Under the sea

Our Year R children dived into an exciting Under the Sea topic, sparking curiosity and imagination as they explored the wonders of ocean life. Throughout the topic, the children learnt about a variety of fascinating sea creatures. As part of their learning, they compared and measured the lengths of these creatures in a fun, hands-on way by marking them out on the playground. We were amazed to discover the incredible sizes of different sea life, including pot-bellied seahorse at 35 cm, a sunflower starfish at 102 cm, a blue whale at 30 metres, and a lion’s mane jellyfish measuring an unbelievable 37 metres. To help the children visualise the true scale of the blue whale, Mrs Garrett and Mrs Parry used the climbing frame to demonstrate the height of a blue whale from its belly to its blowhole a whopping 5 metres, bringing the learning to life in an engaging and memorable way.

We enjoyed asking questions and sharing our ideas about what lives beneath the waves, which encouraged a sense of wonder and discovery. Our literacy learning was inspired by two delightful books, Commotion in the Ocean and The Rainbow Fish supporting our exploration of rhyme, rhythm, descriptive language and helped us develop our understanding of friendship and kindness too.

Creativity played a big part in our topic. We made our own colourful paper plate jellyfish, painted seascapes and worked together to create a large, collaborative Rainbow Fish for our display. It was a fantastic few weeks full of learning, discovery, and underwater adventure!

QMC Visitors

We were excited to welcome students from Queen Mary's College, who visited us as part of their Childcare course. They planned and led a range of fun rotation activities, which linked perfectly with our Under the Sea topic. We took part in lots of creative activities, including making octopuses, crabs, boats and even bracelets. It was fantastic to work with the college students, and we really enjoyed moving around the different activities and trying new things. We showed great listening skills, creativity, and teamwork throughout the sessions. It was a lovely opportunity for us to learn in a different way and to meet new people, making it a memorable part of our topic!

The Daily Mile

We made the most of the beautiful sunny weather by taking part in the Daily Mile on our school track. With lots of enthusiasm and energy, we ran, jogged, and walked our way down the track and back, building our stamina and enjoying being active outdoors.

The sunshine brought smiles all around as we encouraged one another, showing great determination and resilience. The Daily Mile was a fantastic opportunity for us to develop our physical fitness while also supporting our wellbeing and enjoying time in the fresh air and getting ready for Sports Day soon!

Rainbow fish weaving

To finish off our Under The Sea topic, we enjoyed creating beautiful Rainbow Fish weaving on card, carefully threading and weaving different colours to make bright and colourful designs inspired by the story The Rainbow Fish. This helped us to develop our fine motor skills, patience, and creativity.

Recycling – keeping our oceans clean

We have been thinking about how we can help to look after our oceans. We worked together to use recycled materials to create a large class turtle. We also became inventors and constructors by designing and building machines, boats, and trucks that could help clean rubbish from the sea. The children shared brilliant ideas and showed great imagination, teamwork, and problem-solving skills throughout the activities.

Arts week - African dancing

As part of Arts Week, we also took part in a fantastic African dance workshop where we moved to lively rhythms and learnt new dance steps. We had so much fun expressing ourselves through movement and music while building our confidence and coordination.

African Art

We also explored African-inspired art by creating African silhouette paintings, carefully choosing colours and shapes to design striking artwork inspired by African patterns, landscapes and sunsets. This gave us the opportunity to express ourselves creatively while experimenting with colours, sponges and shapes.

Music - Boom Whackers

Following on from our learning last term about rhythm, body percussion and percussion instruments, this term we are exploring the use of Boom Whackers to create scales as a class and understand the difference between high and low notes.  In the next few weeks, we will begin to play Twinkle Twinkle together as a class focusing on pitch, listening, turn-taking, playing together. 

Space - Our Way Home

To start our new term we read and explored the wonderful book ‘The Way Back Home’ by Oliver Jeffers where a little boy discovers a plane in his cupboard and decides to fly to the moon! This sparked our interest to learn more about the moon and we researched facts to deepen our knowledge. During the last three weeks we have counted aliens as well as sketched them, used our D&T skills to design and build rockets, created moon art with paint and tin foil to get the effect of the craters and made our own name rockets to take home.  We have had great fun playing in our rocket tent with space toys, planets and space creatures too!

Chinese New Year

Over the last three weeks we have been on a whistle stop tour to China to discover all there is to know about Chinese New Year! To start, we got our passports ready and boarded the plane to travel to an unknown country. When we arrived, we found lots of artifacts that we used as clues to work out where we were and it wasn’t long before we realised it was China. We read a book called The Great Race to learn about all the animals in the Chinese zodiac and found out that this is the year of the horse. This book was also the focus of our story telling in our writing sessions as well as helping us to understand 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and more through our maths by using the animals in the race and where they placed. We learnt all about how the Chinese celebrate New Year and prepared for our very own Chinese New Year Party by making Chinese red lanterns, dragon puppets, bunting for our classrooms and we painted watercolour dragons too. The best and final part was the party day itself. Mrs Bond came in to make dumplings with us which she then cooked and made noodles and rice to go with for us all to eat at the celebration. We each made red envelopes which had a surprise chocolate coin as a treat, we dressed in red (which is good luck in China) and did a dragon dance altogether in the hall!

Gym - wall bars and balances

This half term we have been learning about balances and using the wall bars in our gymnastics lessons. We began by learning about five main positions; straight, tuck, straddle, star and pike. Followed by using our maths skills to create four, three, two and even one point balances. Once we had got the hang of these, we transferred these skills onto the benches and wall bars which was very exciting! Every week we would go over the rules of using the apparatus to keep us all safe, especially as some of us were climbing really high!

Number Day

We had so much fun on this year’s Number Day. Everyone in the school came in with number on their clothes and some people even dressed up as things like UNO cards and Numberblocks! Each year group was given a special challenge combining our current topic and maths. Ours was to build a bridge for the animals from our Great Race story to cross the river. We were only allowed to use recycled materials, items from the construction area and lots of our maths skills to complete the task with our teams.

Percy and the Park Keeper

We have been reading a Percy and the Park Keeper book called The Lost Acorns. Percy and his friends Mole and Squirrel plant spring bulbs in the Autumn and hunt for squirrel’s missing acorns. We had two exciting visits from Mrs Smith who helped us to plant our very own spring bulbs in the flower beds outside Class 2 and some special bulbs we planted in pots that will be ready for us to take home for Christmas too!

The story got us wondering about moles and wanting to know more about where they live and what they look like, so we started an investigation to find out and then used our DT skills to design and build homes for moles. We found out lots of information about moles. Maybe your child could tell you what they can remember?

Children in Need

This year for Children In Need we donated £1 each so we could come into school wearing all things spots, yellow and even our pyjamas! There were special biscuits for sale and we had great fun doing lots of Pudsey Bear activities as well as learning the Strictly Come Dancing 25 step challenge routine to show to the other class.

Repeating Patterns

This week we have been exploring and learning about patterns in maths using coloured blocks, elephants and multilink cubes. First, we used coloured blocks to understand patterns that repeat. For example; red, blue, red, blue, red, blue. Then, we explored more repeating patterns that weren’t as simple and had a go at drawing our own patterns too! We even decided to use our new pattern knowledge to decorate our pot collars for our festive flowers we planted with Mrs Smith a few weeks ago.

Christmas maths games

We have been playing some themed games to help us practise our careful counting, subitising and part-whole skills that we have been learning this term. One of our favourites was decorating the Christmas tree. We had to roll the dice and collect the right number of baubles. Then, roll again and collect in a different colour. We then counted these two ‘parts’ to find out our ‘whole’ number of baubles on the tree.

Christmas Crafts

In the lead up to Christmas, we enjoyed lots of special activities, including Christmas crafts where we used our handprints to make a class door wreath, as well as snow globes with us INSIDE! We also coloured, cut out and decorated a Christmas tree. But best of all was being part of our first Key Stage 1 Nativity, where we were donkeys, shepherds and sheep, and we performed to all our families. Our teachers and LSA’s were extremely proud of us!