hands, like you would warm up before a sport! Finally, we read a poem called ‘Others’. We chose a line from the poem and wrote it in our best handwriting, using all the things we had practiced before. Then, we had a go at writing the full poem, taking our time to make sure our presentation was as good as it can be. At the end, we were able to decorate the page as well.
Everyone tried their best to produce their best piece of work, well done Southern Europe!
W/b 12/01/26
PE – Gymnastics
This week has been another busy week in Southern Europe! This half term, on Thursday mornings, we are going to the dance studio to do some gymnastics. Last week, we learned the importance of stretching, as this will help us to avoid injury when doing gymnastics. After our stretches, we started to learn about point balances and patch balances. We learned that a point balance is a balance on a small body part, like a foot or a hand. There are lots of different versions of these, for example, three-point balances have three small parts of your body on the ground, like two feet and one hand. We had a practice at lots of different types of point balances, and some patch balances, which are on a big body part, such as your back. Finally, we made a sequence with two-point balances and two patch balances with our partner!
This week, we moved on to looking at jumps. We learned that when we jump, we should land with our hands in front of us, our heads pointing forwards and our knees bent, feeling the tension in our muscles. We practiced this technique before moving on to some different types of jumps. We had a go at a straight jump, a star jump and a tuck jump. When we watched our partner do these jumps, we would give them feedback on what they could do differently to improve their jump. We so much fun and everyone worked really well together!
W/b 05/01/2026
Maths – Angles
After a lovely Christmas break, we have come back this week with renewed energy and had a great week in Southern Europe! In maths this week, we have been learning about different types of angles. On Monday, we used two pieces of card and a split pin to make some ‘angle checkers’, which we used throughout this week in our lessons. We also learned about three different types of angles; right angles, acute angles (smaller than a right angle) and obtuse angles (bigger than a right angle). We used our angle checkers to show these angles.
On Tuesday, we learned about different types of shapes, triangles and quadrilaterals. We learned that a triangle is a shape with three sides and three angles, while a quadrilateral is a four-sided shape with three sides. We drew some of these in our books and used our angle checkers to see what kind of angles these shapes had. On Wednesday, we learned that a right angle is also a quarter turn. We used our angle checkers to find right angles in the classroom and to navigate a treasure map!
Finally, on Thursday and Friday, we learned some more about quadrilaterals. We learned that a rectangle is a quadrilateral with four right angles and two pairs of equal sides. We also learned that a square is a quadrilateral with four equal sides and four right angles.