Week 6

This week we learned all about Easter and why it’s such an important Christian festival. We started by pretending to be chicks hatching out from eggs. Then we wrote about what eggs make us think about.

On day 2 we listened to the bible story, starting from Palm Sunday when Jesus arrived in Jerusalem. We had lots of fun acting out the story and shouting ‘Hosana!’ as Jesus walked through the street. We waved ribbons and palm leaves, played instruments and sang a song. 
 

Throughout the week we made Easter cards to take home, and at the end of the week we worked together to make an Easter garden. We made sure that we included rocks for a tomb, a cross (made in our woodwork area!), flowers, grass and some stepping stones. We loved playing with our special garden after it was finished.

Snack time on Friday included hot cross buns! We learned about the cross on top and what it represents. Then we ate them! 

In maths we reminded ourselves of the different ways we can sort things. We sorted shapes and different objects according to different attributes they had, like colour, shape, size and thickness.

Later on in the week we learned about odd and even numbers. We learned that these numbers always follow a pattern as we count up in ones: odd, even, odd, even. Then we made our own numbers and sorted them into odds and evens.

PE was so much fun this week! We put all of our learning from this half term together and played some target games with our friends. We bounced balls into flat targets and then threw them into hoops held by our partner. 

At the start of the week, we brought our home learning projects in to show each other. Our imaginary characters were amazing! Everyone has been so creative, thank you for supporting your children to use their imaginations and have fun with their learning. We loved showing our work off to everyone in the school.

The best part of the week was going on our very first school trip! We went to QE 

park to explore their forest school. We made s’mores, created wooden medals and flower crowns, painted with mud, foraged in the woods, hunted for bugs, swung in a hammock and played in a mud kitchen. What a fantastic way to end a brilliant half term. Happy Easter, Dolphins!

Week 5

This week was very exciting because we performed our first ever class assembly to our parents! We all showed lots of courage and it was amazing being able to share our learning with our grown-ups.

In PSHE we talked about money. We shared our ideas about what money is, what it looks like, where we keep it and what we can do with it. Then we explored different coins and thought about which ones were worth the most.

In PE we spent more time practising ball control. We dribbled balls with our feet, moved them around with our hands, passed them around different body parts and then had a go at throwing and catching them.

In maths we made pictures using flip counters to help us learn our number bonds of 10. We arranged our counters in different shapes and patterns, then counted how many yellow and how many red counters we had.

We also spent some time practising our doubles facts. We worked with a partner to place flip counters on a butterfly picture. Our partner had to listen to our instructions and make the same pattern. Then we said the doubles fact we’d made out loud together in a sentence stem.

In Outdoor Explorers we learned about seeds, bulbs and plants we can eat. We then planted cress seeds using a cup, cotton wool, seeds and water. We knew that we needed to give our seeds plenty of sunlight, so we placed them on the windowsill.

In our Big Write, we wrote instructions for Turtles Class so that they could find out how to grow cress seeds, too.

Week 4

This week in maths we consolidated our learning from last week on ways to make 7. We used ten frames and flip counters to find out how many ways we could make this number.

By the end of the week, we were applying these skills to the number 10. We used multilink cubes and numicon to make 10 in lots of different ways.

In Drawing Club, we enjoyed watching the adventures of Bananaman and Dr Gloom! We drew Bananaman and Dr Gloom’s lair and made each other giggle by having a go at writing some character speech to go with our pictures.

In Discovery Time we used charcoal and chalk to make cave pictures. We looked at the cave pictures in The Gruffalo’s Child and had a go at drawing the fox, snake, mouse and owl from the story. Then we labelled our pictures and wrote special messages from the characters to each other.

Some of us decided to help the mouse and Gruffalo’s Child by designing and building traps for the mean characters in the story. We used large construction, loose parts, junk modelling materials and the small world to make our traps.

Outdoor Explorers and PSHE mixed together this week! We had a good think about the world and all of the things in it that rely on us to take care of them. We reminded ourselves about the best way to dispose of our rubbish and thought about how wildlife can be affected if we drop litter on the floor or put too much rubbish into landfill.

When we went to the field, we searched for things we can look after. We found chickens, horses, flowers and trees and made a promise to be kind to these things. Then we practised putting our food waste into the correct bin at snack time.

Something new appeared in our classroom this week - the voting station! Every day we will vote for the story we’d like to listen to before lunchtime. We do this by putting a cube in one side of the bucket scale. It’s fun having a look to see which book is the most popular by spotting which side of the bucket scale has been weighed down the most. We had a good chat about keeping the vote fair by only using one cube each so that everyone gets a chance to make their choice.

Week 3

This week we continued our artist study. We learned some facts about Axel Scheffler and found out that he was born in Germany. We learned what the word ‘illustrator’ means, and found out that Axel has illustrated over 120 books! He works very closely with one of our favourite authors, Julia Donaldson.

Throughout the week we had lots of fun drawing some of his famous characters and making our own picture books. It’s fun being an illustrator!

Some of us made Axel Scheffler characters using junk modelling materials and some of us made our own Squash and a Squeeze house big enough to fit the old woman and all of her animals!

In maths we spent lots of time investigating different ways to make the number 7. By the end of the week we were really good at this, and applied our learning by singing a song about 7 little ducks. We had to figure out how many ducks we had left if a certain number had flown away.

On Friday we enjoyed making bracelets with Mrs Mannie. We had to make sure that we had an equal number of beads as our friend. It was interesting comparing the lengths of our bracelets to check whether we had succeeded or not!

In woodwork, some of the children decided to make boats! We used saws, screwdrivers, drills and hammers. After we had built our amazing boats, we tested them to see if they could float… they were able to float, but we couldn’t get them to stay upright!

We are getting really good at applying our love of writing to all areas of our learning. We had a great time this week building, playing and imagining with our friends… and adding signs along the way!

Week 2

For the first time in phonics this week we wrote a dictation sentence. From now on, we will write one of these sentences every week. It takes lots of concentration to listen to each of the words, hear the sounds in each word, match them to the correct grapheme, write the words down in the correct order, include finger spaces, spell tricky words accurately and include a capital letter and full stop… but we did amazingly! 

In PE we started a new unit of work. This half term we will be learning new ball skills on the playground outside. For our first lesson, we practised moving balls along the ground with our hands and feet. We had to control the balls carefully to stop them from rolling too far away. Our favourite part was rolling our balls along the ground to our partner - this was harder than it looked!

We have been learning about different habitats this week. We learned that a habitat is a place where an animal lives, and talked about how animals are adapted to suit the habitat in which they live. We made different environments in a tuff tray and matched animals to the place they’d thrive in.

Then we focused in on one habitat in particular - the woods. We found out about which animals live in the woods and painted pictures of them.

Some of the children noticed that the snow in our tuff tray habitat looked like magic dust! They had lots of fun making a fairy house in our small world, decorating it with the fairy dust and then writing messages to the fairies to invite them to live there.

On Thursday the whole school celebrated World Book Day. We dressed up as our favourite characters or in pyjamas and enjoyed reading all sorts of different books together throughout the day. At the end of the day some of our grown-ups were able to come to school to read with us - it was such a lovely day!

Week 1

We have really caught the writing bug this week! On Tuesday, we found secret messages in our room from some mysterious creatures… we had to read the clues and look at the footprints to try and figure out which creatures had written to us. Then we wrote our guesses down. Some of our guesses were dinosaur, grizzly bear, snake, owl, wolf and bird.

In our Big Write, we tried to write words and phrases to describe the different characters in The Gruffalo story. We used our grapheme mats to write words like ‘prickles’, ‘claws’, ‘wings’ and ‘long tail’. 

Some of us were so inspired by our Gruffalo writing that we decided to re-tell the story using puppets! We’ll keep these puppets in our book corner throughout the half term so that everyone has the chance to make their own Gruffalo play with their friends.

We practised writing on phoneme frames in our guided reading lessons. We sounded out words to match different pictures and worked hard to fit the sounds into each part of the frame. 

In maths we have been learning about the composition of the numbers 9 and 10. We worked hard to find different ways to make these numbers and used the words ‘part’ and ‘whole’ to describe what we found.

We also continued to investigate what happens when we add one more to a number and learned that we can make the numbers 6-10 by adding 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 to the number 5. One of the children demonstrated this perfectly using multilink cubes!

This half term we will be learning all about forests. We began this week in outdoor explorers by finding out about different types of tree. We collected different leaves and then used crayons to make leaf rubbings. It was lots of fun to see all of the different colours, shapes and textures.

We continued to learn new skills in our woodwork area. Just over half of the children have now learned how to use all of our tools, including hammers, hand drills, screwdrivers and the Japanese pull saw.