10th July – Maples: It’s a bug’s life!
Today Maples had a very exciting morning! They had a chance to visit our school pond. The pond didn’t have much water in today so we had to dig deep to see what we could find. To stop us from falling in we lay on our tummies and learnt the ‘safe stance’
We found: tadpoles, froglets, worms, water snails and newts.
When it wasn’t their turn to go pond dipping we used equipment to find mini beasts! They also identified each mini beast using a leaflet.
Some even found time to have a little skip around in the sunshine!
Maples have been really busy in school this week working really hard and having fun.
In maths they have been learning all about place value and drawing pictorial representations of number to help them They have also been practising counting in 2s, 5s and 10s through songs and dances.
They have also been busy making sure that in Literacy all their sentences are punctuated correctly, finger spaces are being used and they are using their neatest handwriting. Some have even been using conjunctions to joining two clauses.
We have also made sure that we have enjoyed using the field in the sunshine. They have collected lots of crickets – some of which seemed to make it back into the classroom!!!!!
Maples have been very busy in class this week.
They have been busy in SOLE leanring about the Victorians. They have been completing cutting and sticking tasks, true and false tasks as well as researching their own facts to find out the difference between schools then and now.
The children have also been working hard at learning to count in 2s, 5s and 10s using songs (and silly dances) as well as focussing on partitioning numbers into tens and ones. Today they also challenged themselves to write number sentences to match.
In Literacy we have been concentrating on Victorians as well. Today the children discussed everything they’ve learnt and created ‘Did you know’ statements. They spoke about strict teachers, the cane, and the Dunces hat!
Maple have been working really hard this week and having lots of fun.
In phonics they have been working hard on their tricky words and various different sounds. The children really enjoyed finding words in a word search with the a_e split digraph in.
Aria up-levelled her sentence using the word before and also adding in an apostrophe for it’s without any help!
In maths we have been leanring about position and direction. Today we have been focussing on learning about our left and right, we listened to some songs and did some silly dancing.
We are missing the sunshine but are making the most of the fresh air and still making sure we are having fun!
Maple class have been very busy in school this week leanring about their school day and how it differs from Victorian times.
In Literacy they wrote about their school day.
In SOLE they have been seeing what it would be like to be a child in a Victorian school. They have been practising the ‘3 R’s” – wRiting, Reading and aRithmetic. Writing on blackboards and chanting their times tables were firm favourites. Some of them even got sent to the corner when they made mistakes!
In maths they have been leanring about halves and quarters. Today we experimented out on the playground turning by a half and then by a quarter. We draw circles in chalk to help us!
We have also had fun in the classroom dancing to our favourite songs.
Year 1 had a wonderful treat today with a visit from the RNLI Lifegaurds. We learnt all about beach safety and how to have fun and keep safe. The two lifegaurds told us all about what flags to look for on the beach and what to do if you are in trouble.




Today we used “colourful semantics” cards to help us learn about different word types. We then had our first go at improving a boring sentence using our new knowledge.
The children worked really hard in Phonics today. We focused on the ‘ur’ sound, sound talking words with ‘ur’ in, reading sentences and explaining how we know what a word says.
A really simple and effective game to play with your children is to make some sound cards. You can then have fun ordering them into real and nonsense words. Look at some of the examples we read today.
This afternoon, Maple class visited year 6 to hear the brilliant children’s stories that they have created. The children have written and built their own book during literacy and SOLE and were extremely proud to show off their fantastic creations.