Dangerous Dinosaurs!
The children at Little Acorns have really enjoyed our most recent topic- Dangerous Dinosaurs! We have discovered interesting facts about herbivores and carnivores! Became palaeontologists as we dug for dinosaur fossils in the sand! We have explored frozen dinosaur eggs! We have built our own dinosaurs from junk modelling! What an exciting topic!
At the start of this week, year 1 received a letter from the Easter Bunny. It said he was thinking of retiring!
We decided to learn about letter writing, then write him a letter to persuade him to change his mind! We worked really hard on our letters and included lots of persuasive language to convince the Easter Bunny to carry out giving out chocolate eggs.
This afternoon, we found out our letters worked!! The Easter Bunny had left us chocolate!
This week at Hazeldown, we have been continuing to develop our metacognitive understanding in the classroom and on the playground. Using our cycle of metacognition phases, we have given ourselves time to reflect on all aspects of school life including: our friendships, our learning and our own progress. We understand that reflecting on the decisions that we make can not only have a positive impact on moving our learning forward, but can also help us to understand social situations that we might encounter during the school day and improve relationships.
Palm Class have been working hard this term learning all about different types of music from opera to body percussion. They have been thinking about different instruments and how alternative pieces types of music make them feel.
Today they finished journaling all their work and worked hard to create their own journey through their SOLE book to showcase their learning.
To celebrate the end of our WW2 unit of work, Year 6 enjoyed a street party in the glorious sunshine this afternoon. We made decorations yesterday to prepare and enjoyed getting into the festive mood with squash, biscuits and crisps!
This week, Year 5 have continued to focus on their current writing genre. We have been reading Tom’s Midnight Garden and exploring the descriptive language used. So far, we have worked on a descriptive list using a colon and semicolons, using relative clauses in our writing and using embedded clauses with parenthesis. We have then looked at how to up level our sentences by differing our sentences starters using our ISPACE Openers resource.
Have a look at some of our work:
Palm Class took part in a ‘guess the sound quiz’ where they had to write down what they thought each sound they heard was.
They then had to decide whether the sounds were easy or hard to identify. It was a fun SOLE activity and got them to listen very carefully to the things around them.
We found the easiest sounds to identify were the dog barking and the bird tweeting. The hardest sound so to identify was toast popping out of the toaster.
Today, the whole school launched The Daily Mile scheme. Everyone embraced the challenge, including the adults! Here are year 5’s efforts:
In maths, we have been leaning about perimeter.
We had great fun yesterday designing floor plans for veterinary surgeries, gardens which needed fences and even writing our name in bubble writing and finding the perimeter of each shape the letters made.
How many sides would you need to measure for a square field if you needed to build a fence to keep your animals in? Why?
Year 6 have been enjoying Science Week this week! At the beginning of the week, we tried an ‘Odd One Out’ activity. We had to look at the similarities and differences between three pictures and then discuss which one we thought was the odd one out and why. Another activity we tried was ‘Zoom In, Zoom Out’ in which we saw a picture of something zoomed in and after each ‘zooming out’, we had another guess as to what it might be thinking carefully about the appearance, texture, colour etc. Here are some of the guesses we had:
Our final activity for Science Week was to create a ‘Robo-bug’. We had to think very carefully about the ‘why’, or the purpose, of the robot and then design it focusing on the features it would need to achieve its goal. Here are some of the designs.
As you know, this week is Science week and year 5 turned into scientific investigators yesterday to learn about the reproductive parts and functions of a flower. Have a look at the pictures below:
Today in class we revisited the Zones of Regulation. (You can learn more about them here: https://www.zonesofregulation.com/learn-more-about-the-zones.html).
After talking about the different emotions that people feel and the zones that those emotions belong in, we talked about how to recognise those emotions. We then watched Shoo Rayner draw the different expressions and had a go ourselves. Can you guess the emotion from the picture?
For one of our activities in science week Year 2 have been having discussions about the odd ones out!
They had to look at the 3 images and discuss as many similarities and differences as they could. They thought about:
- appearance
- what they do
- where they might be found
Then, as a class we decided which one is the odd one out and why. The class thought about justifying all of their answers … there was no wrong answer! Palm class then had a go at creating their own.
Well done to everyone in Year 6 for the last eight weeks. We have been so proud of all of you for your resilience and determination. You have worked so hard even when times have been a bit tricky. To celebrate all of the fantastic learning that has happened over the last eight weeks, and to look back on what we have achieved, we watched a short video in our final Zoom session this afternoon.
Wow, Foundation! What an amazing 8 weeks it has been. You have blown us all away with your fantastic attitudes towards your learning and the challenges you have faced. We are SO PROUD of each and every one of you and your phenomenal resilience. It has been a pleasure to teach you all at home! I can’t wait to see you all on Monday! 🙂
This week, in literacy, we have been learning all about dinosaurs. We labelled dinosaurs, wrote a postcard to a dinosaur and even went on a dinosaur themed reading treasure hunt! This linked to our Cornerstones topic ‘Dangerous Dinosaurs’. We have been looking at Julia Donaldson’s ‘Cave Baby’ and identifying prehistoric animals.
In phonics, we have been continuing our learning on adjacent consonants or consonant blends. We have read, written and used adjacent consonants. We are even fantastic at putting our words into context to help us understand what they mean. We are now so confident!
In maths, we have been looking at our number of the week – number 9. We have been using the bar model to partition number 9 and have been learning about measuring. We have been looking at different ways of measuring using different resources like rulers, cubes and feet! We even extended our understanding by discussing what we can measure. We knew we could measure many things such as time, length, height, width, speed and weight. We used our metacognition minds to plan, monitor and evaluate our process for measuring the witches broom from ‘Room on the Broom’ on World Book Day! We found that the broomstick was 7 cubes long.
On Wellbeing Wednesday, we talked about returning to school and how we might be feeling. We also looked at our new social story and discussed the things we are looking forward to on Monday.
On Friday, we had a celebration of our amazing learning over the last 8 weeks. We feel so proud of our resilience and enthusiasm! We watched a video of all of our fantastic learning, here is a short clip:
Here we are sharing our favourite pieces of work with our friends:
Well done again, Foundation, for being home learning heroes!
Year 3! What a journey we have been on. We are all incredibly proud of you. It was so wonderful to see so many of you all together on Zoom today. I hope you remembered to go and give your adults a big hug and a thank you for helping you along the way.
Below are some images of key things you might want to remember.
We can’t wait to see you!!!!!
Remote learning didn’t get in the way of our celebrations today. All the children bought their favourite book to our zoom sessions to share why they loved that book so much! Have a look at all of the different books we shared.
Year 6 have been enjoying World Book Day today! During our Zoom sessions, we dressed up as our favourite book characters and listened to a small part of one of Miss Tapp’s favourite childhood books. We shared some of our own favourite stories and books and had a go at a book emoji quiz!
Year 5 have returned after half term eager to continue their amazing learning.
This week, we are working on instructional writing. We are using the film “How To Train Your Dragon” to help us practise writing instructions. Once we have gathered all the knowledge and skills we require, we will be moving on to write instructions for making vegetable soup. This fits nicely with our new topic, Sow, Grow and Farm.
Below are some examples of our work so far:
This week, Year 6 have started their new topic – A Child’s War – learning all about WW2. The hook to the topic was to try and experience what it was like to be in an air raid. The children at home found a space where they could create a mock bomb shelter, for example, by putting a blanket over the top of a table and some cushions underneath. To add to the experience, they hid in the air raid shelter whilst the air raid siren was sounding. Here are some pictures of their experiences, along with reflections about how the experience made them feel.
This afternoon, year 3 began their new topic of Rocks, Relics and Rumbles. We became geologists as we studied a range of rocks to find out if they were metamorphic, sedimentary or igneous. We first used our excellent observations skills on the rock’s appearance, then we used wire to investigate if the rock was hard or soft. Finally, we used pipettes to drop water to test if the rock was permeable or impermeable. All of these tests led us to discovery the rock type. We had a lot of fun and we’re excited to learn more about our topic.
This afternoon, year 3 were lucky to take part in a virtual pilates session. We enjoyed taking part, but we especially loved the plank competition! Have a look at how much fun we had.
Here is the personal PE challenge for Week 4. This week’s challenge is to have a go at some frog jumps within a relay course. Have a look at the video to see what the challenge entails:
In year 1, we have been learning loads about different types of weather, as part of our Splendid Skies topic.
As part of this learning journey, we have been finding out about different ways people can measure the rain fall, thinking about the reasons why farmers might need to do this.
We then got the chance to make our own rain gauges in school. We had to collaborate to create our rain gauges using plastic bottles, then think very carefully about where on the playground we wanted to place these.
We will use to measure how much rainfall we get over the next few days. We might even collect some snow!
This week, Year 6 have been fantastic as always!
As part of children’s mental health week, we discussed the ’10 a day’, thinking about which ones we are doing really well at home and maybe some that we need to think a bit more about. In maths, we have been focusing on percentages, and towards the end of the week, have looked at how we convert between fractions, decimals and percentages. Our literacy has continued to work towards our final piece of writing: a narrative piece based on the Golden Compass. Year 6 have thought carefully about their vocabulary choices and how we can develop this for our final scene.
Finally, in SOLE, we have continued our ‘Darwin’s Delights’ topic. This week, we have learnt how to sketch shells in detail, researched Mary Anning and used this to write a biography about her and planned or recreated Charles Darwin’s plant investigation. Here are just a few pieces of the fantastic work from this week, including two videos of the plant experiment being carried out.
Some children have also been doing lots of other exciting activities. Ben had a go at the PE Plank Challenge with his sister and Lucas has been cooking for his family.
This week in our learning journey, we have been looking at what our hopes and dreams might be for the future and how we think the world might change. Have a look at Max’s video below and Isabella’s ideas for the future.
The future. 2100.
In the future they may develop flying cars. Like our cars but without wheels. They would have things like on a monorail and use magnets so they can float. They would be solar powered and electric.
It might even have robots to look after people that are contagious from diseases that would be pretty cool. I think they will have special body scanners that can tell you if you’re poorly and make you better. If they can’t I think robots will be able to independently do operations. I know we have medical robots now but they can’t do this.
You will be able to ask Alexa to do things like cook you meals with a built-in oven, Alexa could throw balls for your dog. Alexa would be able to help with all the day to day chores.
Paper printers could print 3D images, sugar paper for baking, and normal paper print.
Things would be a lot more expensive. My mum said sweets when she was younger were 1p that are now 5p. A loaf of bread was 33p and now averages at £1.10. A pint of milk was 17p and now is 54p on average in the 1980’s.
Tv wouldn’t look like it does now. It would be 3D without needing to wear glasses.
In the future I think a loaf of bread would be much more expensive along with everything else. Imagine £15 for a loaf of bread!
At the airport they could have planes that flew themselves completely. Not just auto pilot.
A charger for your electronics, mega powered and would charge your phone, laptop etc within a minute. A multi charger.
Everything is recyclable in the future. Renewable energy is used in all homes. No animals are endangered as they have special equipment to keep them healthy and to support development.
But really I don’t know what will happen in the future, I just hope the word will be more green . I just want the world to be a better place for everyone and everything.
We have creative in all the different ways we can participate in remote learning and today we practised our French numbers with a quick game of Kahoot!
We are also working on writing our opening of The BFG. We have been focusing on being resourceful and using all of our knowledge from our notes on previous lessons and linking this to ‘The Forgetting Curve’. Have a read of this fantastic opening below:
BFG
In the middle of the witching hour, a towering Oak tree was home to a screeching owl. With a flap of its wings it took off from the branch, flailing wildly to escape the shadow that moved stealthily towards the town.
Whirling on the air currents, the owl proceeded to the town, coming to rest on the roof of Mrs Conker’s Home for Girls. In the dormitory below, Sophie rose cautiously from her cold creaky bed, put on her spectacles and looked through the frosted paines of the window. From her lookout she spied the snowy white owl perched on the roof.
Sophie got out of bed, slipping on her trainers, and began to creep across the room trying to avoid the creaky floorboards. Suddenly, lights in the corridor outside the door to the dormitory flicked on and the disembodied voice of Mrs Conker pierced through the room “Who’s that out of bed?!”
Sophie timidly replied “Sophie miss.”
Mrs Conker bellowed back “Get back to bed and we will continue this in the morning!”
The red haired orphan looked back at the old faded door and decided Mrs Conker had left. She began to creep back towards the window. Looking out into the street below, she noticed how the buildings looked crooked and foreboding in the shadowy light. Just as she was about to close the curtains a clap and flash of thunder and lightning rolled through the town casting a silvery glow which illuminated a tall, hooded figure!
We also spent some time interviewing members of our family or friends, discussing how they felt about retirement.
Sole- retirement
For this I interviewed my grampi who is retired over facetime.
Wed.3.feb
When did you retire? – 1997
What did you do before you retired? – My grampi used to run his own company.
Do you like being in retirement ? – I love being in retirement but I don’t like being old .
Why do people retire? – they might be unfit to work , or they could reach an age where they want to do something other than work.
Would you have retired earlier/ later? – No.
What benefits is there to retirement? – you can do what you want when you want more or less.
Is there anything you don’t like about retirement? – yes, it feels like you get older quicker.
Do you have any worries now you’re retired? – no , not apart from trying to keep healthy.
Keep up the great work Year 5!
Last week, we were writing film reviews for films linked to time travel. We also created our own online Literacy Working Wall – just like the one we have at school. We are using this to collaborate with our literacy skills. We’ve also created one for Maths and our very own I Wonder Wall, where we discuss anything we might be worried about.
This week, we will be focusing on Mental Health Week. We have some fun activities that we will be sharing, whilst focusing on all the resources we have to support us to look after our mental health.
Here is the personal PE challenge for week 3! This week’s challenge is to see how long you can hold the plank position for. You can use the video to help you if you need to:
Remember to share any photos or videos of your efforts!
Year 6 have been amazing once again this week. They have continued to be resilient and approach their home learning and Zoom sessions with a positive attitude. This week in year 6, we have been exploring decimals further in maths, focusing on the past, present and future progressive tense in grammar and practising our ‘shun’ suffixes in our spelling lessons. As part of our literacy, we have written another scene for our story. This scene was written as a diary entry so we have learnt about the features and skills for this throughout the week, eventually building up to writing the diary entry today.
Here are some examples of the fantastic paragraphs that were written and the grammar work.
In SOLE, we have continued to work on our ‘Darwin’s Delights’ topic. This week, we have learnt about how birds’ beaks have evolved by carrying out investigations and how animals have adapted to their environment in the Galapagos Islands. We also wrote poems and created bar and line graphs to show our results of the experiments.
Here is a video to show all of the excellent SOLE work from this week.
Well done year 6, we are really proud of your efforts!
Well done Isobel for taking time out of her remote learning to support our local zoo with some fruit and vegetables for the animals!
Well done to everyone who took part in the Week 1 PE Challenge.
Here is the second challenge: the ‘Step Up’ challenge. Remember to send any pictures or videos of your attempts!
Well, that’s another week of impeccable learning coming to an end!! Year 5, you must be exhausted; you have all worked so incredibly hard and been so resilient with your learning.
We’ve seen some amazing writing – some of your best yet, we might add (we’re not going to let a Lockdown get in the way of our Super North Star!) We have been so proud seeing your love of learning grow and grow, despite these difficult times, but year 5 you have risen to the challenge …… and excelled!!
Have a look at some of the incredible things we have completed this week:
Year 6 have continued to be brilliant with their remote learning this week. They have taken walks outside to collect a range of natural items, just like Darwin did, and then grouped their findings in different ways. They also collected data about Darwin’s voyage and tracked the distances that he travelled. Year 6 pupils then presented this data using a range of ways including Excel and creating their own line graphs. Finally, Year 6 carried out a sample investigation to learn about a variety of plants.
Not only this, they have continued to be amazing with their core subjects: Literacy, Maths and SPaG. We have been learning about decimals in our maths, a range of punctuation in grammar, using the -ial suffix in spelling and working towards writing another scene for our ‘Golden Compass’ narrative in Literacy. Well done to everyone – you have continued to show how resilient you are!
Here is a video to show off all of the amazing SOLE work from this week:
This week the children have been learning about teeth as part of our work on Bile, Bottoms and Burps.
They have been looking at the structure of a tooth as well as learning about the different types and their functions.
They made collages, posters and fact files of their new learning. Now they are ready to carry out scientific investigations about the teeth relating to PSHE- learning how to keep teeth healthy.
Watch this space for the science investigations carried out next week!
Hello Hazeldown,
Each week, there will be a PE challenge for you to have a go at to make sure we are keeping active whilst learning at home.
This week’s challenge is ‘Speed Bounce’. Watch the video below and then have a go yourselves. Remember we would love to see your efforts – you can send a photo or video to Miss Tapp if you would like to!
Good luck!
Wow, we are completely overwhelmed with how much work is being shared with us from Year 5 at home. It’s impossible to share everyones – there’s just so much!!! Here is a snippet of all of the amazing work that our wonderful children are doing at home.
We researched the photographer and artist Andy Warhol and had a go at making a digital montage of ourselves replicating his style.
During our zoom sessions, we like to have bit of fun too!! Today, we watched a video from Rob Biddulph and tried to draw the same character with our paper on our heads!!!
Continuing our learning journey of ‘The Time Traveller’, we have spent our time at home building time machines, making timelines of our lives and speaking to the older generations of our families to see how things have changed in their lifetime. We even had a look at some photos from https://www.francisfrith.com/teignmouth/photos to see what our local skate park used to look like!! We couldn’t believe how different it looked! Have a look at Thomas’ picture!
We are continuing to work really hard on our core subjects of maths, literacy and SPaG with the addition of some of the Oak National Academy’s videos. Today, we learnt all about non-finite clauses and wrote some of our own. We shared these during our afternoon zoom sessions.
Finally, we are reminding ourselves to look after our mental health. Mrs Prentice spoke to us about our ’10 a day’ – Our very own magic. We realised we are doing lots of these every day.
Well done Year 5! Everyone at Hazeldown are so proud of how hard you are all working – don’t forget to say a big thank you to the adults at home who are helping you too.
Here is a video showing all of the SOLE learning from Year 6. They have been learning all about the Galapagos Islands and learning how to sketch flowers and plants in detail, as well as continuing their research on Charles Darwin. Even though they are working at home, they have still demonstrated many of the school learning values. Keep this up Year 6 – we are very proud of you!
Year 5 have been fantastic at accessing all of their remote learning whilst at home!! We are especially enjoying our zooms, where we are able to discuss our lessons from the day and speak to our friends. We also played a great game of scavenger hunt today!!
Keep it up Year 5 – we are so proud of you all!
Year 6 have been fantastic with their remote learning this week. I am really proud of them for how resilient they have been!
As part of our SOLE this week, we started a new topic: Darwin’s Delights. Here is a video to show all of their learning so far!
Dora has also made her own video about Charles Darwin:
Parent Lockdown letter 5th Jan 2021
Year 5 have been busy over the last 2 weeks working hard on researching torches, designing their own, crafting their designs and then evaluating their use whilst searching for chemical elements on Alchemy Island.
Children have been looking at the 6 principles of Design and Technology: user, purpose, functionality, design decisions, innovation and authenticity to go through the process of designing and crafting their torches.
Take a look……
In Holly Class, we have been working really hard on our spellings. At the beginning of the term, we were tested on our year 5/6 spelling words which created our own personalised spelling list. We then used a range of strategies to practise our personal spellings. This week, we have tested on these spellings again. We used metacognition (thinking about thinking) to reflect on and evaluate the strategies that helped us, or didn’t help us, to make progress.
Here are a couple of examples of the progress made:
Mrs Prentice was so impressed with Monkey Puzzle’s learning today!! Children took turns to put themselves in the hot seat as Verideon, from ‘The Alchemist’s Letter’. It was such an amazing, engaging lesson; just look at the emotional vocabulary we were able to produce…….
Year 6 have been using two new VR headsets as part of our topic ‘Tomorrow’s World’. Some pupils have been able to have a go over the last few days, with everyone else being able to use it in the next couple of weeks. The experience they are playing is called ‘Turning Forests’.
Monkey Puzzle began to create their 3D contour maps of Alchemy Island today.
They began exploring contour lines by understanding that they are a map’s way of showing you how high the land is. The children also learnt that contour lines join together places of the same height and form patterns that help us to imagine what them and actually looks like.
We looked at Naismith’s rule to remind us that the closer together the contour lines are, the steeper the land.
Year 6 started off their new topic, Tomorrow’s World, today by being welcomed into the future. Once they entered the classroom, they had a ‘top secret’ mission ready on their table. They needed to read the mission statement and then crack the code to find out what the secret mission involves.
Over the last term, Holly Class have demonstrated excellent learning attitudes, especially in maths. They have been reflective by thinking about what they noticed and learning from their mistakes by using them to make progress. They have also been collaborative, with lots of great examples of maths discussions and helping each other. Additionally, the pupils in Holly Class have shown excellent resilience. I am very proud of them!
Today we paid our respects to fallen heroes from world wars and other conflicts. Mrs Prentice was incredibly proud of the compassion and empathy displayed by Monkey Puzzle class during their class discussion and the 2 minutes silence.
