Week 6

This week we have been thinking about the Christian stories of Easter and thinking about which parts are happy and which parts are sad. We started our learning this week with a sensory version of the Easter story. The children could hear the steps of the donkey as Jesus entered Jerusalem, they waved a palm leaf and shouted, ‘Hosanna’, as Jesus came past. They then smelt and felt the bread shared at the last supper and touched the grass from Mount Olive. They walked with the wooden cross to the top of the hill where they smelt the vinegary wine that Jesus drank just before he died on the cross.
 

We then talked about the happiness felt by the people as Jesus entered on his donkey, the sadness felt when Jesus died on the cross and then the happiness felt when he rose from the dead  - the day Christians celebrate as Easter Day. We also ate hot cross buns and talked about how the cross on the top of the bun is meant to symbolise the cross Jesus died on and how many people eat these buns on Good Friday to commemorate Jesus’ death on the cross.

Our final piece of art this half term, was a portrait of a queen. The children sketched and then painted, using water paints, the portrait of their chosen queen of England. 

What fantastic projects Turtle class! This week the children shared their projects with each other and they were really impressive. Well done Turtke class 😃

Before we could draw and paint our final portraits, the children practised mixing skin colour, the colour of gold to paint the jewellery, hair colour, eye colour and clothing colours.

The children learnt how to sketch the different parts of the face! They sketched the eyes, nose, ears and lips and then added the hair and neck and shoulders. They did so well; It’s not easy to draw a face!

The children loved their Openbox visit this week and learnt about life in the past. They started off learning what life would have been like in Victorian times, the jobs the children would have been expected to do, living conditions, the number of people who would have lived in a ‘2 up, 2 down’ house and they did this through drama. In the afternoon, the children went further back in history and learnt and castles and even trained to be knights! What a fun day we had! 

This week, we continued our work with money and did an investigation. The children used their toolkits and the Polya method to help them solve the problem in different ways. Then later in the week, the children added coins, found the totals and ordered the purses from smallest to largest amounts of money!

This week, we had a special visit from Georgia and did some exciting science! The Turtles loved mixing liquids to create bases and acids. They loved being little scientists!

Week 5

In games this week, it was very wet outside, so we used the hall to send and receive the ball. The children started by warming up with a fun game involving hoops (islands) they practised moving around the room in different ways and then when they heard the signal they had to jump into the hoops. They then travelled around the room with the balls using the bats, passing the ball to a partner who stopped the ball before sending it back. Then finally, the children practised bowling the ball by rolling to a partner who returned the ball using the bat. The bowler then put themselves into a receiving position, caught the ball and then the children swapped roles. 

In computing this week, the children thought about the labels objects are given and how these labels can help to group them in different ways. They were then given 2D shapes and together created groups using the properties of the shapes (labels the shapes could be given).

We starter our Easter RE unit of learning this week linked to the feelings of happiness and sadness. Today, we walked around the school looking for signs of Spring and new life! We found lots of beautiful flowers on the ground and buds in trees and bushes.

In maths we practised counting in 10s using 10 pence coins. The children were given word problems to solving by counting in 10s using coins, Numicon and number lines.

The children practised their jumping and bouncing today and travelled in different ways around the hall, by hopping, skipping, side stepping, galloping, hop sketching and bouncing. They then moved over and around the equipment combining different jumps and travelling movements.  

The children went around all three classrooms having a look at the topic work produced this half Term. It’s always so nice to share our learning as a school!

Week 4

The children were learning about the values of the different coins today, using maths equipment to identify the number of pence the different coins represented. 

The children solved a problems today using the Polya method and their maths toolkits. They worked systematically to find all the possibilities and showed their thinking using maths equipment. 

This week, we were learning about plurals! The children learnt that a plural is when you have more than one of something and you add the suffix -s or -es to the end of the noun to show this. The children learnt that if the word ends with a: s, x, ss, ch or sh then we must as ‘es’ but for all other words we add an ‘s’. The children then wrote instruction sentences containing plurals to practise using their new words. We also encouraged the children to include adjectives, prepositions and time words in their instruction sentences.

Using concrete apparatus and familiar maths models, the children found the missing numbers and thought about how the pairs of number sentences on the cards were linked. We talked about how one of the number sentences could be used to help find the missing number in the other number sentence and how known number facts can help us to find other number facts easily.

This week, we talked about the object and the material and what the difference between the two was. The children then classified the objects based on their material.

Today we were sorting past tense and imperative verbs. The children thought about whether the words has an -ed suffix ending or not or whether they could be used to instruct someone. We also talked about irregular past tense verbs, such as ‘saw’, which the children found more tricky to classify because they didn’t have the -ed ending but also didn’t sound like imperative verbs either! The children then practised using the words in sentences verbally and then in writing. 

Week 3

Thank you to all the family members who came into school to read with their child. The children really loved this special time. They also really enjoyed dressing up and all looked amazing! 

In Science this week we classified objects by their materials. We thought about what the materials felt like and words to describe them.

Meet Petal! Petal is our new class plant! The children named her Petal and talked about where would be best to keep her in the classroom - they decided the windowsill would be a good place because she can enjoy the sunshine there. The children talked about what they can do to look after her and will water her whenever her soil looks like it is too dry. Hopefully, we will see her grow happily in the Turtle classroom! 

After working their socks off to rewrite the fairy tale of Jack and the Beanstalk, the children started a new learning journey which will see them write a set of instructions for Little Red Riding Hood to help her get to Grandma’s house! They started their learning journey by watching the fairy tale of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ to remind them of what happened in the tale and then created their own maps and labelled the things Little Red Riding Hood would pass with adjectives! 

Week 2

This week, the children were presented with a very challenging word problem and then set of to work on it using the maths toolkits and the steps of the Polya method to help them. The children were resilient, courageous and hard working throughout! Well done Turtle class.

This week, we learnt about contractions in English! The children were given two words and an apostrophe and practised making contractions by cutting the words down, popping out the letter that no longer belonged and replacing it with an apostrophe! They then created sentences using these words linked to the story of Jack and the Beanstalk.

Over the last week, Turtle class have been monitoring the temperature and rainfall around our school. The children set up their test in the morning and then checked their results at the end of the day!

Week 1

The children were excited to start their new art unit this week. Over the next half term, the children will be drawing and painting portraits of Queens. Today, we learnt about tone and how we can adjust the pressure we place on our pencil to create light and dark tones as well as using the tip and side of our pencil too. We also talked about hatching and crosshatching and how this drawing technique allows artists to create tone in their drawings. The children experimented in their sketch books and did really well!

We were very busy this week in gymnastics, travelling in different ways and in different directions around the room by: hopping, hopscotch, skipping and galloping. We also thought about and practised different jumps including bouncing, jumping high and leaping. Next, we practised our log rolls, we pointed our toes, stretched our arms above our heads and used our muscles to roll carefully across the floor. Finally, we created routines which started by travelling in one of the ways we’d practised and then moved into a bounce or jump, followed by another way of travelling, a log roll and a third way of travelling and our finished positions! The Turtles worked very hard!

In science this week, we added to our longitudinal study which stretches over the year. We look at how the seasons affect our surroundings and the animals who live there. This week, we have been looking for signs of spring. The children went on a walk around the school grounds and took photos of what they could see. Then, each day a new group of children have been monitoring the outside temperature and rainfall in their chosen location around the school grounds. 

In English we have started our new learning journey about Jack in the Beanstalk! The children have been getting to know the story this week through retelling it in a drama activity, creating a story board, identifying the repeated phrases and traditional story language such as, ‘Once upon a time...’ and ‘They all lived happily ever after’. The children identified nouns in the images and then created noun phrases by adding adjectives using the word bs k given to them as well as their own ideas. They also ,earns about the suffixes, ‘er’ and ‘est’ and how they can be added to the end of an adjective to give it a new meaning. The children then wrote sentences using all of this vocabulary! 

This week, we learnt that objects are given labels and that we can group objects using these labels as can a computer. The children grouped objects from around the classroom to fit the given labels. We then talked about how a search engine on the Internet uses the labels on photographs to find a group photos or information that we search for. It doesn’t just know for example, that a picture is a picture of cat, it knows that the picture is of a cat because it has the label, ‘cat’.