Dough Disco – Foundation – 15.10.21
We had great fun taking part in Dough Disco today!
We know why we were doing it too! We were working the muscles in our fingers to help us strengthen them. This helps us to hold our pencils properly – with our ‘pinchy fingers’. In turn, this will help us to improve our writing.
We squeezed the dough, we pressed it and rolled it. We stretched it and squashed it! We worked so hard and thoroughly enjoyed the process!
We demonstrated a ‘Growth Mindset’ attitude and were being Explorasaurs with the dough.
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Foundation have been working so hard to develop their growth mindsets and have been doing a fantastic job of approaching their learning with a ‘Tryatops’ attitude. The children have been reminding each other not to give up and to always try their best.
In phonics, we have been learning a new phoneme each day. We learn how to read, say and form the phonemes and really enjoy the challenge of writing them. We know that we need to use our tripod grip and keep our writing sat on the line.
We know that purple means progress and each day, some children earn themselves a purple post-it for making fantastic progress! Take a look below at the amazing progress we have made in phonics this week:
We have also been working so hard to develop our conceptual subitising skills. We have been learning to instantly recognise the amount without counting and decided to challenge ourselves even further by seeing number within number! We identified the amount and could justify how we could see the number using our metacognition. We then had a go at creating our own subitising patterns. We planned, monitored and evaluated our learning. We were very resourceful and used the whiteboard and pens to display our understanding.
Well done Foundation, we are so proud of you! 🙂
Foundation had a very exciting day exploring our new fancy dress area. The children transformed into Gruffalos, Princesses, Pirates and Dragons! Despite all of the excitement, the children remembered to respect our learning environment and made sure that they hung their costumes up after they had finished with them.
We also collaborated with our friends and helped one another to get in and out of our costumes. We played lots of different games using our fancy dress as inspiration and made sure everyone had an important role to play.
Foundation have been learning Phonics. We learnt all about the letter ‘s’ and the sound or phoneme that it makes. We even had a go at writing it. It was a real challenge but we were ‘Stickasaurus’’, and showed our resilience by not giving up. We even used some Metacognition questions during our learning time to explore our understanding further.
Then we snipped snakes with scissors in the ‘finger gym’. This helped us to practise the letter ‘s’ and we were working the muscles in our fingers.
We also made spaghetti soup and mixed up lots of ingredients with our spaghetti. Yummy!
Can you remember any things that have ‘s’ as the initial phoneme?
Look at our fantastic paintings!
We have been in school full-time this week and have been absolutely fabulous. We have worked hard and had great fun getting to know new friends. We have been learning about new routines and have settled in really well.
This week we have started learning about mixing colours and how to hold a paintbrush. We have been talking about the colour of our eyes and hair and which colour paint we should choose. Aren’t our portraits fabulous?
Can you spot yours?
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Well done to all of the fantastic new children in Beech and Ash. We are all so proud of how well you have settled into your new school.
This week, we have been focusing on building relationships and getting to know our new learning environment. We have had so much fun playing with all of the resources and using our imaginations to create exciting games. We even collaborated at tidy up time and worked as a team to make sure the classrooms were looking beautiful and ready for learning!
Take a look at some of the amazing work we have already done. We have been drawing self portraits and focusing on what makes us special:
This year we have made a sculpture for the art trail in Teignmouth. The sculpture features a piece of artwork from each class, Forest school, breakfast and after school club, and Little Acorns. Each class had a school value to represent on their piece and we are sure you will agree they did a fantastic job! All the children and staff, joined in by leaving their own mark or fingerprint on the artwork. Please pop down to the seafront and take a look, the sculpture is in the flower bed close to the pier. Please remember to vote for our sculpture once the voting opens. As soon as we get the voting information, we will pass it on to you.
This week, Foundation have been continuing to learn about their companion topic, ‘Splash!’ In PE, we had lots of discussions about water and decided to collaborate to create some dance routines inspired by the movement of water. We came up with some fantastic adjectives to describe water such as “choppy”, “calm”, “loud” and “tranquil”!
We used the ribbon sticks to support us in moving like water and created some impressive routines. We demonstrated our fantastic relationships by being patient and watching one another perform. We were so excited to share our performances. We then reflected and had another go at creating routines using techniques and movements we had learnt from our friends. Each group improved their routine!
The children in Foundation have been learning all about different people, places and cultures for their topic “Big Wide World”. In our PE sessions this week, the children have been learning all about dance and chose Spain as their country.
The children explored the traditional dance of flamenco and decided to create their own dance routines inspired by Flamenco.
Foundation were so resilient and collaborated when learning the new dance moves!
The children in Ash and Beech have blown their teachers away this week with their incredible maths skills. They employed the metacognition cycle to support them in planning, monitoring and evaluating their learning. The children used our ‘Plan, Monitor and Evaluate’ board to plan what resources they would use to help them explore the composition of 13. They then experimented with the resources and monitored their progress. Some children decided to change resources and could articulate why they had decided to change. We created some fantastic number sentences and partitioned number 13 in many different ways. When we had created or number sentences, we evaluated our progress and explained what we would do differently next time.
We had some fantastic discussions and the children used their metacognition reasoning to justify their choices:
“We were successful because we used the numicon. We could see that a 10 and a 3 can make 10.”
“We used the double sided counters because we could turn them to show 13 as one lot of 10 and 3 lots of 1.”
“We used the bugs, next time, we would use the stacking counters because the bugs were tricky to count.”
The children in Foundation have been learning all about the world for our new topic: ‘Big Wide World’. We have been exploring the Earth and have been learning about the 7 continents. The biggest continent is Asia and the smallest continent is Australia.
The children created their own map of the world and added pictures of the animals that live in each continent. The children used our Learning Values to support them when creating their world map. They collaborated, were resilient and demonstrated their fantastic relationships by choosing which team would complete each continent. 
Foundation have had an exciting start to the Summer term. We have been looking at the ‘Big Wide World’. We discussed different journeys we have taken, and why journeys to different places are important. We had a cognitive conflict when discussing the question – “What is a journey?”.
We set up a road journey outside and the children loved exploring it.
We also enjoyed looking at how people use dance as a celebration in different countries.
The children in Foundation had a fantastic afternoon learning all about capacity. We had a ‘capacity race’ and moved the liquid from one container to the other. We collaborated and supported our team mates. We used key vocabulary such as ‘full’, ‘half full’ and ’empty’.
Well done Foundation! 🙂
Foundation had a fantastic time during their PE lesson. They used tweezers to develop their fine motor skills and collaborated with their friends to collect the ‘dinosaur eggs’ and sort them into the ‘nests’. The children used their problem solving skills to move the eggs carefully and quickly. We then played a game of ‘hungry dinosaurs’. The children sat in a circle and took in turns to collect as many eggs as possible. We used our subitising skills to see who had collected the most eggs.
The dinosaur themed learning continued this afternoon in Foundation! We experimented with some frozen dinosaur eggs. The tiny dinosaurs were encased in the ice and we used different tools to free them. We predicted that the eggs would melt quickly if we poured the warm, soapy water over them. Our hypothesis was correct and we had freed all 6 dinosaurs in no time! We then had a go at using some metacognition to explain our hypothesis and debated with our friends!
Ash and Beech have had some very exciting visitors this week. On Monday, 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 linked this in with our learning for science week. 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.
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 eat 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!
On Thursday, we got to have chick cuddles! We were very careful and patient with the chicks and loved holding them.
Foundation had lots of fun on ‘Wellbeing Wednesday’! We used the parachute in our PE session and related the colours on the parachute to the Zones of Regulation. We collaborated and discussed how important it is to work together to keep the parachute in the air. We played lots of fun games such as ‘sleeping dinosaurs’! This linked to our exciting Cornerstones topic ‘Dangerous Dinosaurs’!
Here is a short video of us playing ‘sleeping dinosaurs’:
We also wrote some fantastic sentences on why we are happy to be back at school. We used our amazing segmenting and blending skills to independently write these sentences! We were so happy to see our teachers and friends and couldn’t wait to get back and have lots of fun in our learning environment.
We had a fantastic day in Foundation! We got to catch up with our friends and teachers and talked about all of the things we are proud of. We talked about the Zones of Regulation and how we were feeling.
We had lots of fun playing and exploring our new dinosaur world! We are so happy to be back at school! 🙂
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!
We had so much fun for World Book Day today! We all dressed up in fantastic costumes and were so excited to show our friends. We were very creative and made some of our costumes at home! 🙂
We discussed our favourite stories and used our oracy skills to explain why we liked them so much. Miss Banning shared her favourite stories with us too. They were called ‘Whiff’ and ‘Helpful Henry’.
We then completed an exciting maths activity all about ‘Room on the Broom’ by Julia Donaldson. We used cubes to measure the broomstick and used our metacognition minds to plan, monitor and evaluate our learning. We discovered that the broom was 7 cubes long.
Have a look at our amazing costumes:
Around the School in 13 Bubbles!
I was lucky enough to take a socially distanced journey around the school to take some photos of the children dressed up for World Book Day. There were some fantastic costumes from all year groups. Thank you to everyone who joined in both at school and at home. Photos of the children who are currently home learning will be added to the blog at a later date.
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:
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:
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!
Foundation have continued to blow me away this week with their amazing learning. They have been working so hard on developing their understanding of number 7 in maths. We have looked at different representations and how we can see number within number. The children have also been recapping digraphs in their phonics learning and have been continuing with our topic of Dear Zoo in Literacy. They have created some fantastic story maps to support them in retelling the story and worked hard to learn the Makaton actions to accompany it.
During our zoom lessons this week, we played ‘The Masked Singer’ and fed some of our phonics words to a dinosaur!
Well done for an excellent first full week of home learning Foundation! You are making all of your teachers so proud with your resilience and attitudes towards learning! A huge thank you to all of the parents and carers of Beech and Ash for your support! 🙂
Have a look at some of our phenomenal learning:
This week in the Foundation bubble, we have been focusing on climbing out the ‘learning pit’. The children have been challenging themselves and then working collaboratively to improve. Well done Foundation bubble.
We have looked at one less than, our number of the week, 7. The children really enjoyed using cubes to secure their understanding.
Well done to all of Foundation. Miss Redwood and Miss Banning are incredibly proud of all your hard work and achievements, both at home and in school.
Ash and Beech class have been working incredibly hard in their new bubble. Miss Redwood and Miss Banning have been extremely proud of all the Foundation children’s resilience and enthusiasm this week.
This week we put on our wellies and went on a fantastic nature walk. We discussed nocturnal animals and looked at these animals in more detail. We really enjoyed learning about one more and one less in our maths lessons. The children loved collaborating to represent one more/one less in a tens frame.
The children enjoyed seeing Miss Banning on the ‘big screen’ and playing a game with her. They told her about their week in school with Miss Redwood and what they did for Christmas.
Well done to all of Foundation for a fantastic 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:
In Foundation, we have been creating circuits. The children have used different components to create circuits. They really enjoyed making the bulb light up and developing their understanding. The children loved answering questions about why things were/weren’t part of a working circuit.
We have been working really hard to challenge ourselves in Foundation. We learnt the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears and created our own story map. We then decided to uplevel our story map by adding adjectives and adverbs from our vocabulary wall! We thought about all the different adjectives we could use to describe the bears and chose to order them according to how effective they were.
In Foundation, we have been using different resources to make number 5. We created number sentences using cubes, numicon and counting bugs. We represented 5 in lots of different ways!
This week, the children in Foundation have been learning all about Diwali – the festival of light in the Hindu faith. The children enjoyed dancing to celebration music, making diva lamps and experimenting with rangoli patterns.
We had lots of discussions about Diwali and why it is important to Hindus.
This week in Foundation, we have been reflecting on our progress so far this school year. The children have loved looking at their special books. The children have looked back at their learning and decided how they could improve. We are encouraging the children to think about their targets.
We had a very exciting visitor to Foundation Stage this week… a fairy! Two fairy doors arrived in our classrooms and we even watched a video of the fairies flying around!
We decided to write some letters to the fairies and left them outside the door.
The children in Foundation have been learning all about the sound ‘w’. We even had a go at sorting the bugs from the spider’s web.
Things got a bit spooky in Foundation today as we started to explore the pumpkins. We used spoons and tongs to scoop, mix and chop the pumpkins.
We talked about the smell and texture. We also collaborated with our friends so that we all got to have a go.
We had great fun today planting our different fruit and vegetable plants. We grew cucumber, watermelon and tomatoes. They grew very tall so they were ready to be moved outside. Daniel made some beautiful signs for us so we remember what is planted in each pot. 🙂
We also looked for some inspiration from the Chelsea flower show and then created our own special gardens. We carefully labelled them and put them on display for everyone to see!
Some of the children in Ash class practised their independent writing today and wrote what they really liked doing at school. The only word they had some help with was ‘because’. We’ve also been learning about the number 19 so we made some ‘part, part, whole’ diagrams and wrote some number sentences.
Ash class had great fun creating these ladybirds with 18 spots! They then had a go at writing the number sentences for each ladybird. For e.g. 9 + 9 = 18
In Beech class, we have been exploring the field and collecting everything we could find to create wild art pictures. We also tried to see what shapes we could create after learning about shapes in our maths lessons.
Katie’s meadow:
Jamie’s apple tree:
Evie’s heart:
Romily’s heart:
Harry’s fence:
Alex’s house:
We had a lot of fun and we even spotted some bugs.
Lucas worked really hard to draw this house. He also did some fantastic maths learning using different dice patterns and listed some tricky words. What lovely letter formation Lucas! 🙂
Georgie has been working hard at home and has created this beautiful sculpture from recycled materials. She was inspired by the story “The Snail and the Whale.” Amazing work Georgie! 🙂
We have been making up our own number stories for our number of the week: 18. We also practised counting down from 18 and had great fun firing the bubble rocket when we got to zero!
The children in Ash class had great fun today as we made our own version of air hockey! We used some glue pots and beanbags and had a fantastic time! We made sure that we all scored 18 as it is our number of the week. 🙂
Foundation had great fun experimenting with the bubble rocket today. They each had a go at sending the rocket into the sky and loved watching all of the bubbles come out. We counted down from 18 each time because 18 is our number of the week. We had a fantastic time! 🙂
Ash class had a very exciting day today as they found a toad hidden in Forest school! The toad had his leg caught under a log so Mrs Proctor used the trowel to carefully free him. We then gently picked him up and moved him to the pond where he jumped straight into the water! We all thought he looked much happier at the pond. 🙂
In Foundation, we learnt about the number 17 this week and made up our own number sentences using number beads we made from pipe cleaners and beads. We also learnt about 2d shapes and played a ‘what shape am I?’ game. We had to guess what shape we had on our forehead by asking our class for clues e.g you have 4 equal sides and 4 corners.
We have been investigating the number 17. Look at the ways we partitioned 17. We could even say some number sentences to describe what we had done.
Can you think of another way to make 17?
Wrenna’s mummy very kindly donated some tomato plants to us and we each planted one in a pot. We made sure we handled them carefully and gave them some soil and water. We can’t wait to see how they grow! 🙂
