We’re loving World Book Week in Maple Class – 01.03.22
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.
We have been working so hard in Maths, using the Numicon to explore fact families. We know our number bonds to 10 confidently now and have been using these known facts to help us work out other facts.
We started by finding four facts first, two additions and two subtractions.
We then challenged ourselves to find another way of presenting the four related facts. We needed reminding that we could only use the same three numbers each time. Having the Numicon there really helped us to see what was happening to each number.
How did you get on with your learning at home?
We had so much fun in PE today. We started with a team building warm-up. The children stood in a line, one behind each other, as the child at the back had to crawl through the legs of the other children in their team. Gradually the line of children moved forward until one team reached the end of the hall first.
We then practised improving our posture and balance by pointing our toes, stretching one leg out, bending the knee and then taking a graceful step forwards. The children tried so hard, even though it proved quite a challenge.
We have had so much fun exploring the properties of 3D shapes. We have become much more confident in naming cubes, cuboids, pyramids, cylinders, cones and spheres and have now started to look at how many faces each shape has and what shape the faces are. We printed the faces by dipping the 3D shapes in paint. There were a few surprises, especially when some of us rolled a cylinder and discovered one of the faces was a rectangle.
We also challenged ourselves to make some 3D shapes using card. We took apart a cube and it revealed a T shape with 6 square faces. Lots of us then cut a T shape and folded it into a cube. It was a fiddly job, but we didn’t give up. We also made cylinders and cones.
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.
We have been learning about the seasons and the changes that happen at the different times of year. We took out the class iPads and took turns taking photos of any signs of Autumn. The children were so excited to see the different coloured leaves and even watched as crispy leaves fell to the ground.
We have started re-creating Autumn scenes through our artwork. Look out for our giant tree on the board outside Maple Class. We are making leaves and adding them to it everyday.
We have been so busy over the past two days working together to build moon buggies. We worked wonderfully well in pairs, problem solving and sharing ideas. We were set the challenge of attaching wheels that can move. Some children chose to use split pins while others made their own axles to attach to each wheel. All our buggies could move!
Have a look at the children hard at work.
The children showed so many of our Learning Values: collaboration, resilience and risk taking. Well done, Maple class. We are so proud of you.
We visited the school pond yesterday for a spot of pond dipping. We found lots of tadpoles in varying stages of development. Some of us spotted that they were starting to sprout legs. Some of them were at the froglet stage – not far off transforming into frogs. We were all very excited.
We then had a quick explore on the field and found a few woodlice hiding under logs. Later on in the week, we will be seeing what mini beasts we can find lurking in the woods.
To help the children to remember to stay in their own imaginary bubbles, we used hoops today in PE. We imagined the hoop was our own bubble. We played a variety of listening and moving games, making sure we stayed in our bubbles and didn’t go into anyone else’s.
We played the Traffic Light game where we moved in spaces, going forwards and backwards and changing direction. We also played the Beans Game where we practised actions to go with a type of bean. Look at all our curled up baked beans!
We had a lot of fun and have remembered the lines from Mr Quint’s song: ‘Please don’t go in my bubble and I won’t go in your’s.’
We have all been working so hard this week on our Maths. The children in school have been using their place value knowledge to challenge themselves to find as many different number sentences as they can to go with one image. Have a look at their wonderful work.
We also worked out that we could use the equals sign to show two number sentences have the same value, for example, 10 + 3 = 3 + 10. Teagan also said 10 + 5 = 9 + 6 as each one gives the same answer. Well done, Maple class.
I wonder, could we find any corresponding subtractions to go with each image?
We have had a very productive afternoon today, making our own information posters about life in Victorian schools. The children have become experts in this area and have been matching up the relevant pictures to the text. Have a look at how creative they have been. They have also been writing their own ‘Did you Know?’ boxes. We hope you’ve been enjoying learning about Victorian school at home.
The rain held off this afternoon so one of the Maple groups spent a lovely afternoon outside. We started with some PE, taking part in sprint races, timed races and keep fit activities. We then had so much fun exploring the woods on the top field. We discovered lovely flowers, rope swings and wildlife. We even heard a loud flapping of wings and spotted two pigeons arguing over a nest. We can’t wait to get out on to the field again.
The children in Maple Class have been showing great resourcefulness this week. Have a look at some more of their Andy Goldsworthy inspired artwork. We love the shadows in the background of Hugo and Jude’s cone structures.
Elliot used crayons and plates to great effect to work out some division problems in Maths this week. What a good idea!
Once again, we have been so impressed by the work the Maple class children are doing from home and would like to say a massive thank you to all the grown ups for supporting them.
Jack has been learning all about trees and spent ages doing an observational drawing of a cherry tree in his garden.
Oscar has been busy outside, riding his bike without stabilisers and perfecting his scootering skills. He has also been working really hard on school work too.
Lily loved making a woodland crown and decided to draw it and write instructions on what she used and how she did it.
Connie has been busily getting on with her Phonics work. She has been doing rainbow writing of some of the Year 1 tricky words. That will help her remember how to spell them.
Keep up the good work, Maple. We are all so proud of you.
Inspired by our Learning Journey, Enchanted Woodlands, some of our children have been turning their hands to a spot of gardening.
Zach has been helping with a lot of planting at home and has even made a bug hotel to encourage mini beasts to visit.
Evan has planted some sunflower seeds and they have started to grow. He is making sure he regularly waters the plant and that it gets plenty of sunlight.
We had so much fun in Literacy today. We played different games to help us learn and use a range of interesting vocabulary. We tested our memory skills to match words and pictures, we played a fun dice game and we drew our own pictures to go with different words. We acted out words, came up with words with the opposite meaning and practised putting the words into sentences.
To end the session, we played word bingo. The children were so excited, you could hear their squeals up and down the corridor!
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?
We have been using oil pastels today to create a fiery background. Some of us drew swirls, some lines, some chose triangular shapes to create flames. We then blended the colours together using our fingers. It was messy work, but a lot of fun.
We looked at a variety of pieces of art depicting flames to get ideas. We also cut out silhouettes of buildings which we will stick to our backgrounds. We worked really hard to carefully cut out the buildings.
We are looking forward to building model houses soon in preparation for our Celebration event.
In Phonics today, we were looking at different ai sounds. We focused on ai, ay and the split a-e digraph. In pairs, we acted as sound detectives and circled the ai sounds in a story. Some of us even spotted other alternatives, such as eight, great and grey.
We noticed that ai usually comes in the middle of a word and ay usually comes at the end of a word.
When we arrived at school this morning, we found a very official looking invitation to a Queen’s tea party. We spent the morning preparing for it. Preparations included making our own sandwiches.
We learnt some facts about Her Majesty and watched a slideshow of London. In the afternoon, we continued preparations by laying the tables with tablecloths and cutlery. We learnt from the Lord Chamberlain himself how to correctly curtsey and bow.
We then had a wonderful tea party, listening to classical music, chatting politely amongst ourselves and occasionally coming over to bow or curtsey before the Queen.
We hope you’ve had a lovely Christmas. Just a reminder that we are holding our memorable experience tomorrow, a tea party fit for the Queen, so children are invited to come in smart attire.
Today, we looked at collecting information and presenting our findings in a table. We each drew our face then stuck it down alongside our favourite superhero. We could see which the least popular superhero was as it only had one face by it.
We will be interpreting this data tomorrow and drawing comparisons using the words more, most, fewer and fewest.
Please find below the Year 1 spellings for the upcoming week.
Year 1 Spelling Focus: ‘aw’
Handed out on Monday 25thMarch; Tested on Monday 1st April.
- saw
- yawn
- claw
- do
- we
Note: Spellings 1-3 focus on this week’s phoneme focus; spellings 4-5 are from the Year 1 High-frequency word list.
Year One have been creating some awesome African art! We have been learning how to draw different African animals and using oil pastels to create our own colourful pieces.
We learned the importance of drafting and how being a critical friend helps other improve further.
Today in Maple class, the children worked really hard to compose their own sounds using body percussion and their voices. This was to mimic a whale and a jellyfish moving through the water. They also created their own graphic scores on their whiteboards to record their sounds.
1st December 2016
Willow children worked in their teams to help reassemble poor little Jim’s torn up letter to Father Christmas.
They learnt about the structure and format of a letter, and labelled it using he new words they had learnt. Can you spot the heading, the greeting, the body, the closing and the signature of the letter below?
25.11.16
Willow children put their directional and positional language skills to test today. They gave their partner a direction to follow and helped each other get from one place to another, like human SatNavs!
“Turn left”.
“Under”.
“Around”.
“Over”.
“Through”.
If we get lost. We know who we can ask each other for directions!
24th November 2016
We have spent the whole day carefully crafting our lanterns for our Christmas lights parade.
Collaboration was our goal today as we worked together to secure our frames and wrap them in tissue paper.
This was sticky business, but the results were amazing!
Thank you to all our parents helpers today too. It was great to have you!
18.11.16
We were running out of paper in our big write today, and here’s why: the children couldn’t stop writing!
They loved retelling the story of Rama and Sita, using all the story language they had learned over the past three weeks. Amazing work Willow Class!
17.11.16
This morning, Willow Class worked in teams to sort shapes into different groups. Here are the groups they came up with:
Can you work out why the shapes were sorted in this way?
Year One had a fantastic introduction to the school’s anti-bullying week with a workshop this afternoon.
During the workshop, they were fully engaged and involved in a story performance, which told them about what bullying is and how to recognise it.
They learnt all about how to be a good friend and what to do if they ever felt like they or a friend are being bullied.
We are all winners!
4.11.16
In our MEGA MATHS today, we used our knowledge of shape to design and create firework rockets.
We all started off with two rectangles of paper. What other shapes did we use and make?
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…BLAST OFF!
In our Literacy lesson today, we used actions and role play to act out different scenes from the Diwali story, Rama and Sita.
First we sequenced the story in the correct order to create a storyboard.
Next, we came up with some actions to represent the different characters and events. We worked in pairs so one of us could take pictures on the iPad.
Using actions helps us to remember important parts of a story.
20th October, 2016
What an amazing, fun-filled day at Occombe Farm! Take a look at all the things we got up to!
First we learnt how to make pizzas. We even picked our own herbs to garnish it. Can you remember the ingredients we used?
We ate lunch together in the yurt. We were hungry after all that cooking!
After lunch, we paid a visit to the different animals kept on the farm. We learnt so much about them.
At the end of the day, we visited the bird hide. Then we made clay creatures to put in the woodlands.
Phew! What a busy day!
Friday 14th October
This afternoon, Willow Class used clay to create a healthy plate of food. Next week they will start painting it. See if you can guess what meal they are creating…
Mmmm… Delicious!
13th October
During our Literacy today, we worked in pairs to join two sentences using a conjunction.
First, we wrote down a fact we had learnt about the human body.
Then we chose the most appropriate conjunction to join the two facts together. Now we are well prepared for our Big Write tomorrow.
07.10.16
Today in Maths, Willow class worked together to create a poem to help them remember their number bonds. They used rhyming words to make the poem stick in their heads:
Have a a practise at home and see if you can memorise the different number bonds to ten!
Monday 3rd October 2016
In SOLE today, Willow class children worked hard to perfect their sketching skills and draw detailed pictures of fruit.
The children learnt how shading can create light and shadow to give images a more realistic and three dimensional look.
They also talked about how all these fruits can help to keep you healthy!
30.9
In our SOLE session this afternoon, we worked on our new topic about our bodies. We labelled different body parts, drew around our hands and feet and used the Explain Everything app to create fact pages about what we have learnt.
The children all worked so well together, they should be proud! Perhaps we have some little biologists and physicists in the making!
29.9.16
Today we looked at ways to find one more than a number and ten more than a number. We used 100 squares to help us see the patterns of counting in tens and adding ten more.
We will be using this knowledge to help us in our Mega Maths morning tomorrow.
22.09.16
Today we used rulers to solve a problem. We had to prove that one length was longer or shorter than another by carefully drawing to a given measurement.
When you measure, you always start from zero centimetres.
16. 9. 16
Today, Willow Class used single-digit numbers to create two-digit and three-digit numbers.
We talked about hundreds, tens and ones and what each digit represents within a number.
Today, Willow class learnt about partitioning. They found out that two digit numbers are made up of two different numbers.
15 is made from 10 and 5. We can show that as:
10+ 5 = 15
37 is made from 3 tens and 7 ones so
10 + 10 + 10 + 7 = 37
We spent the morning talking all about ourselves and what makes us who we are. We shared all the things we had brought from home with our team tables.
Some of us brought in photos of our families and family trees. Now we know so much more about all our friends and we are ready to give our class presentations this afternoon.
Maple Class have been working very hard in maths this week during their elicitation task challenges. Marvellous number recognition, reading and writing numbers, comparing different lengths and solving problems!
Numbers are all around us. Which number sense skills can you demonstrate at home?
Maple Class have been using their new writing toolkits to help draft the written content for their Me, Myself and I presentations.
We have been sharing details about our lives so far and talking about the information we want to include in our presentations. We’ve discussed where we live, who we live with, what makes us happy and what we enjoy doing.
We said all our sentences out loud to a partner first, before writing them on our whiteboards.
We even reminded Mrs Hooper how to write her sentences, by sharing our top tips for superstar writing. Tell someone at home where you need to start your writing, what type of letter the first letter needs to be, how to form you joined letters, what you need to leave in-between each word and what you need to write at the end of your sentence.
Maple and Willow Class welcomed a very important visitor to our new school library on Wednesday. She was so important, she was even wearing a crown on her head!
Yes, the Queen came to visit us and shared one of her favourite stories with us. Can you remember what happened in the story? What did the Queen wish for on her birthday?
Don’t forget to look at the helpful booklist the Queen gave you and get yourself down to our wonderful new library to enjoy reading more amazing books!
Willow and Maple Class continued to create their salt dough people, carefully crafting the dough to form themselves, their family members and their friends.
What a fantastic variety of interpretations and 3D models. We look forward to creating more mini-me models using different materials during our Me, Myself and I topic!
With our fingers on the icons, Maple and Willow have been perfecting our Pic Collage skills to create our own unique presentations for our Me, Myself and I whole school learning focus.
What information did you choose to present in your Pic Collage? How did you add a photo or some text? Explain to someone in your family how you changed the shape and size of a photo or a text box.
Can you remember what these icons help you to do? Explain to someone in your family how you navigated through the Pic Collage menu to create your presentation.
Some of us have also started to look at another form of presenting with technology. We have been looking at the Explain Everything App.
Here is a quick demonstration of the Explain Everything App. What will you include in your presentation? How will your page or slides look?