Year 5 Artic Explorers 10/05/22
Year 5 were surprised to find posters up around the classroom advertising for explorers. The children were able to infer from the advertisement that the expedition would take place in the artic and had to work together to brainstorm the skills the would need for the journey. In groups the children had to explain why their skills and experience would make them the best team to conquer the arctic. Today the pupils built on this immersion by finding out more about Shackleton and his preparations.
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!
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.
In Foundation, we love to make progress! This week, we have been very excited to begin using purple pens.
We have been learning all about rhyming words and how to spot them by identifying their endings. We collaborated to spot the rhyming words and generated some silly sentences. We then had a go at writing our sentences. Before we began writing, we employed the metacognition cycle to plan our learning. We reminded ourselves of key things such as capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. We then wrote our sentences and were resourceful by using a phoneme mat to support our letter formation. Once we had written our sentences, we reflected on our learning and identified mistakes. We used our purple pens to have another go and made incredible progress. This showed we had learnt from our mistakes! Some of the children challenged themselves even further by up levelling their sentences and adding adjectives!
What incredible progress we made, well done team Foundation! 🙂
Today in Palm Class, we went on a walk around the school to find things that would protect us, if we were to meet a Big Bad Wolf. In Literacy and Guided Reading we have been learning about alternative endings to traditional tales. Demonstrating resourcefulness, we found objects from nature which have a dual purpose! Who knew that wolves hated worms? Or that they are allergic to daisies? We employed lots of reasoning, using our oracy skills, to gather our objects. Our favourite idea was to use bricks so the Wolf would stub his toes and not be able to chase us.
This week in Literacy, we were immersed in our new text The Paperbag Prince. We spent time developing the main character’s feelings in the story, we collaborated to decide how different events made him feel. Then some members of the class sat in the hot seat and were interviewed as if they were the Paperbag Prince.
We all learn in different ways, and the more ways we are exposed to something, the stronger the neural links become in our brains. When we make strong links in our brain, we remember more. This is a huge help when it comes to writing: our brains can quickly and efficiently recall those key phrases that we can then use in our own writing. Hot seating is one of the many ways we develop this in class.
Across the whole school, we have been thinking deeply about ‘why’ we do things. Pupils, just like adults, tend to perform better if they have a strong understanding of the purpose of the task.
In Year 6, we have been using the purpose to help us make out writing suit the purpose. So far this year we have: written stories for sale as an e-book, created display pieces including poetry for an exhibition and written stories to make a class book for the library.
In our new unit, a unit looking at women in science, we asked the pupils to think about what our purpose might be. We had a lively discussion and, as a class, decided our outcome. We have decided that we would like to inform the wider world about these amazing women who have changed our world.
To make this even more powerful, we have decided to release our information as a range of media: blogs, podcasts, videos, presentations and more. Once we have created these, we can release them over time to keep people interested in learning about these amazing women.
We hope you are looking forward to seeing the products of our learning.
12 sets of book shelves stocked and ready for the launch of ‘Book Buzz’ on Monday’. An early Christmas present for our amazing children! 
Oak class have started their new literacy writing unit this week, The Snowman. We have fully embraced the story as it’s so close to Christmas. Today, we retold the story and drew pictures on a story map to help us remember the main events. We then tried hot seating and we got to ask the Snowman and James how they felt flying through the air, what it was like at the party and how they felt getting up to mischief in the house. We are really enjoying this new writing unit and we can’t wait to share our writing soon.
Oak class today were learning their new vocabulary for their new writing unit, The Book of Bones.
We first had to discuss any words we were already familiar with and which words were new to us. We had the challenging task of matching the definitions up with the correct CiP words, but we worked collaboratively to complete the task. Then we had a go at spelling 3 challenging words in our best handwriting. We can’t wait to get writing so we can put our new vocabulary into practice!
Can you use one of our CiP words in a sentence?
We have had a great time learning about the Polar regions in the first half of this term. It was all started with James coming in and talking to us about why the Polar regions are so important.
To finish of the learning journey, we had an exhibition in the school hall!
Part of the exhibition was a piece of writing we created. The unit had a focus on different phenomena that occur in the Polar regions. Each pupil had to pick a phenomenon to research and then present their information in a piece of writing. Alongside this, the pupils also created Haiku poems and fabulous pieces of artwork.
I think you’ll agree it looked amazing!
The pupils knew right from the first lesson, that we would be showing their work at this exhibition – this gave them a really strong ‘why’.
As well as this, we also presented our eBook – ‘Stories inspired by the Ice Bear’, which will be on sale soon (with all proceeds going to charity).
It was lovely to be able to share all of the amazing work the children have been doing.
Today in Fir Class, we have written persuasive letters to the general public, as well as companies, to persuade them to take action regarding plastic pollution. In literacy, we have been learning why and how we write persuasive letters. We used our prior knowledge from our learning journey of Blue Abyss, along with devastating plastic pollution facts that we learned by visiting Plymouth Aquarium.
We used the metacognition cycle to plan, monitor and evaluate our persuasive letters. You can see from the pictures that we used our plans effectively to support our writing, as well as monitoring them by using our purple pen to edit and improve. This demonstrated our learning value of being reflective. We have shown our resourcefulness learning value by making sure we have all our helpful resources in front of us. Great learning Fir Class!
Year 6 have been putting a lot of effort into getting their work ready for the exhibition on Tuesday. They are excited to share their wonderful poetry and information texts about Polar phenomena. We have been studying a book called ‘Earth Verse’ that inspired us to create our own pieces of art, combined with poetry. Alongside this we have created information texts about a range of Polar phenomena including blizzards and avalanches.
The places are filling fast – if you have not booked yours already please visit: https://calendly.com/hazeldownprimaryschool/
In Palm class, we have been expanding our vocabulary in our Literacy learning journey, all about biographies and significant people. We were surprised to find out that research shows that people who know and use a wider vocabulary are more likely to be successful in their lives! We collaborated to discuss why we thought some adjectives were more powerful than others, making sure to use our high order questioning bubbles to deepen our partner’s reasoning. 
Year One have been working incredibly hard to create a non-fiction text about teachers. The children have worked really hard and created their own non-fiction books.
We have written different headings and facts about teachers.
We even made our own glossary!
Have a look at our amazing writing below.
In Palm class, we have been story mapping our new class text “Augustus and his smile”. We are doing this to try and help us learn the story, learn all of its features and expand our vocabulary. We have really enjoyed working as a team and making actions to go alongside the words. We are very resilient when practicing our story mapping as we often forget the words or actions and remind ourselves that mistakes are our friends! We think it might be one of our favourite books we have learnt about so far.
Today, Year 6 have been working extremely hard on ensuring the skills learnt in their most recent literacy unit can be embedded into their writing.
Right back from their very first lesson where they were feature detectives, the children have built on prior knowledge to successfully write some fantastic stories based on our learning journey – Frozen Kingdom.
Using their learning values, the children were resourceful and collaborated well when they were stuck in the learning pit. Well done Year 6!
This week Year 5 took a chapter of our class book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Race Against Time, and had to take on the role of a character. They had to delve deep into their characters thoughts and feelings noticing their personality and their state of mind.
After their role play the children then had to create a freeze frame. Every child had to be tracking their characters thoughts because if they were tapped on the shoulder they had to speak as their character and hold improvisation dialogues with their characters.
All of year 5 were highly collaborative during this lesson, really showing support for one another, it also showed how they deeply understand the text we are currently reading.
This week in Willow Class, we have been learning our ‘Oi Frog’ story. The children have been using actions to learn the story.
We have learnt about the new vocabulary in the story. We played a pairs game with our Communication and Print words. When we found a pair we had to discuss what the new vocabulary meant. We all really enjoyed this game.
We have been looking at how to write sentences. We have focused on writing rhyming sentences. Look at the children’s amazing work!
In literacy today, Year 6 have been learning about figurative language. There are many different types of figurative language including: alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, simile, metaphor and personification.
Figurative language helps the author to paint a picture in the reader’s mind, so they feel like they are inside the story.
In our lesson, we collected some examples of figurative language.
Some of the ones that stood out included:
The wind howled at the boy’s ears. (personification)
The iceberg calved from the glacier and shivered at the touch of the cold water. (personificiation)
The ice crackled like fire. (simile)
The snow ate the warmth. (personification)
The brave bear bellowed. (alliteration)
The polar bear reared up as large as a mountain. (simile)
Which do you think paint the best picture?
In Year 2, Palm class have been enjoying learning all about our class text “I don’t like snakes”. On Friday, we worked collaboratively to role play the beginning and end of the text and thinking about the different Zones of Regulation our character may have been in in those sections. We used figurines and toy snakes to create our freeze frames. We are enjoying learning all about snakes and hope to extend our expert knowledge to other types of animals and mini-beasts as part of our learning journey ‘Wiggle and Crawl’. 
Year 3 have been busy learning all about their favourite creatures since our first trip to Paignton Zoo. In school today, we finished writing up our leaflets which we are sending to Matt at the Zoo. Other visitors from the Zoo can then learn more about these fascinating creatures like we have been.
@Paigntonzoo
Apple Class are currently remote learning and have been using their persuasive skills to persuade their parents and guardians to do a variety of things. They used the metacognitive cycle to plan, monitor and evaluate their persuasive techniques. Miss Hazell is immensely proud of how they have all showed great resilience and used their Growth Mindsets as for some, it was particularly challenging to persuade their parents and guardians! 
Today, Cherry were travelling to the Amazon Rainforest in hunt of predators and other animals native to that part of the world. We began by flying over in our canary yellow sea plane before kayaking down the river. Then, we spotted bugs, enormous plants and elephants! Later in the week, we are going to write our travels down in diary entries. Can you remember what other animals you spotted in the rainforest?
This week the Foundation children have blown us away with their resilience and hard work during home learning.
The children have loved learning all about number 16.
Miss Redwood and Miss Banning were incredibly impressed by all of the fantastic stories the children produced.
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As part of our topic ‘Moving on’, the children looked at all the people they have enjoyed spending time with in Foundation. What fantastic pictures and memories you all created.
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A huge thank you to all the amazing Foundation children and grown ups for their superb home learning!
Today, Cherry class learnt their new CiP words for their new writing unit. We are going to be writing leaflets about our favourite predator. There were words we already knew and some we had to spend time learning.
First, we were timed to see how many CiP words we could match with their definitions. It was challenging as some words were synonyms and their definitions were similar. Then, we played BINGO! We love playing CIP word bingo. Can you remember any of the words from today’s lesson?
Year 4, as part of their new learning journey “Playlist” have been researching the key features of biography writing.
They started the week by focusing on the purpose of this genre of writing and then became reading detectives to discover the key features. They used this information as part of the metacognition cycle in order to plan a biography. As the learning journey continues they will use their self generated success criteria to monitor and then evaluate their own independent writing.
Class ideas – key features of an exemplar biography on the life of Elvis Presley
Today in Apple class, we received a very exciting piece of mail from Laura Wall after we sent her our brilliant stories. She ACTUALLY wrote to us and told us how amazing our stories were – we couldn’t believe it! We used the metacognitive cycle to plan, monitor and evaluate our stories and showed great resilience when receiving feedback to improve our work.
Today, Year 3 were using an online thesaurus to find synonyms for words to describe different feelings. We had to make sure that we made appropriate choices to match the context we wanted. For example, when we looked at the word ‘tired’ we decided that ‘fatigued’ would be suitable but ‘tatty’ would not in the context that we were exploring.
As a pair, we then had to order these words from weakest to strongest. If we didn’t agree we had to say phrases such as, ‘Can you justify your opinion?’, ‘ Can you explain why?’ or ‘ I don’t agree because..’.
Here are some of our thoughts:
In Year 2, we have been learning about narratives and have used our growth mindsets to produce stories for Laura Wall. We based our stories on ‘The Enormous Turnip’ and explored a range of other stories linking with our Learning Journey, ‘The Scented Garden’. We also demonstrated great resilience in using the metacognition cycle to plan, monitor and evaluate our stories, using our purple pen to make progress in our learning. We are very excited for Laura to read our stories! 
Year Three will shortly be writing their very own Vindolanda Tablets in the style of a letter home from a Roman soldier based at Vindolanda, a fort alongside Hadrian’s wall.
To get to know some of the jobs and the arduous duties the Roman soldiers had to carry out, we did some role play.
We marched across the empire to invade Britannia, building our campsites, ensuring they had ditches and added spikes for protection. If you were on duty and caught sleeping you faced harsh punishments. As we moved from place to place, we built straight roads to ensure quick travel in the future.
Finally, we practised our fighting and moving as a unit to battle the tribes in Caledonia (Scotland).
Can you tell from the pictures who is worried about the battles to come?
The children in Foundation have been working so hard to develop their independent writing skills. The children were resourceful and used the working walls, their books and different resources to help them. The children also demonstrated their brilliant relationships by collaborating and showing empathy.
We used our imagination to create our own sentences or stories. We are so proud of our hard work and resilience!
Cherry class loved their literacy lesson today. We learnt new CIP words for our new literacy unit- letters. We are writing letters home as Roman soldiers who have marched over to Britain to grow the empire!
We first had to find our partner who had the matching CIP word or definition. It was challenging as we came across words we had never heard of before, but we showed resilience and kept persevering.
Then, we played BINGO! This tested our listening and memory skills but we had a lot of fun.
In Ebony class we are at the end of our literacy unit. This unit has been inspired by the book Holes by Louis Sachar.
In the story, our main character is sent to a camp as a punishment for a crime he says he did not commit.
The final outcome of this unit is to write a letter to a judge to try and get him to do something about the despicable conditions at the camp.
We would love to be able to send the letters to the actual judge, but as this is a fiction book that is not possible. Instead, we are going to send the letters to Louis Sachar to show him what his book has inspired.
This week in Ebony class, we were learning about some new vocabulary for our ‘Holes’ topic. We introduce these words using CIP (Communicate in Print) which is an approach that matches symbols to words to help us remember them better.
Usually, when it comes time for showing our understanding, we write sentences.
This time, we decided to think about, and plan, our learning.
The class were given time to plan what they would do. Once they had done the work, the class were given time to look back at their approach and evaluate it. When using the metacognition cycle, it is important to give the time to evaluate so that we know if an approach works for us or not.
Cherry class were exploring expanded noun phrases today. We are going to be writing our own myths next week, so this was a perfect opportunity to practice using expanded noun phrases. We were very creative and were able to use powerful adjectives to describe our nouns. When we were confident with our phrases, we wrote sentences remembering not to write a verb between our noun and preposition. Can you write any more expanded noun phrases?
Foundation have had a very exciting week learning all about the world around them for our new topic: ‘Big Wide World’. We have been exploring different cultures and countries.
This week, we have been looking closely at Sir David Attenborough and his life. We learnt all about his exiting adventures and discovered that he is a ‘naturalist’. We were inspired by a message from Sir David about climate change and pollution. Because of this, we decided to write some letters to Sir David explaining what we will do to look after our world.
Foundation have had a very exciting week learning all about the world around them for our new topic: ‘Big Wide World’. We have been exploring different cultures and countries.
This week, we have been looking closely at Sir David Attenborough and his life. We learnt all about his exiting adventures and discovered that he is a ‘naturalist’. We were inspired by a message from Sir David about climate change and pollution. Because of this, we decided to write some letters to Sir David explaining what we will do to look after our world.
Today, Cherry class became Roman Gods and Goddesses. We are writing myths as part of our new topic and to help us understand the structure and features of a myth we created freeze frames based on the myth of Proserpine and Pluto. We had a lot of fun working collaboratively and we are excited to create our own myths. Can you remember what happens with Proserpine and Pluto?
When we came back from our daily mile, we were shocked to find that the devices had gone on strike!
As a class, we had to decide how we were going to get them to come back to work. We thought of some reasons including: promising to look after them more, using them less and making sure they get charged.
We thought that we may need to use emotional language and present a strong a argument.
We then had a go at writing letters to persuade the devices that we do deserve them!
This was our elicitation task, we will be using this to indentify the skills we need to write a high-quality presuasive letter.
Why not ask your child if they managed to get the devices back off strike.
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:
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.
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:
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.
In Foundation, we have had a very exciting world book day. The children have loved dressing up as their favourite characters. We had a fashion show to show off our costumes!
The children loved meeting ‘Rex’ the dinosaur from Tyrannosaurus drip. They asked him questions and thought he was very funny, and not the least bit ‘scary’. We loved sharing our favourite stories with each other. What a superb day- well done Foundation!
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:
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. 
