Little Acorns- Splash
The Little Acorns children have been enjoying our new water-based mini topic- Splash! They have been exploring different types of water play and learning about the different forms of water. They have learnt about freezing and melting, they have investigated with objects to see whether they float or sink, they made their own waterfalls, and they have even made their own scented water by squeezing sliced citrus fruits.
The children enjoyed blowing bubbles in watery paint to make their own bubble paintings, and had great fun being graffiti artists by flicking and spraying coloured paint onto a large sheet of paper!
Today Palm celebrated finishing their learning journey, The Scented Garden. We used our knowledge of metacognition to plan how we should approach making a garden on a paper plate, by drawing out our design. We then monitored our design as we went through making changes as and when we needed to. We used materials such as tissue paper, lolly sticks, tin foil, felt, cotton wool, buttons and much more. Finally, we were able to evaluate our designs and explain the strategies we’d used and whether we would do anything differently next time.
Palm Class created some fantastic gardens and were really proud of themselves. This has been a brilliant learning journey and loved by all.
Have a lovely half term everyone!
Today was a victorious day for the Cherry Romans!
We sailed across to Britannia in our ship. We travelled North to reach the Caledonia border to battle the evil Celts. After a triumphant morning, we then set up camp to create our own mosaics.
Big Wide World!
Today in Little Acorns, the children created their own ‘Planet Earth’ picture.
After studying pictures, we filled a circular dish with shaving foam. Then very carefully, the children used pipettes to slowly drip blue and green food colouring onto the foam. Next they lay a piece of paper over the foam and gently tapped their fingers around the circle. They were amazed at the prints that had formed! They look just like Planet Earth!
This week in Little Acorns, we have been continuing with our topic ‘Big Wide World’. One activity was called ‘Beautiful Buildings.’ First the children were shown images of various landmarks and buildings from around the world. Then using various cardboard boxes, tubes and plastic pots, the children tried to copy some of the buildings based on the images they had previously been shown. We had some wonderful creations of the Eifel Tower, The Taj Mahal, Big Ben, Sydney Opera House and The Parthenon.
Another activity was called ‘Flags From Around The World.’ We talked about why countries have flags and what they represent. We looked at images of different flags, then the children designed and created their own flags using a variety of different resources.
We also learnt how to say “Hello” in 9 different languages!
Year 5 have absorbed themselves in all things Egyptian this week during their SOLE based learning; becoming historians and artists all in the same week.
We started our learning journey with our ‘hook day’; exploring ancient artefacts, hieroglyphics, memes and amulets. We have continued through the week studying some of the artefacts found in Tutankhamun’s tomb and investigating what these treasures tell us about ancient egyptian life and the boy pharaoh.
This afternoon Palm learnt how to create collages out of a variety of paper. They had to think about how they drew their flower, as to start with many drew it too small and then realised that it would be difficult to fill with pieces of paper. They then had to think again and improve their drawing. All of Palm Class had to apply metacognition to their way of thinking to design their floral collage. We haven’t quite finished yet but we hope to complete them on Monday.
We used tissue paper, newspaper, card, magazines craft paper and more. Here is some of our work.
The Little Acorns had another fun filled afternoon at Forest School. We started the session around the fire pit. We closed our eyes and used our other senses to take in our surroundings. We then split into groups and took part in 3 different activities. The children made ladybird pictures by printing half an apple in red paint then carefully added on its features with a fine paintbrush in black paint. They made ‘flower soup’ and ‘mud pies’ in the mud kitchen and matched numeral and quantity correctly by counting the spots on each ladybird pebble and counting out the corresponding number of pinecones.
In Apple class, we explored plants and did some observational drawings of them. Firstly, we watched ‘Austin’s Butterfly’ and talked about how we can plan, monitor and evaluate (metacognition) our work and improve it through several attempts. We had to look carefully at the size, shape and texture of the plants and work together to give each other effective feedback. We had lots of fun and enjoyed using colouring pencils, wax crayons and art pencils to complete our drawings! 
Today, Year 5 were introduced to their exciting new topic – Pharaohs. Throughout the day we have been working on a number of art and design techniques to produce ancient Egyptian artefacts for our very own museum. Using our metacognition phases throughout, we planned, monitored and evaluated our progress through continuous reflection.
Our focus key skill was to produce various pieces of creative work based on a theme, developing ideas through a range of preliminary sketches and models.
We have had such an amazing day!
Ash and Beech have had some very exciting visitors. 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).
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.
We used the chicks as inspiration for our literacy writing and wrote some independent sentences about the chicks. We used some of our fantastic adjectives and were resourceful by using the vocabulary wall. We loved challenging ourselves to up level our sentences and encouraged one another to be resilient.
Beech Class had a fantastic time at Forest School! They made some beautiful ‘flower eggs’ and carefully decorated them. They threaded the flowers through the cardboard using their fine motor skills.
We also developed our oracy skills by debating. We used the question ‘Are Eggs Alive?’ as our hook. We discussed our ideas and decided that not all eggs are alive as you can buy chocolate eggs! 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 got to have chick cuddles! We were very careful and patient with the chicks and loved holding them.
In Apple class, we made Easter baskets using coloured card and glue. We had to follow instructions very carefully and showed great resilience, co
llaboration and empathy when making our baskets. Some of us even made eggs out of paper to put inside our baskets – it was lots of fun and we cannot wait to use them for an egg hunt in the holidays! 
In Ebony class, we have been celebrating the end of the war – V.E. day!
Today, we have been preparing for our street party to celebrate the end of World War 2.
As you can see from the pictures, we have enjoyed getting into the festive mood after all the bombing and rationing.
Check back tomorrow to see how our street party went.
Today’s Forest School session was themed around Easter. The children started with an Easter egg hunt where they each had to find a painted egg shaped pebble. The fun continued with Easter egg making, hedgehog pictures and cooking in the mud kitchens
When you go down to the forest today… you are in for a big adventure! Foundation absolutely loved going to Forest school today. They put on their wellies and went stomping into the woods. The children made stone soup in the mud kitchen and loved finding different outdoor items.
The children threaded daisies into Easter egg templates. They enjoyed developing their fine motor skills.
What a colourful week we have had in Little Acorns! The children have been exploring colour and how it can be changed by mixing different coloured paints. They have produced colourful collages from a selection of craft resources which are proudly on display, and we have looked at the Colour Monster story. The children each chose a coloured scarf which represented a different emotion from the story. They then showed the emotion into a small mirror. We had some wonderful happy, calm, surprised, loved, angry and sad faces!
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!
Another great week in Foundation! We started a new topic, dangerous dinosaurs. The children have loved learning about prehistoric creatures and creating dinosaur movements to music outside. We have created our own dinosaurs and dinosaur names!
The children have been discussing empathy this week in wellbeing Wednesday. We have focused on self empathy. The children practised breathing exercises to feel calm and relaxed. They also celebrated all the ways they excel.
In maths this week, we have focused on ‘cheeky number 9’. We have loved learning about number 9 and looking at square numbers. The children enjoyed exploring the composition of 9 with numicon.
In literacy the children have shown incredible determination to make progress. We have been thinking about winter. We have thought about all the things we might smell,feel,touch and taste in winter. We made our own snowflakes and wrote some fantastic adjectives to describe them. 
Foundation have been working so hard this week, displaying their amazing growth mindsets! They have been using their ‘metacognition minds’ to justify and reason. Well done Foundation for another fantastic week! 🙂
We have been developing our oracy skills by trying a daily ‘odd one out’ challenge. We collaborate and share ideas using key language such as ‘I agree…’ and ‘I believe…’ Here is an example of an odd one out challenge:
We have been so excited to start our new Cornerstones topic ‘Dangerous Dinosaurs’! We have learnt lots of interesting facts. We now know that the T-Rex had teeth that were bigger than bananas! We have been making dinosaur footprints, creating dinosaur silhouettes and writing dinosaur speech bubbles! We also created our own dinosaurs!
In literacy, we have been learning all about winter. We even made some bird food ‘cakes’ to make sure the birds are keeping warm. We also looked at some pictures of snowflakes and made a list of all of the adjectives we could think of. We then up-levelled our adjectives to make them even better with shades of meaning! We used some fantastic adjectives such as ‘twinkly’ and ‘transparent’.
In maths, we have been learning about the number 9. We have been looking at how it is a square number and can be made from 3 lots of 3. We have used lots of different resources and approaches such as numicon, part-whole models and dominoes to help us learn all about the composition of number 9. We have been using the metacognition cycle and have been planning, monitoring and evaluating our learning!
We have been challenging ourselves in phonics as we have been learning all about adjacent consonants and vowels. We added the word ‘adjacent’ to our vocabulary as we now know that it means ‘next to’. Throughout the week, we have been looking at different adjacent consonant or ‘consonant blend’ words and have worked at putting them into context by using them in sentences!
We have also been engaging in lots of additional activities to support our wellbeing such as going for beach walks, learning about Chinese New Year and water play!
Foundation have been very busy this week! We have been learning all about 2D and 3D shapes in our maths learning. We went on a shape hunt, created some shape pictures and even challenged ourselves to create repeating patterns. In phonics, we have been practising our tricky words. We extended ourselves using our oracy skills to put the tricky words into context! In literacy, we have been learning about the North and South Poles! We made some beautiful pictures and labelled them. We have also been creating our own winter themed songs and used our metacognition minds to challenge ourselves in all areas of our learning. Some children had a go at redrafting their work to make it even better! We have really enjoyed our Cornerstones topic “Starry Night” and this week, we completed some interesting ice experiments! We even wrote our hypothesis (vocabulary word)! Well done Foundation for your amazing enthusiasm, eagerness and positive attitude towards your learning. You are superstars and we are so proud of you!
We watched a video to celebrate and reflect on all of our brilliant learning. Here is a short snippet:
A huge thank you to all of the parents and carers of Ash and Beech for your continued support! Have a lovely half term! 🙂
Have a look at our incredible learning below:
Today we celebrated Chinese New Year in Little Acorns. The children experimented with chopsticks and noodles, designed their own chinese hand held fans and tasted prawn crackers at snack time.
Ash and Beech have been working incredibly hard this week. In phonics, we have been recapping some very important trigraphs. We have also been extending our learning by putting our words into context and using them in sentences. In maths, we have been continuing with our learning about number 8 and have even challenged ourselves to look at number 18 and how it is made from a ten and 8 ones. In literacy, we have been continuing our learning about ‘Dear Zoo’ and even made our own story books, they looked amazing! We have also been having lots of fun learning all about our Cornerstones topic ‘Starry Night’.
We have also been thinking about keeping our minds healthy for Children’s Mental Health Week. We thought about ways to support our friends and discussed the importance of talking about how we are feeling. We all made sure that we took 15 mins on ‘Wellbeing Wednesday’ to look after ourselves. Here is a fantastic example of one of our wellbeing activities:
Foundation have worked particularly hard at using their ‘metacognition minds’ this week. We learnt all about the metacognition cycle and how we can plan, monitor and evaluate our learning. Ash and Beech worked so hard and planned their response to a maths activity. They explained what resource they would use and why it would be useful, they then monitored their progress and evaluated how well it worked! We even ensured we used our oracy skills to communicate our answers effectively! WOW, Foundation, you really do have magnificent metacognition minds!
We are so proud of you all! 🙂
Take a look at our amazing learning below:
Year 2 enjoyed a very creative afternoon with making monarch models! They chose an English monarch and then were asked to make a model/picture of him/her. They were allowed to use anything in the classroom!!!!!
Wow, another fabulous week in Foundation. In our cornerstones learning we have discussed how we see the moon. We decided on what materials would make the texture of the moon. We tried making the mixture several times. We evaluated our mixture and improved upon it.We loved getting our hands dirty to create the texture of the moons surface.
We have really enjoyed reading our up-levelled ‘Dear zoo’ story map. The children loved using the vocabulary ‘quickly, immense and stretchy’. The children are extremely proud of their performances.
The children have worked incredibly hard to produce their own narrative writing. They have written the ‘Dear zoo’ story using their own ideas.
For Wellbeing Wednesday, we all enjoyed a variety of activities. Half of Year 2 found their inner peace during a yoga session in the hall. The other half completed mandala patterns as a calming activity. We had a great afternoon and look forward to our activities for next week! 
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Foundation have been working so hard this week and I have been so impressed with their enthusiasm and resilience. We have had a really exciting week on zoom! We have been playing ‘I spy a tricky word’, feeding polar bears fish and enjoying lots of fun games. In maths, we have been continuing to explore the number 8. We looked at composition of number, worked with number lines and used our ‘metacognition minds’ to extend our learning and make our brains bigger. In phonics, we have been recapping our digraphs and reading sentences with capital letters and full stops. For our Cornerstones topic of ‘Starry Night’, we have been making bat caves, finding out interesting facts about stars and discussing bedtime routines. In Literacy, Gerald the giraffe came back to visit and we wrote some fantastic sentences about what zone he was in. We used words like: frustrated, thrilled and heartbroken to describe Gerald’s feelings. We also worked hard on up levelling our adjectives to describe the animals in Rod Campbell’s ‘Dear Zoo’ and I was amazed to see words like: colossal, immense and towering! What fantastic vocabulary we have in Foundation!
Amazing work Foundation, you are making us so proud! 🙂
Have a look at our amazing learning below:
Foundation have blown me away this week with their phenomenal attitude towards their learning! They have been ‘Tryatops’ by trying their best and have challenged themselves in all areas of their learning. We have been talking about the ‘Zones of Regulation’ this week and are making sure we are discussing our feelings with our adults. In maths, we have been experimenting with the part-whole model and the bar model. In literacy, we have been writing some beautiful letters to Gerald the giraffe from ‘Dear Zoo.’ We have also been practising our digraphs in phonics and challenged ourselves to read some adjacent consonant words! We have been developing our skills in oracy and have been debating on whether or not zoos should exist. In our zoom sessions, we have been playing some games such as ‘Blankety Blank’ and ‘The Chase!’
Amazing work Foundation, you all deserve a huge STAR!
Take a look at our incredible learning below:
This week in Foundation, we have had a superb week. The children have been working incredibly hard writing questions to Gerald the giraffe. We copied Gerald’s movements in PE and made up movements for other animals. The children also made some zoo’s for Gerald to move into. They up levelled their zoo’s by describing them as “immense,spiky, sharp, colossal and terrifying “.
The children really enjoyed using a part-part-whole to partition 7 and to discover all the number bonds to 7.
All the Foundation children have been working their ‘socks off’- well done Foundation! Keep up that amazing resilience!
Year 3 have been exploring how humans in the Neolithic area created cave art. We learnt that they used animal hair, sticks and their fingers as paint brushes. They also crushed up bones, rocks, wood and charcoal into powders before mixing them with animal fat and water to create paint. We created our own cave art painting using mud and charcoal mixed with water. We were resourceful using sticks, pine needles and stones as our tools!
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.
This week in Ebony Class, we have been working very hard – especially in our S.O.L.E. .
One of our MUSTS involved observational sketching – inspired by Charles Darwin and his sketch book. We remembered to apply the ‘Austin’s Butterfly’ approach and have several goes – using constructive feedback from other people in the class.
One of our MUSTS was more flexible – we had to learn about the Galapagos Islands and then present what we had learnt. We were able to choose how we displayed our learning.
Some people created short films in iMovie, some people created websites using Google Sites whilst others chose to write the information out by hand.
As a part of our research about the Galapagos, some of us created custom made maps using Google Draw. We used these to plan an expedition around the islands. Someone became such an expert in this that she was able to help others create their own maps.
I hope you enjoyed finding out what we have been up to this week.
Foundation have blown me away this week with their amazing remote learning. They have all been so resilient when facing a new challenge and have made Miss Banning and Miss Redwood so proud. It has been so lovely to see your smiley faces on Zoom and I have enjoyed playing lots of fun games with you all. This week, we have learnt lots about our new topic of ‘Starry Night’ and have introduced our new Talk for Writing topic – ‘Dear Zoo’. We have also been learning about one more and one less in maths.
Well done Foundation, you are SUPERSTARS! 🙂
Look at all of our fantastic learning:
Little Acorns have been getting very creative over the last 2 weeks. We have made decorations for our classroom, Christmas cards, snowmen pictures and sparkly saltdough tree decorations.
In Year 2, as part of our learning journey, we spent the afternoon researching facts about crowns and why members of the royal family wear them. Then, we made our own crowns, using card, jewels, cotton wool and lots of other colourful things! 
Today we have been designing and creating spinning tops as well as developing our art skills. We looked at different techniques to bend and shape wire and well as ways to emboss into foil. We used this skills to create Christmas based products.
As part of our learning journey, Paws, Claws and Whiskers, we have been using art pencils to draw animals. We found it quite hard to copy a picture of our favourite animal last week and all felt we needed some extra support so today we watched a Shoo Rayner (an artist who specialises in teaching children how to draw) online tutorial. We all followed Shoo’s instructions on how to draw a fierce lion. We could pause the video to give us time to draw each part.
We all found it so helpful. Look at the artwork we have produced.
We were so proud of our drawings. We are continuing to explore texture and pattern in our artwork so we can produce even more detailed animal artwork in the future.
Today the children of Fir class had a go at weaving using a cardboard loom. The children worked really hard and were able to use different coloured wool to create different patterns.
If you want to have a go yourself, use this video to help you:
Today Palm class had a lovely afternoon painting woodland animals in SOLE for their Enchanted Woodland Learning Journey.
They had to use primary colours, plus black and white, and mix them to create all the colours they needed for their pictures.
We most definitely have some future artists among us!
As part of our revist to Land Ahoy, we have been designing pirate flags. We learnt about what different symbols represent on flags before having a go ourselves. We first drew a draft of our flags on plain paper before block printing them! We had a lot of fun, perhaps you can have a go at home. If you would like to try block printing at home, there is a video on the school blog.
This week in Year 3 we will be learning how to block print. Please watch this video that Mrs Bryant has made. You could have a go at home too.
We are getting very excited about our zoo trip and have started our new learning journey, Paws, Claws and Whiskers. We have been exploring pattern and watched a Shoo Rayner drawing tutorial on YouTube. He showed us how doodling can help with our fine motor control.
We took post it notes and have been creating our own patterns. Some of us thought our patterns looked like those found on animals. What do you think?
Year Two have started applying what they learned from melting their coloured ice cubes (see previous post) . They have been using view finders to paint a section of a picture. They had to look closely at the shades, shapes and colours. Some children started exploring with water colours to make designs on paper which they can cut out or use to back there work.
Today Year Two made predictions about what would happen when ice that was different colour would melted. What do you think will happen?
We will be using what we learn to help us with our up coming art work.
This week’s ‘Special Week’ children tried their hands at painting in the style of local artist, from Totnes, Yvonne Coomber. They produced an amazing piece of work using watercolour paints, dribbling and layering paint on top of other paints and really thought about what flowers would look like outside, in a field. Not bad for 4 and 5 year olds!
Years 1 and 2 have been doing lots of work on plants. They have been learning how to draw them in the style of Georgia O’keeffe. They have learnt language used to describe them and then used this to help them identify different plants. They even used their sorting skills to classify different leaves.
