Miss Staines - 2025/26

Happy Holiday!

What a great first half term it has been! It has been so lovely to get to know the students and they have done some amazing work so far. Let’s look at what we have done this week.

In Literacy, we have been continuing to describe magical settings. They have worked incredibly hard and made some amazing magical places! I was so impressed with their writing. We also finally started to read our new book- ‘Leon and the Place Between’.

In Maths, Y3 have been doing some excellent work with their addition and subtraction work. They have been so confident, even helping others and working together. Maybe they are even better teachers than me! In Y4, we started multiplication and division, after they all scored full marks on their area test! It seems like our times tables maybe a challenge, but I hope we can use our growth mindsets to learn them well.

In IPC, we did some online safety work (making digital footprints and learning about cookies and safe passwords) and finally finished our ‘What Are Friends For?’ topic, completing a booklet for any new people joining our class. We want them to feel super welcome and happy, so we made sure to write lots of lovely things and draw great pictures!

We will finish with our Halloween Party today! The students are so excited and it must have taken so long to plan. I know many of you helped out, so thank you so much for working so hard on it! It will be a perfect finish to the week and to start the holiday. Thank you again!!

Have a great few weeks and see you on Monday 1st November!

(There will be no homework this week- I will give homework again on Friday 7th November)

Happy Friday!

It has been a super exciting week in our class!

We started our Monday with a circus! In Literacy, our new book setting is a circus, so we watched some circus performances whilst eating popcorn and even trying out the circus acts ourselves. The smell of the popcorn, the music and the darkened room made it feel kind of like a real life circus! This will help us write our own descriptions so much better.

In Maths, Y3s have continued with their addition and subtraction topic, learning how to use more formal methods to calculate their answers. Y4s started their new topic of area and flew through the booklet! I’m so impressed with their learning and hard work this week. After the test on Monday, we will start multiplication and division.

In IPC, we are finishing our topic of ‘What Are Friends For?’. We looked at alternative ways of apologising and next week we will focus on online safety and our Exit Point! We also searched the school in our computing lessons, looking for how our school network is connected.

Lastly, we went on our school trip to Yangdong Village! It was so fun hammering the deok and stretching the yeot… but I think my favourite part was eating it after! I hope you all enjoyed the delicious snacks they brought home. They did so well listening to instructions and working in teams to make the food- I was very impressed. I will attach some photos here, but if you would like to look through alllllll the photos (there are many…), please click here.

I hope you have a great weekend!

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a lovely Chuseok holiday.

It’s been a fun Friday here, but it feels strange that it’s a weekend again! They finished their fact files, read some books and had a fun PSHE and PE time!

Just a reminder about the trip next Thursday (16th). Thank you to everyone who has paid so far! Change was sent home today with the students.

Have a lovely weekend!

Happy Friday everyone!

The week has flown by with so many fun lessons and activities! Let’s see what we have been up to in class this week!

In Literacy, we were writing our final fact files all about Katherine Johnson and her work at NASA. They wrote so much independently and I am very proud of their hard work. Next Friday, we will check them and then we can start our new literacy topic!

In Maths, we have been doing a lot of addition and subtraction. It definitely tested our maths knowledge and our counting skills! We found it a little bit difficult, but we tried our best! If you’d like to practise more maths at home, definitely counting up in 10s would be useful for Year 3s! (e.g. 186, 196, 206, 216 etc.)

In IPC, we are continuing with our friendship topic. We discussed lots about why friendships are important, how to make new friends and how to solve conflicts in friendships. We even made a recipe for friendship!

Today, the class decided they wanted to teach PE to the Y1s and Y2s! We had lots of fun playing different games with the younger students and they had so much energy! However, I think some of our class have realised that maybe Y1/2 class teacher is not a job they would like in the future….

Homework was sent out today, however because of the Chuseok holidays, it can last for 2 weeks. So no rush to do it over the holiday! Also, an email was sent out about the trip, so please respond to the link whenever possible.

I hope you all have a lovely Chuseok!

Hello everyone!

This week was full of excitement with our Chuseok celebration and other class activities. They have also worked super hard this week, doing lots of great writing and maths!

In Maths, we started our new topic of addition and subtraction. Whilst Y3 have been looking at adding and subtracting 1, 10 and 100, Y4 have been looking at a formal method of addition and subtraction, including exchanging! The students have been flying through their workbooks which was so impressive! I hope when it gets a little more difficult they can be resilient and keep trying their best.

In Literacy, we are getting close to the final stage of our Counting on Katherine topic! We have written a motivational letter and started preparing for our final writing- a fact file all about Katherine Johnson! We have learnt so much about Katherine in the past month, so I think we will have a lot to write about.

In IPC, we started our new topic all about friends! After finishing our last topic’s posters, we began looking at what makes a good friend and how we can make new friends! Yesterday, we enjoyed creating our own comic strips showing ways to become friends with someone.

We also had an amazing time at the Chuseok celebration event! It was so fun to try the traditional games and listen to the performances. I was so proud of the students performing their drumming song and dance.

Have a great weekend!

Week 4 is finished! I can’t believe it has been over a month of school already. Let’s share our learning for this week!

In Maths, we have finished our place value topic and will start addition and subtraction next week, after our test on Monday. The children have worked so hard on their maths this month, so I hope they can show their amazing work in the test! Year 4 have been working hard on their roman numerals and rounding to the nearest 10, 100 and 1000, whereas Year 3 have been reviewing number lines to 1000.

In Literacy, we discovered more about the Apollo 11 mission to the moon! We read a newspaper article all about how Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins travelled through space and bravely landed on the moon. But, it couldn’t have been without the amazing mathematicians like Katherine Johnson. We also pretended to be workers in NASA, understanding how Katherine would feel for the first time, walking into the office. We had lots of fun! We have finished the week off with making fact files all about the first man on the moon.

We have finally finished our IPC topic of brain metacognition! This week we looked out how students all around the world learn and compared them to our own classrooms and experiences. We also loved looking at photos of some parents in their school days! I hope they ask you the homework questions all about your life in school. We have finished the week creating posters to summarise our learning. On Tuesday, we found out all about what sugar can do to the body and how much sugar is in some drinks! We were so shocked at the results!

I hope you have all had a great week and have a lovely weekend!

Happy Friday, everyone! I hope everyone has been having a lovely week. Here is what the class have been up to this week.

In Maths, we have continued looking at place value, finding numbers on number lines, comparing numbers and finding one, ten and hundred more or less. Even though we found the number lines quite challenging, we were resilient and kept working hard!

In Literacy, we have continued to look at Katherine Johnson’s life and how she finally made it to work in NASA! We have been learning lots of vocabulary to describe Katherine and her emotions on her rollercoaster journey to becoming a human computer. We are so excited to read what happens next! Also, we wrote some amazing diary entries from the perspective of Katherine’s Dad, who was debating moving towns so his daughter could attend high school. I was so impressed with their vocabulary and sentence structures.

In IPC, we have been continuing our topic of brain metacognition and also looking at how to solve conflicts using ‘I feel’ rather than ‘you’ statements. We also looked at how our neurons grow in our brain and how we need to challenge our brain to grow these neurons more and more! Furthermore, we looked at the worry emotion and how we can calm ourselves and help someone who is worrying or anxious. So, we made mini windmills to practise our calm breathing and tried out the different sensory tools in the calm corner! Our IPC Brain Metacognition topic will be coming to an end next week, so I’m excited to start our new topic with the students.

Once again, it has been another great week in our classroom! Have a lovely weekend!

Hi everyone!

Another great week in our classroom! This week felt much more settled and we did lots of learning!

Our Maths learning has continued to be amazing! We continued with place value, looking at numbers up to 1000 (Y3) and 10000 (Y4). The numbers just keep getting bigger and bigger! We have even challenged ourselves with some extra hard questions, learning how to understand what the question is asking and thinking deeply about solving the problem.

In Literacy, we continued reading ‘Counting on Katherine’ and learnt lots about Katherine Johnson and Rosa Parks. We discussed boycotts and segregation and how unfair life was for black people in the USA in that time. We practised using prepositions (Y3), fronted adverbials (Y4) and conjunctions.

Our brains have been working hard in IPC! We made our own mnemonics, learnt the difference between a fixed and growth mindset and our most exciting lesson was making the tallest tower out of just spaghetti and marshmallows! The lesson was supposed to make us practise resilience, teamwork and growth mindset… but I think the hardest part was trying to avoid eating all the marshmallows!

Thank you everyone who made it to the meeting this week- it was so lovely to get to know you! If you couldn’t make it, no problem! It would still be lovely to meet you, so please email or say hello if you get chance. Also, thank you for all the homework- the children all did great! I hope they can complete this week’s homework well too.

Have a lovely weekend!

Hello everyone!

It’s been such great first week of term! We have enjoyed exploring the new classroom and getting to know each other.

We started with decorating the classroom with our ‘All About Me’ flowers. They look so beautiful on our windows and it was great to learn all about each other! We also got to do many different backpack activities- we especially loved the calming breathing exercises and the connection games. I hope we can do many more in the next few weeks. It was fun to make our classroom agreement and understand that everyone learns in different ways too!

We started place value in our maths learning and the children did some amazing work! I was so impressed by their maths knowledge and their eagerness to solve the questions. We will continue with place value next week- I hope this amazing work continues!

In English, we started learning about the Space Race! It’s a difficult topic with a lot of new vocabulary, but we learnt so many new facts and can even use words such as perilous now! I wonder if we can still remember all these facts by next week…

In IPC, there was a mysterious present on the balcony…. but we couldn’t unlock the door without figuring out the code! We worked together as a team, helping each other and solving puzzles with great enthusiasm and teamwork. When we finally opened the door, we discovered some bubble blowers! So we had great fun blowing bubbles and trying to make the biggest bubble.

I hope the children all enjoyed their week as much as I did! I sent homework today- please return it by next Friday along with their reading books.

It’s been really lovely to get to know all the children and I’m really looking forward to next week! I hope I can see you all at the meeting on Wednesday at 10:45.

Have an amazing weekend!

Hello everyone!

I hope you have all had a wonderful summer! I am so excited to meet you all very soon and start teaching here at the school. It will be lovely to get to know everyone and have fun learning together.

It will be the start of my 8th year of teaching (3 years in Sheffield, England and 4 years in Daegu) – I can’t believe how fast the years go! I have really loved my time in Korea so far and I am looking forward to beginning a new life chapter here in Ulsan and working as a class teacher once again.

Shortly, I will send an email with more information regarding the Class Information Meeting and getting ready for the start of term. In the meeting, you will find out more about me, the classroom and the curriculum. If you would like to see the slides beforehand or want to know more about me, you can click here: Important Class Information

See you soon!

Miss Staines