Spring has sprung!

 

In Early Years, we had a very exciting egg delivery! The children made predictions about what they thought would hatch from the eggs. We had all sorts of ideas: ducks, crocodiles, snakes, chickens and even dinosaurs! Once they hatched we watched them get stronger and more confident. We have noticed that their wing feathers have started to change. All of the children had the opportunity to hold and stroke the chicks and we talked about how to do this safely.

The chicks have inspired lots of different art work and writing. Children have been describing the chicks after looking at them carefully.

As well as this, we have also been watching some tadpoles develop - they arrived to us as frogspawn and we created them a pond area outdoors so we can observe them as they change and grow into frogs! 

Lots of learning!

 As always, our children have been working their socks off now they're back into the swing of things in school again. 

We have been practising making words in different ways, using magnets, cutting out letters, using sand and glitter as well as by writing onto paper. Some of the children are writing sentences about our 'around the world' topic talking about different places and animals. 

Each class have enjoyed being creative in their art areas. We have had lots of free choice with different materials for collage and making - creating jewellery has been very popular! We have experimented with different ways of using colour including using marbles to roll around on paint in trays and using food colouring on shaving foam for printing.

Maple Class spent a very long time sorting out the Hama beads into colours to make it easier when they were making patterns on the boards. It took 45 minutes with the help of an adult and lead to lots of interesting conversations about shades and tones of colours as well as estimating the amount of beads in our hands or the amount of time it was taking!

The staff have been busy making dough and the children still love creating different textures with the rollers and using cutters to make different shapes. We love finding different ways to make our hands nice and strong for writing and drawing!

All of the children are just about ready for the Easter holidays ... just one more week of amazing work to do and they can finally have a bit of a rest after a busy term working at home and school :-)

Settling back in

 We are so pleased that all of the children have come back to join us in Early Years! They have taken the time away from the building in their stride and area pleased to be back in their classrooms with their friends and teachers again. We have spent the week settling back in and remembering the routines that are in place in school and applying some of those skills we have been practising during home learning and key-worker provision since January. 

We have been remembering how to do careful counting using different resources and matching amounts to numerals.

There is a lot of independent writing going on - we are using word mats to help us with some of our trickier topic words. This week the children have been writing about Arctic and Antarctic animals after we read the story 'Poles Apart' by Jeanne Willis and Jarvis.

Lots of teamwork has been happening in our new role-play areas and with our construction toys. The children have been talking with each other about models they are making and working out what bits they might need next.

The adults have enjoyed being able to play some different games with the children and have been really impressed with their turn-taking skills. We are getting good at recognising the number we have rolled on a dice without having to count all of the dots.

And of course, there has been lots of practising of our tricky words that we are learning to read. The children have enjoyed uncovering the words and reading them aloud.

A big thank you again for all of the support during home learning and hopefully we won't need to worry about that again any time soon!

Home Learning

 We are all so impressed with the effort that our families have been putting in with their home learning over the last few weeks. We thought we would share with you some of the fantastic work that has been going on.

This is just a small selection of the things we are being sent every day but as you can tell, there is a lot going on! We are very excited to see all the children back next week for the remainder of the spring term 😁😁

Our impressive children!

 A very huge well done to all of our children and families for their amazing efforts at home from the Early Years team. The children in key-worker provision are also working incredibly hard. So far there have been so many exciting activities including some science experiments, PE lessons, music, stories, making pirate things... We are really pleased to see some of the fantastic outcomes and thought we would share a few pictures from the home learning so far...

Keep up all of the hard work and we can't wait until we are all back together again!

Getting creative!

The children in Early Years have settled in amazingly well, especially as lots of them hadn't been able to go to nursery before coming to school this year. We have spent time learning different sounds in phonics and are starting to read simple words using these sounds. We have mostly been practising careful counting and writing numbers in maths activities.

The children have enjoyed getting creative in their art areas with different media and materials. We have made 'Numberblocks Stampolines' to look at different ways we can make numbers.  

For Remembrance Day, the children used different printing techniques to create some beautiful poppy art. Some of it is on display in the classrooms and there is a lovely display which combines work from all of the classes in our shared area.

Our new roleplay areas are a big hit! Last half term we had areas linked to our fairy-tales topic. This half term we have a NASA space station, a hairdressers and a doctors surgery. The children have loved exploring the different resources and playing together cooperatively. 

Now we are all busy practising for our Christmas performance which will be filmed on the 8th December. 

 

Year 1

 

 Toys

All the children have been enjoying the new and exciting things that keep arriving in our Toy Box. Most recently we have found a teddy bear and a book ‘The Everywhere Bear’. We loved hearing all about the other books by Julia Donaldson that you liked and other stories about bears that you know.  

In class, the children have been making ‘lost posters’ to help the children in the story find the Everywhere Bear.

     

In History, we became time travelers, finding out what toys children played with in different decades and even found out what the teachers in our class liked to play with when they were younger. Our classroom even turned into a toy museum for us to discover and investigate toys from the past.

 

We have been designing our own pop-up toy in DT and will be making it very soon. The designs the children created were amazing and imaginative. Here are some of the fantastic designs.

         

 

 

                                        

We have enjoyed receiving the lovely work, videos and comments from the children in Year 1 on Seesaw. We always love seeing things you get up to at home and really appreciate all the fantastic support from parents.