Thursday 24 October 2019

Nearly Half Term

We have already been at Alderwood School for half a term! The children are very settled and becoming more independent each day.

We have been practising our tricky words a lot alongside our phonics - we are learning to recognise these words quickly and playing different matching games to help us.




The children have been using the art areas to come up with their own creations and practise their cutting skills. Some of the children used the bat templates to make hanging bats for their roleplay area. They found ways to attach the bats to the wood including BluTack, tape and string. 



We have been reading the 'Funnybones' books by Janet & Alan Alhberg in class and watching some of the videos on the interactive whiteboards. This has inspired lots of labelling and work about skeletons. The children have made some skeleton pictures at the art table - the first time the children made their pictures we hadn't discussed the different bones and their names so they came up with what they thought a skeleton looked like. As classes, we then looked at pictures and models of skeletons and felt where some of our own bones were and then made a second skeleton picture to see what we had learnt. As you will see from the photo below, the children made great improvements to their skeleton pictures and added a lot more detail and were able to talk about some of the different bones in their bodies (top = before, bottom = after).



We look forward to coming back after half term where we will be learning about different places around the world as our class bears are off on an adventure! 

Friday 18 October 2019

Year 1

Autumn Term in Year 1


This half term we have been excited to start finding out about fossils and dinosaurs.
A dinosaur egg arrived in our classes and we  thought about how we can look after a dinosaur.

We have thought about what a dinosaur needs and have written instructions explaining how to wash a dinosaur and we thought about what we would need to teach a dinosaur.


In our History lessons we have found out about Mary Anning and some of the children have even researched her at home as well.  In the playground we have become budding palaeontologists  searching for fossils in our school grounds! 


We have created amazing fossils using clay as well as practising our sketching skills to create wonderful drawings of ammonites.

 



At home the children have been busy building brilliant dinosaur models whilst thinking about the different shapes they have used.








Thursday 10 October 2019

Phonics!

In Early Years we have been working hard with lots of different activities. We have now started practising some letters in phonics and thinking about the sounds each letter makes. We have been learning songs and actions to help us which you can practise at home. We have had lots of activities around our classrooms to help us recognise the letters and to practise forming them properly. We are listening carefully to hear the different sounds in words and thinking about what the first sound is in a word.