Week 5

It’s been such a special and exciting week at Catherington! We’ve spent lots of time thinking about the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and getting ready for our street party. In Discovery Time, we made crowns out of paper and flags out of sticks. We had great fun waving our flags and singing songs.

Later on in the week, we made shiny crowns out of gold and silver paper plates. We loved choosing which sparkly jewels we wanted to use and sticking them on carefully. Then we used pens to add some final touches.

The best part of our week was Friday, when we finally got to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee by having a street party. We wore our special outfits and crowns and joined the rest of the school for a feast fit for a king or queen. Thank you to all of the parents for being so supportive with costumes, toilet roll queens and food!
 

Week 4

We have really enjoyed our Discovery Time challenges this week! Our toy Amelia Earhart and her plane, Canary, have gone missing, so one of our tasks was to make posters to stick around the school. Hopefully someone will find them and bring them back to us soon.

We have also been making vehicles with 2D shapes, solving problems for little people and making the number six in as many different ways as we can with paint.

In maths we’ve been thinking about the words FIRST, THEN and NOW. We’ve used passengers on a bus, dinosaurs in a garden and cubes in a tower to explore the idea of adding numbers together. We had fun saying our special sentence with different numbers, for example: FIRST we had one, THEN we added 4, NOW we have 5.

In Outdoor Explorers we thought about trees and looked at how different their leaves can be. We decided to investigate what trees we have on our field. We had to look carefully at the leaves we found and matched them to our checklists to see if we could figure out what each tree was called. 
 

Week 3

We’ve been busy in Dolphins Class as usual this week! We have continued to practise writing tricky words and have worked hard to write captions to match pictures, too. In our group writing sessions we’ve been writing words and sentences to describe different vehicles.

In maths we have been ordering numbers to 20 and are getting really good at recognising teens numbers.

In Discovery Time, some of us helped Miss Watts to plant potatoes. We’re going to keep looking after them over the coming weeks, topping the bag up with soil when the leaves poke through. Hopefully we’ll have some delicious potatoes to cook and eat soon!
 

Outdoor Explorers on Tuesday was messy! We learned all about bees and why they’re so important. They pollinate plants, so without them no fruit or vegetables would grow! We decided to make pollen patties so the bees around us could have a special treat to eat. We mixed brewers yeast with powdered milk, soybean flour and water to make little burgers. 
 

This week we also had our first helicopter story session. We set out our stage and I told the children some stories, which they acted out together. Next time, the children will tell me their own stories and we’ll take in in turns to bring them to life. We had so much fun, I can’t wait til we do it again!

We learned all about Amelia Earhart and found out that she was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She must have been so courageous to embark on such a dangerous adventure! 
 

In PE we played cups and cones and had a go at passing balls to a partner. We had to pass them around our bodies as well as over our heads and through our legs. It was hard work!
 

This week we also said goodbye to Mrs Marshall. We’ve enjoyed having her in our class since January, but it’s time for her to go back to her family now that she’s gained her teaching qualification. We were treated us to a special party to celebrate - thank you, Mrs Marshall!

Week 2

This week we enjoyed writing about our trip to QE Park. We’re getting really good at writing words using the phonemes we’ve learned in phonics and are remembering to use finger spaces and sometimes even full stops and capital letters! 
 

In maths we’ve been using tens frames to investigate different ways of making numbers up to 20. We’ve also been practising our number bonds to 10 during discovery time.

We’ve continued to learn about different types of transport and had fun this week trying to sort pictures into old and new transport. We had some interesting discussions about which vehicles we thought people still used today and which ones were used many years ago. We also used Google maps to find different places (like our school!) and thought about the best ways to travel from place to place.

In Outdoor Explorers we collected beautiful things we found on the field and used them to make bracelets.

Week 1

What a first week back we’ve had! We’ve jumped straight back into our learning, reminding ourselves and each other of some of the digraphs we learnt last term. We have been spotting these digraphs in words as well as practising writing some tricky words. We’ve also enjoyed using play dough in funky fingers to make transport pictures.

In maths we have continued learning how to make the number 10 and have even started to think about how to make the number 20! We are getting much more confident recognising numbers all the way up to 20, too.

In outdoor explorers this week we learned about how spiders make webs and how they move. Then we went to the field and collected sticks so that we could make our very own spider webs!

In Discovery Time we have been making dens for explorers, building garages for vehicles, making boats to see which materials float best, sending messages in paper aeroplanes and playing in our role play areas as coach drivers, passengers and forest explorers!

The highlight of our week was definitely our amazing school trip! We visited Queen Elizabeth Country Park and took part in lots of different activities. We had so much fun being imaginative and creative in the woods with our friends and even toasted marshmallows and drank hot chocolate. We wish we could go back again next week!