We have been busy this week attending booster classes to support our learning. These have been fun and not really like school.

We have been trying to create artwork inspired by Faith Ringgold. We are building up our skills in printing.

Year 2 have been recreating houses like those in the City of London in 1666.

How long would these burn for?

Figgles has broken the Addven calinder on his last day.He has eatan all the chocolates and been sick on the calinder. From Daisy Megan and Rebecca.

Year 2 & 4 went to the post office together yesterday to post their letters to Santa. Elfy was so kind and gave us all a pound each to post our letters, even leaving enough change to buy ourselves a treat!

Today we sent our letters to Santa Claus!

We bought our stamps from the Post Office…

We also bought a sweet.

Then we put our letters in the post box!

Hopefully he won’t be too busy to reply!

All children across the school took part in a pebble painting activity which will make a new pathway in the school grounds. We looked at some design ideas and used these to create our own designs. We then used brightly coloured paint to complete our pebbles.

The children have enjoyed making their own puppet theatres to help retell the story of ‘The Gruffalo’.

We had a great afternoon at the sports centre where we took part in a range of Olympic activities. We all did our best and the atmosphere was amazing!

We have planned and set up our first fair test investigation. We are testing what plants need to be able to grow healthily. We thought of a question we wanted to answer by comparing two pots of seeds. We have learnt about how to keep it a fair test by keeping most things the same and only changing one thing to find the answer to our question.

For example – Does a seed need sunlight to grow? One pot will be placed outside whereas the other will be placed in a dark place inside the classroom. We will be observing what happens and record what we see.

Our topic this half term is called ‘How does your garden grow?’ and we have decided as a class that we would like to grow our own sunflowers and see how tall they can get. We wrote instructions in literacy to explain how to plant a seed and then followed the instructions to plant our own seeds. We are looking forward to seeing how tall they get!

As part of our new topic we have been learning about Vincent Van Gogh and his famous paintings. We have looked at real sunflowers and used these to help us decide which colours and textures to use. We have spent a few days working on our pictures to make sure they are amazing and we are very proud of the finished product!

We have been excited to use our new role play area which is a travel agents. We can use lots that we have learnt in Geography and literacy to help people find the holiday they want. Some very good sales pitches happening in year 1!

We are still celebrating books by continuing with our weekly stay and read with parents. We hope to see lots of you for the last week of term.

In PSHE we have been learning about a balanced diet and the different food groups. We have made our own food pyramids to show which foods we should eat.

We have enjoyed learning how to read alien words and have made some of our own. Can you read them?

We have been learning about aerial photographs and how they are different to maps. We also looked at our local area using Google maps earth view and identified features in and around our school. Lastly, we worked in groups to label an aerial photograph of the school and surrounding areas.

We enjoyed spending some of our afternoon outside in the sunshine listening to a story.

In topic lessons we have been using atlases and globes to learn about the UK and the four countries within it. We have also been learning and labelling the seven continents of the world and started to name oceans that surround them.

On Tuesday we had an energetic and fun morning at the sports centre where we competed against other schools to complete different sports activities. We all worked well as a team and as a result we came third out of 7 schools!

To carry on the celebration of World Book Day the whole school read the story ‘Detective Dog’ and based the whole day around this book. We used our senses to describe the different settings in the story and created our own map with a key based on where the characters went in the story. We also enjoyed sharing what we had done in Friday’s assembly.

We all had a exciting day being dressed up as our favourite book characters! We took part in lots of fun activities including writing book reviews, book scavenger hunt and creating story boxes.

Year 1 had a great time at the Box Moor trust learning about maps and compasses. We used a map to follow a trail to help us find clues in the woods. We also made our own mini beast town map using natural things found in the woodland. We followed a map to help us find clues on a treasure hunt and put these together to find the treasure.

In science we are learning about animal habitats around the world. We have been sorting animals into the right habitats and thinking about what helps them survive.

A new half term means a new area of literacy! We are learning about information texts. We have learnt about the difference between fiction and non-fiction books and have been sorting them. We have also started looking at the features of information texts eg. contents page, index and facts etc.

As we are nearing the end of term the children had a chance to use different areas of the classroom to further skills they have been using throughout the past half term. Some children used the maths area to role play buying things in a shop whilst others used fairy tale puppets and scenery they had created for homework to retell traditional stories.

In science we have been learning about birds and their characteristics. We labelled parts of a bird and then went outside to see which birds are common in our school grounds. We used a classification sheet to observe and record which birds we found. Lots of pigeons, magpies and blackbirds could be seen as well as a nest of sparrows!

We have been learning about living things and what they need to stay alive. Today in science we went outside and sorted things we could see into ‘living’ and ‘non-living’ within a table to classify our findings.

Thank you to all parents who came to our weekly stay and read the children love showing you their favourite stories! Same time again next week 🙂

In maths we have been learning lots about money. We have ordered coins from the smallest amount to the largest and have been sorting coins into the right places. We used role play during our lesson to buy items from the school shop using a range of coins.

Another successful stay and read! Thank you to all who came to read with their children, we hope to see lots of you again next week!

We had lots of fun showing the school and lots of parents what we have learnt so far this half term. We acted out the story of Little Red Riding Hood, read our own stories and showed the castles we have made. Thank you to all parents for helping the children learn their lines we are all very proud of ourselves!

The next part of our D&T project is underway! We have used different sized boxes and other recycled materials to create our castles. We used tape, glue and scissors to make all the parts of our castle stay together. We will be painting them next to make them colourful.

In our D&T lessons we are going to be creating a fairy tale castle using recycled materials. The first stage of our project was to look at existing castles and talk about the different shapes and structures. We then used a help sheet with some basic shapes on to design what we would like our castle to look like. We used a ruler to help us make sure our lines were accurate and straight.

During topic lessons we have been drawing and painting our favourite fairy tale characters. We used pencil to sketch our drawings and then used paint to finish them off. We look forward to seeing them on display in the hall!

As part of our new topic ‘Fairies and Frogs’ we have been learning the story of Little Red Riding Hood. During Literacy lessons we have sequenced the story using pictures and written our own sentences.

Year 1’s theme for the school Christmas tree is ‘love’. We have been talking about love and what it means to us and how we can show love towards others. We have made love heart Christmas tree decorations using pencil, paint and glitter to make it sparkle!

We have been learning about algorithms and what they do. We have written and tested our own algorithms to make beebots move backwards and forwards to reach a certain point. We have also written our own instructions to help someone find treasure on a map.

Thank you to all parents who came to our first ever stay and read! We all had a lovely morning and we hope to see lots of you again next week.

We have been learning all about Diwali and have made some Diya lamps using clay. We have also painted them using bright colours.