Year 4 Activity Week!
The Year 4 children at ‘Hazeldown Basecamp’ have demonstrated their Core Values participating in a great week of activities including ‘having a go’ at inspired art and poetry, ‘collaborating’ when playing table games such as Trivial Pursuit and Hangman, showing ‘curiosity’ during our nature spotting activity, being ‘resilient’ when trying to solve Sudokus and Boggle, ‘building relationships’ while further developing their tennis skills and learning to play rounders, and of course ‘being resourceful’ at our amazing Forest School!
Our topic is ‘Animal Safari’ and we have been learning all about different animals and how to look after them. We were so lucky to have a vet come in to visit us to tell us about all the animals she cares for. We planned for the visit by writing down the questions we wanted to ask. We found out that she looks after animals like dogs, cats and hamsters. We learnt that lizards and snakes would need to go to a vet specialising in exotic animals.
After the visit, we had great fun playing vets. We collaborated with our medical colleagues to bandage our poorly teddies and check that their hearts were beating well! We wrote notes about their care and telephoned their owners to tell them they were better!
Thank you so much to the vet for coming to see us and teach us so much about being a vet.
What is your Super North Star? Do you want to be a vet?
This afternoon, Year 2 thought about what an artist is and the different types of media they use to create their artwork. We learnt a new media called collage and created our own floral collages, thinking about texture, shade and pattern for the different parts of our flowers. We had to be resilient as we found that collages can take some time as they are very detailed. We thoroughly enjoyed it and were keen to share our artwork with our friends and were proud of our hard work!
In Foundation, we have been enjoying using different objects and our own ideas to represent the number 4 in order to develop our understanding of ‘fourness’ – the property of being four in number.
We know that numbers can be represented in different ways and used the lollipop sticks to show our understanding. We represented number 4 in an array of ways to show how the possibilities are endless! We even challenged ourselves to write number sentences to accompany our findings. This supported us in seeing number within number. Eg. We know that 4 can be made of a 2 and a 2, a 3 and a 1 or a 4 and a 0!
Look at our amazing learning below:
Day 2 started off a little wet and windy but as you can see from the photos, a little mud just added to the fun. Groups today took part in crate towers, low ropes, bushcraft, orienteering, shooting, archery and raft building. Thankfully the weather cleared up for the afternoon, which the group on the lake were really glad about!
We are struggling with the Wifi here at the moment, we will upload more photos as soon as possible.
This afternoon, a team of Year 3s participated in a football tournament at Teignmouth Community School. The squad performed brilliantly: they communicated well as a team, showed excellent sportsmanship and demonstrated their amazing attitudes, never giving up and putting in 100% effort. Out of 4 group games, the highlight was a 3-1 win, drawing 2 others and narrowly losing 1. This meant that Hazeldown were in the final! After a close final, the team finished runners up and each received a certificate. Well done to the whole squad – you were a credit to our school! 
Day 1 at Colehayes has been a blast! The sun finally came out for us as we settled into the beautiful accommodation; then we moved onto a range of activities that included climbing, using low ropes and crates, bush crafting and orienteering. We have loved our first day and cannot wait for more activities tomorrow. Our dinner this evening was lovely, we ate everything and finished the evening off with a short story from our class reader book “Beyond the Stars”.
We have become super artists as part of our topic. We have been learning all about texture and colour. We made some lovely animal skin collages.
Take a look below.
The children in Foundation have had a fantastic week learning how to ride a bike. Each day, the children have been using the balance bikes to develop their gross motor skills. We discussed why it is important to ride a bike and the children shared some of their ideas such as “for transport” and “to make your muscles strong”. The children have been collaborating with one another to play different games and have really enjoyed watching each other make progress!
Well done, Foundation! 🙂
This morning for our S.C.A.R.F activity we discussed what our bodies require in order to be healthy.
We decided that our bodies need plenty of fruit and vegetables, water and milk, exercise and sleep!
We then linked this activity to our P.E lesson.
Before we started our exercise on the playground, we asked the children to place their hands on their chest to feel how their heart was beating.
The children were then asked to perform different exercises which included star jumps, hopping, galloping, running and jumping. The children were again asked to put their hands on their chest to see if their heartbeat felt different!
Their hearts were definitely beating faster after exercising! Some children felt hotter so needed to take off their jumpers and cardigans!
We then went back inside to have a big drink from our water bottles.
Once hydrated, the children lay down on rugs and blankets for 5 minutes whilst listening to some calming music in order to relax and recharge!
Palm Class had a fantastic day at Occombe Farm this week. Our trip started with a nature trail, learning about plants and trees on the farm. We then enjoyed learning about how to make pizza and picking our own fresh herbs from the garden. We even planted our own sunflower seeds and have been caring for them in class, making sure they have everything they need to grow. Our favourite part of the day was feeding the goats!
Monkey Puzzle had a great day today creating lots of Egyptian artwork for our Hook!
We sketched and designed Tomb Artefacts, wrote our own Hieroglyphics in charcoal or ink in Egyptian symbols, created our own Nemes (Egyptian headwear), made our own Amulets and wrote Transformation Spells.
A great day was had by everyone, the creativity that Monkey shoed today was excellent and I’m sure you’ll agree from the photographs that they have done really well.
We really enjoyed using our knowledge of equal groups to find totals. We worked really hard to create equal groups and make sure our repeated addition matched the number of groups.
The children loved using manipulatives to clearly show their equal groups and totals.Have a look at our super work below.
Beech Class started their new PE topic all about dance this week! They were so excited to create their own dance routines and learnt a new vocabulary word… ‘Motif’, which is a movement phrase encapsulating an idea that is repeated and developed throughout a dance.
The children created their motifs based on changing seasons and thought carefully about the movements and what they represented. They then performed their sequences for their friends. You can watch their amazing dancing on the links below. 🙂
Our new topic is all about animals from around the world. In our hook, we found out what we will be learning about. We had to use lots of our deep thinking skills to deduce what the new topic would be. We looked at animals through an opaque box to see if we could identify what they were. When the giraffe was hiding in the box, we could make out its’ long neck and we correctly identified it.
We had great fun listening to the different sounds made by a variety of animals and tried to guess the animal. There was lots of discussion about this, which was a fantastic chance for us to practise our oracy skills. We took turns in talking and listened to the views of our friends. We also used these skills to decide on which habitat an animal might live in and why. For example, when we looked at an arctic wolf, we decided that it has white fur, not only to keep it warm, but to provide camouflage. It took a lot of discussion to arrive at this conclusion, and when we got there, it led to even more discussion about other animals with white fur!
“The tiger is being helped by the vet”“The tiger is being moved to a safe place”“The tiger has made the wrong choice and hurt someone”
After this, we worked on our fine motor muscles to draw around our toy animals. We collaborated with our friends to complete this and had great fun doing it!
What is your favourite animal? Which animals do you want to learn more about?
In Foundation, we have been developing our oracy skills by debating! We used the question ‘are eggs alive?’ as our hook. We thought carefully about our ideas and split into two teams. We then debated with each other and challenged one another’s thinking. We discussed our ideas and decided that not all eggs are alive and came up with some amazing justifications!
We used some fantastic metacognition reasoning to elaborate and justify our opinions. We then extended our learning even further by discussing some statements. We found ourselves in a cognitive conflict but collaborated as a team and got out of the learning pit!
We had a fabulous day today celebrating our learning about plants. We started by listening to ‘Spring’ composed by Vivaldi as we drew pictures inspired by Spring. Then we looked at lots of different types of flowering plants and learnt different ways to create flowery pictures. We were so resourceful as we found different ways to make our Spring pictures.
Using the Metacognition cycle, we evaluated all the predictions we had made about what would happen to our carrot and parsnip tops which we had placed in water. We have been so surprised to see that they started to grow leaves.
Then we planted some seeds and flowers. We learnt about all the parts of a plant and what plants need to grow. We found out that they need water, soil and light to grow well.
Year 3 have had a brilliant day celebrating the end of our topic ‘Emperors and Empires’. Some of the activities today have been: designing and making mosaics, writing a diary entry in the role of a Roman soldier, learning about Roman numerals and taking part in a special Roman PE lesson. We even did a Roman march around the playground with our shields!
Everyone looked amazing in their outfits and so much effort went into them, as well as the shields and swords. Well done Year 3!
Here are some photos of the day.
Today we have been learning to spell some of our ‘Common Exception’ words. We Looked at how some of the words rhyme and discussed why they rhyme. We noticed that they all have the same ending. We also know that the exception in these words is that the letter e is making the /ee/ phoneme. Look at our fantastic rainbow word writing. Our Growth Mindset was evident in the progress we made as we worked. We always monitor our work to see where we can improve. We know that mistakes are our friends and if we make a mistake, we just try again. 🙂 We also demonstrated our eagerness to learn by practising other words which we know we need to work on.
We worked on the fine muscles in our fingers by cutting out Common Exception word pictures to take home.
Can you think of any other Common Exception words which rhyme?
In Foundation, we have been working hard to develop our skills in PE. This term, we have been focusing on rolling, jumping and developing our gross motor movements. We have learnt a range of different rolls such as an egg roll, a pencil roll and a dish roll. We also challenged ourselves to do a shoulder roll and were so resilient even when we found it a bit tricky! We have also been learning how to jump and land safely by bending our knees. We have shown progress by using the apparatus and evaluating our skills to make them even better. We have learnt lots of interesting new vocabulary such as ‘canon’, where gymnasts work together to perform in time with one another. We took inspiration from some Ukrainian gymnasts who performed in canon. We created our own sequences and routines and tried to stay in time with one another, we were super at collaborating.
Take a look at our amazing sequences in canon!
The Little Acorns have had so much fun exploring our new topic ‘Dangerous Dinosaurs!’ We have learnt about prehistoric animals that lived on Earth before our time. We have learnt facts about dinosaurs and realised how big some of these giant creatures actually were! We have investigated the difference between herbivores and carnivores. We became palaeontologists for the day and discovered ‘dinosaur bones’ in the sand. We then compared the sizes and put them in size order from shortest to longest. We wrote our names in the dinosaur ‘swamp’ and produced our own ammonite art on the playground!
We are still having the most incredible time here in Brixham. We have been so lucky with the weather which has made the activities even more enjoyable (if that’s at all possible).
Take a look at all of these fantastic photos:
We continue to be amazed by the resilience and growth mindset displayed by all of the pupils on residential. We have had so many individuals step outside of their comfort zone – trying out new experiences and making us all so proud in the process.
The children have been sharing random acts of kindness to show how collaborative their experience has been. Please check back tomorrow to see more amazing pictures!
Year 6 have been busy challenging themselves whilst having great fun at Grenville House today. We had some excellent examples of pupils displaying a growth mindset – keeping on having a go at something even though it was hard.
We have been undertaking a huge range of activities today – stand-up paddleboarding, canoeing, caving, abseiling and rafting. After a lovely chicken pie for dinner, some of us went for a walk to see the sunset, some of us played ping pong, whilst others had a dance off!
Hopefully the pictures show you a flavour of what we have been doing.
Year 6 have had a fantastic first day at Grenville House Activity Centre in the glorious sunshine. The children have demonstrated some amazing resilience, risk taking and collaboration already; everyone is smiling and having fun.
We cannot wait for tomorrow!!
As we approach the end of our ‘Mi familia’ topic, we wanted to celebrate our journey of learning! We began by learning family members’ names with songs and games. This helped us learn more about the concept of the ‘gender’ of nouns that exists in Spanish. We then moved on to sentence building, consolidating our previous sentence level learning and extending with negative verbs and plural nouns by investigating The Madrigal Family Tree (from Disney’s Encanto film) and carrying out some guided writing activities. We then challenged ourselves to plan and produce our own pieces of writing about our own families/ carers, collaborating to provide feedback to each other during the evaluation part of our Metacognition Cycle. The children in Years 3-6 have produced some excellent pieces of writing and as a final part of the process they have demonstrated their resilience by using their purple pens to respond to live marking feedback to ensure even more progress!
We have had some very exciting visitors in Foundation. Last week, an incubator arrived with 10 chicken eggs. The incubator kept the eggs warm and we watched as the chicks started to hatch from their eggs. The chicks started off looking rather soggy but soon warmed up and got very fluffy! We learnt all about the life cycle of a chicken and shared our own knowledge with our friends. We learnt that the orange/brown chicks are females (hens) and the yellow chicks are males (cockerels). We linked this with our learning in our new topic ‘Ready Steady Grow’.
When the chicks were dry and strong, we moved them to the brooder box with a special heat lamp to keep them warm. The chicks huddle together to keep warm.
9 of our eggs hatched and we loved watching them grow. The chicks have grown feathers and are now flapping their wings!
We made a ‘chick pen’ and allowed the chicks to run around on the carpet, we found it so exciting, especially when the chicks chased each other! We observed the chicks and discussed the way they moved. We also looked at the chicks feet and compared them to dinosaurs!
We also got to have chick cuddles! We were very careful and patient with the chicks and loved holding them.
Fir Class have been exploring fractions today. They where using Cuisenaire rods to help them find equal parts. To really push their understanding further we started to think about parts, asking questions like if this rod is 1/3 what is the whole?
Today in Willow Class we managed to grab the only dry spell possible to get out on the fit trail. The children had great fun but also worked their bodies, took risks, worked together, took turns and shared equipment. Well done guys!
As part of our topic ‘Ready, Steady, Grow’, we read ‘Rosie’s Walk’. We discussed where Rosie went and all the things she spotted during the story. We collaborated to create our own map to show all the different things she saw. We drew lots of the places and people she went past and demonstrated our excellent Growth Mindset by labelling our work as well.
Look at our great maps. Teamwork definitely makes the dream work!
Year 6 said “Hola” to their new topic today by making mocktails!
As part of our Design and Technology lesson, we worked through the cycle of design, make and evaluate to decide what juices and fruits we would like to use. We then followed the knife safety rules to chop up our choice of fruit, followed by the best part… the tasting!
After this, we evaluated our own mocktails based on their appearance, texture and taste and reflected on the outcomes. Some on of us even named our concoctions!
In Year 6, we have been using the book ‘The Lost Words’ to inspire us to write poetry. During this unit we spent a lot of time experimenting with peotic licence, figurative language and vocabulary.
For our outcome, we created pieces of artwork to go alongside our peoms – which we spoke out loud.
I hope you enjoy these.
All children at Hazeldown were lucky enough to be treated to a classical music concert by two wonderful musicians from the Teignmouth Classical Music Festival. Alfie and Rebecca wowed us with their amazing musical talents and we experienced so many instruments being played live! Who knew a bassoon could make such a low and deep sound!? What an extra treat in the middle of World Book Week!
Don’t forget the Classical Music Festival is happening this weekend in Teignmouth this weekend, Alfie and Rebecca are performing a special concert on Saturday afternoon. Details can be found in the leaflet given out this week.
Ash Class looked brilliant all dressed up as different words on World Book Day. We had lots of fun doing book themed activities and looking at all the costumes! We were so proud as we took part in the ‘Word Parade’ and got to walk the red carpet!
Look how fantastic we were!
What is your favourite book? Why do you like it so much?
Beech Class had a fantastic day celebrating World Book Day. We spent the day dressed as different words and were very excited to show each other our costumes. We also decorated some crowns with our favourite book characters and wore them proudly throughout the day! We were keen to share our amazing vocabulary and we used adjectives such as ‘colossal’, ‘immense’ and ‘ancient’ in our phonics lesson!
Well done Beech Class! 🙂
To celebrate World Book Day, we dressed up as a word to take part in a vocabulary parade and learn lots of new words! We have also enjoyed listening to lots of stories and learning new vocabulary from our friends around school. Here are just a few of our costumes, can you guess what word they are dressed as?
To celebrate World Book Day, Palm Class spent the afternoon creating Reading themed bunting to hang in our School Library. We were really keen to tell our friends all about our favourite book and the characters we have enjoyed reading about. We made it really colourful and have gone home with many book recommendations that we are excited to read! What is your favourite book? Who is your favourite book character?
As part of our amazing world book week we became story writers! We used our imagination to think about what we might see out a window. The children got very excited describing their monsters and animals.
Look below and see our superb writing.
This year for World Book Day the children came in dressed as a word. Some of the words were ‘rainbow’ ‘brave’ ‘elegant’ ‘monster’ ‘ladybird’ ‘sparkly’ ‘nocturnal’ ‘pretty.’ Don’t they all look fabulous!
The children all designed their own bunting flag based on their favourite book character. We have proudly hung the bunting in our literacy area.
We have had an incredible day in Year One! The children dressed up in their finest garments ready for a Queens tea party.
We learnt all about Queen Elizabeth and what she likes to do and her family.
We made jam sandwiches and followed instructions carefully. We ate these at a very fancy tea party!
The children loved making flags for their royal parade.
To begin our learning journey, Sow, Grow and Farm, year 5 have planned and created their own allotments. They had to think about what would be in an allotment, as well as suitable layouts. Some decided to include sheds for storage, ponds for habitats to thrive as well as dividing up their space for vegetables including carrots, cabbages and apple trees. I think some chickens even appeared on one! We have had a great time and there are some really fantastic ones to see!
We are looking fantastic in Cherry Class! To celebrate World Book Day, we have all dressed up as a word of our choice. We will also be spending some time reading our own books, as well as taking part in a reading quiz.
Have a look at all of the brilliant outfits!
As part of World Book Week, Year 3 created some wonderful illustrations using online video tutorials. We discussed why illustrations are important in books and looked at some examples in books in the classroom. Everyone demonstrated how resilient they were when some of the drawings were tricky. The finished products looked brilliant, well done Year 3!
As one of our world book week activities year 5 have been learning about the importance of illustrations within books and how illustrators work alongside authors. The children had to follow drawing tutorials and apply our resilience learning value when things weren’t going their way. I think you’ll agree there are some fantastic artists among us.
It is so exciting here in Foundation this week as we are looking after our eggs. They are not just any eggs, these eggs are hatching right now! We have been showing empathy already, being really quiet so that they feel happy. We think that they can still hear us, even though they are still inside the eggs.
Look what has happened so far… Perhaps they will have hatched by the time you get to school today!
What do you think we should call the chicks? Can you think of any good names for them?
We have been so busy already for World Book Week, reading lots of poems. We have read poems with rhyming words and poems which do not rhyme. We have read sad poems and funny poems. Some poems really made us laugh!
We have also shown our excellent growth mindset attitude in order to become authors and illustrators. We are collaborating with everyone in the school to create a Hazeldown book and we are so proud of the work we have done. Look at our excellent writing. We are working so hard to join our letters and sit the letters on the line. You can see how we are using our phase 3 digraphs and trigraphs to write some quite challenging words.
If you could create your own story about anything in the whole world, what would it be about?
To celebrate the start of World Book Week yesterday, we had a whole class Book Buzz session. We shared books with a friend and absolutely loved reading to one another, so much so that a child in our class plucked up the courage to read one of his favourite books to the whole class today.
Sitting at the front of the class, he read with such confidence and passion. It was a joy to see and the children were silent, taking in every word read to them. We were all so proud.
Year Two enjoyed their first day back after half term today. Not only was it the the start of book week but also the start of our new learning journey.
We had great fun dressing as kings a queens. We also got to sculpt kings and queens out of clay.
In the afternoon we manipulated our cardboard boxes to build castles and used them to role play. It was fabulous to see not only the different parts of the outside of castle such as the keep and drawbridge but also there was lots of thinking about the inside too. Where would prisoners go? Where is best to keep valuable? Would the princess need a dressing table? How will we keep safe from our enemies?
We are starting our new topic Misty Mountain Winding River by completing the companion project Vista. Vista is all about drawing mountain landscapes. We started the morning by learning about an artist’s tool called a viewfinder and we went outside to draw our own beautiful landscape using the tool.
After that we started to look at famous paintings of mountains. We were able to compare similarities and differences between them and explain what we like about them and how the artists had used colour, line and texture.
We then learnt some pen and ink techniques such as hatching, stippling and random lines and we practised creating tone by moving the lines further apart. Next, we used pencil to create tone and finally watercolours. We then investigated how artists use atmospheric perspective to make things look like they are far away.
Lastly we looked at the colour wheel and explored warm and cool colours.
After lunch, we used everything that we had learnt to create our own mountain landscape. We hope you enjoy looking at out pictures!
Throughout the week, as part of our celebration of books and reading, in Spanish classes we will be reading classic tales we all know and love… in Spanish! Today Y3 enjoyed listening to ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. The children learnt some new vocabulary and joined in with the storytelling of the repetitive parts of the story. ¡Muy bien chicos!
