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Class 1 blog 27.1.20

It has been a very busy and productive week in Class One!
In maths we have been learning how to tell the time when it I so o’clock and half past.
We have played lots of fun games such as ‘What’s the time Mr wolf’ and the children have been working in pairs to quiz each other using small clocks!
In English we have been learning about adjectives and the children have been coming up with some amazing ways in which to describe the different seasons.
Class one have also been practicing their nativity songs for next week and I’d like to thank you all for helping them learn the words at home too. (Away in a manger, Twinkle Twinkle and Come join the celebration. )We’ve heard some reports of lots of Alexa being used as a practise tool so a huge thankyou to all!
It has been quite a festive week I all , we have taken part in some winter themed PE games and the children have decorated candles and hats to display on our hoops in the hall, lots of glitter was had and the children enjoyed the activities.
The children have had a little look at our royal family this week, what sort of homes the royals may live in and they then recreated one using Lego and Duplo brick.
Some of you may have received notes in your monkey books asking for a long sleeved white top, if we could have these by Monday we would be so grateful and thankyou to those who have already have brought the tops in.

We wish you all a great weekend and we look forward to seeing you Monday.

Hi everyone,

We have had a lovely week this week in Class One learning our doubles in maths. We had great fun learning the doubles rap, you can listen to this at home using the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik_-OAgzD-8

We have also been learning all about the celebration of Diwali. We have made diwa lamps, rangoli patterns using stained rice, coloured sand and sawdust and we even dressed up in some beautiful clothing to act out the story of Rama and Sita. Ask us about it at home to see what we can remember!

In topic, we have been learning all about royal people and we have asked some great questions that we want to find out this half term. We have decided we want to research what the Queen’s corgis are called, how much money she has, what car she has, how many crowns the Queen owns and how many servants the royal family own! We look forward to finding out some answers soon!

Enjoy your weekend everyone and well done to everyone who has already done this week’s home-learning! See you all on Monday,

Miss Ingle and the class one team

Welcome back everyone, we hope you have all had a restful and happy half term last week. This week in Class One, we have been learning all about fireworks! We began the week with a journey back in time, 400 years ago where we met a rather scary character.... Guy Fawkes! The children loved finding out some child friendly facts about the Gunpowder Plot and took great pleasure in acting out the story, complete with a Guy, King James and some soldiers. Ask us about the Gunpowder Plot at home, to see what we can remember.

As well as our history learning, we have also been using our art skills this week, using printing techniques to make some beautiful firework pictures. We look forward to you seeing some of these soon during Family Week and Parents Evening.

Thank you also to everyone who donated towards our school skipathon. The children had such great fun today and we managed as a school to complete over 22,000 skips today! Stay tuned on the school website to see our total raised and which house-team won the most skips today!

Other

If you haven’t already seen, have a look on google classroom to see our first home-learning task of the year. Simply log on and look on the class one page under ‘home-learning’ to read what you have to do.

This week we have been thinking about the police in Class One, as part of our ‘People who help us’ topic. We have had such good fun this week designing our own police badges, shields, police ID cards, handcuffs and police hats in play and learn and the Year One children have drawn and labelled some fantastic pictures of all the things that the police need to carry with them to do their jobs. We enjoyed reading the story of ‘what the ladybird heard’ by Julia Donaldson, all about two robbers who try to steal a prize cow from a farm. We even had our own mystery in Class One on Thursday when lots of the Class One toys went missing….the class quickly came to the conclusion that it was ‘The Evil Pea’, a super villain from the Supertato Books by Paul Linnet and Sue Hendra; luckily the Class One detectives had the great idea to make WANTED posters to capture him! Luckily our posters worked and the pea was caught today in Class One along with an apology note and even some stickers for us all to apologise! It was so lovely to see the children so motivated to learn and engaged in the story; they certainly have some great imaginations!

We ended our police week with a lovely surprise…. A virtual lesson from areal life police-man! A HUGE thank you to Mr Martin for arranging this for the class, it really bought the children’s learning to life and the children absolutely loved being able to ask their questions to a real police-man!

REMINDERS/ OTHER

• Last week parents were asked to look for badges at home for our Friday Fellowship (badge assembly). Sadly we have had no more back and are now missing 5 badges from Class One. As a result we were unable to take part this week and only 1/3 children were able to receive a badge which was obviously very sad for them. PLEASE can we have badges back after half term….we are willing to award house points for anyone who can return a lost badge! Thank you.
• After half term, we are lucky enough to have our amazing university student Miss Wenlock joining us again. Miss Wenlock is currently in her second year of teacher training and worked in Class One last year, although had to cut her placement short due to school closures. We can’t wait to have her back, you will all get to meet her at the school gate at drop-offs and home-times!
• SWAP TIME! Today children are bringing home their PE kits and pencil cases for half term. As you may expect from our first half term at school, there are likely to be lots of items swapped/ in the wrong bags so please do use any WhatsApp parents groups etc to swap back over the half term! A reminder too that all children should have both an indoor and outdoor PE kit in their bags (trainers for outdoors, plimsolls for indoors) and all items should be named. Pencil case items should still be in good condition, however it may be that glue sticks need replenishing or pencils topped up. Please ensure that there are no pens in children’s pencil cases in Class One. Thank you in advance.

Lastly a huge thank you to you all for your promptness at the gate this term and for your continued support. Have a restful half term all of you and see you all on Monday November 2^nd!

Miss Ingle and the Class One team.

We have had a busy couple of weeks in Class One! Last week saw the school take part in Wellbeing week where we thought about ways to keep us happy and healthy. We did lots of wellbeing activities including making our own jigsaw puzzle pieces which helped to make a whole school jigsaw, we designed our own Elmer the elephants when thinking about how we are all unique and we also thought about ways of staying healthy by eating lots of fruit and vegetables.

This week we took part in the Harvest Experience day on Tuesday which was such good fun! We started the day by looking at lots of different stations on the playground which taught us about different types of harvesting; harvesting of fields, gardens, oceans, grain and flock. Then in class, we did lots of activities linked to these ideas. Today we are bringing home our amazing ‘harvest of the Earth’ pots where we learnt about clay and rocks from underground and gave thanks for gifts from the Earth, We hope they come in useful for storing lots of trinkets around your homes!

In other learning, we have been continuing with our theme of ‘people who help us stay safe and healthy’. We have been learning about fire-fighters and hospital workers this week and the children have had great fun dressing up as doctors and conducting assessments on ‘poorly patients’! We have been thinking about what we might do in the event of an emergency and you can test us on this at home to see if we can remember the special emergency numbers we can ring (999 or 112) if we encounter an emergency. We have also been looking at X-ray images and bones and we loved having a visit from our school skeleton Mr Bony! We have been busy labelling his body parts with lots of post-it notes and have loved singing the ‘funny bones song’ which you can find at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MleP_40Bpg

Reminders

We are now missing 4 of our class badges which are given out on a Friday (values, achievement and effort badges), Without these returned to us, we are unable to award them to new children each Friday which is obviously very sad for the children who have been chosen. If you are yet to return a badge to class, please can we have them back ASAP! Thank you!

This week in Class One, we have been thinking all about people who help give us food. We thought about farmers in their fields harvesting all of the crops and we began to think a little about harvest time, ready for our Harvest whole-school activities in two weeks’ time. We also thought about our lovely school cook, Mrs Harrington Smith and we thought about how she has to make all of our dinners nice and healthy for us. We had great fun dressing up in her clothes and we also used paper plates, tissue paper and glue sticks to create our own healthy meals. We also had play tea parties and looked at some new foods such as asparagus, aubergines and how it’s good to try new things!

In PE we have been outside with Mr Smith taking part in lots of circuit training activities. We’ve been looking at throwing and catching, balancing and getting our heart rate up. We’ve also looked at the physical effects on our body when we are puffed out.
We have Lots of amazing sports people. Well done children.


In other news, we have been busy watching our playground leaves change on the playground over the last few weeks and we began to think about seasons and how we are in now autumn. On Thursday we took the children on a lovely autumn walk; the sunshine was shining for us as we searched for autumn leaves, conkers and other natural autumn objects in our local area. (The children even saw some Canadian Geese which they were very interested in!) Our autumn objects from the walk were put to good use today when we did some amazing autumn art work! We painted around leaves and conkers, made salt dough autumn objects and hedgehog pictures with spikes made of crunchy leaves, the children had great fun getting creative.

Reminders/ Other
Please could we ask you said your child in with just one piece of fruit/ vegetable at playtime please. Sadly we only have fifteen minutes for our morning play and we like them to have time to eat and go and play with their friends!

Have a great weekend everyone and see you on Monday!

This week in Class One, we have been thinking all about people at school and at home who help us. We started the week with thinking about how our grown-ups are very good at cleaning up after children and we thought of way we could be extra helpful at home! We also made lovely paper trophies to say thank you to our grown-ups at home who help us every day.

Later in the week, we thought about how teachers help us. We learnt the names and pictures of teachers in our school and had great fun making puppets of them all! If you haven’t already, have a look on the school Facebook page to see some of our work.

We have also been reading the story of the Very Hungry Caterpillar this week to learn all the days of the week in class. We have done some caterpillar inspired dough disco (with our own personal tubs of playdough and washing our hands before and after so we can keep nice and safe from germs), have ordered all the different parts of the story, created some caterpillar colouring sheets in the art area and have even tried to draw our own caterpillars on the IPads. It has been such a lovely week!

Hopefully you have all received your parent’s consultation times by now (either by email or by the video-chat invitations) but if not, do let me know. Your children have also brought home their first library book from school this week; please return this on Monday and they will be able to swap it for a new one.

Reminders/ Other

• We are finding lots of ‘lost’ items in Class One at the moment so we are reminding the children to care for their belongings and try to hang them neatly on their pegs in school. If your child does forget items at the end of the day, we are trying to prevent them coming back into the classroom to collect them and instead wait until the next school day. This means no child is left unsupervised in class at home time. Thank you for your support on this.
• If your child has a badge at home from a Friday Fellowship (achievement badge, effort badge or values badge), please can you return them to school on Monday? Thank you.

Enjoy your weekend everyone!

Miss Ingle and the Class One team

Here we are at the end of our second week back and Class One is now complete with all 30 children now in class! We are all feeling very proud of the new cohort in the way they have conducted themselves around school and in the kind and sensible way they carry out their learning each day and it has been lovely this week to watch them begin to form friendships with new children and get stuck into the many activities we have had planned for them this week.

This week, your child has very busy taking part in…

• Circle times to discuss likes and dislikes
• Painting in the art corner
• Reading and acting out the story of ‘The Blessings Jar’ by Colleen Coble and have designed our own blessings jars
• Been learning about materials and testing out magnets and magnetic construction toys
• Trying out some number and phonics games on the class computers
• Learning single letter phonic sounds and forming them without taking our pen off of the whiteboard/ moving the pen in the correct direction.

A big thank you once again for your patience at the gate during home-time and morning drop offs as we learn all of your names and faces. As you can imagine, learning parents, grandparents, child-minders, aunties and other family friends for each child is not an easy task but we hope to get a little quicker at this soon! In the meantime, please continue to inform a member of office staff or class adult if someone new is picking up your child, as we will be unable to let your child leave unless we have had consent and notification of this.

In the mornings, we are trying to open 5 minutes early at 20 to 9 so we will carry on with this to ease congestion at the front of the school.

Lastly, you may notice that over the course of the year, your child may come home wearing a badge on a Friday afternoon. These are from our Friday awards assembly in which your child can win a values, effort or achievement award. Your child will be able to wear their badge for the whole week but will hand it back in the following Friday morning, so that it can be given to the next person. We ask kindly that children look after their badges each week and that parents ensure that the children bring it back in on the following Friday. Thank you for your cooperation. J

Other.

• On Monday, all reception children will take home their first library book. This is chosen by the children from our school library and is loaned out for one week. We ask the children bring it into school each Monday so that we can then sign it back in to our system and swap it for a new one please. Forgotten books will mean that your child will be unable to change their book until it is returned.
• Thank you for all making your children so independent this year! We have noticed almost all children can put on a coat/ sort out inside out clothing and get changed for PE with no help. This makes things so much easier in school for both your children and the teachers! We ask kindly that you continue to encourage your children to change and un-change at home themselves, to continue to develop these skills.
• Thank you also to all those who attended curriculum evening last night. Despite a few technical issues at first, I am glad all went according to plan! Any questions, just let us know by emailing the class email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Thank you and enjoy your weekend everyone,

Miss Ingle, Mrs Holmes and Mrs Sabri

What a successful week we have had in Class One this week! All children have settled extremely well into their new routine and it has been a joy to get to know some of our new intake over the course of the week. The children have been up to many different and exciting activities including rainbow sand mark-making, painting, PE lessons with Mr Smith, number work, phonics sessions, a visit to St Ippolyts church and more. It is also really lovely to see so many children coming in so independently and seeing how our much big Year One children have grown!

The Year Ones have risen to the challenge on trickier work and have been busy getting to grips with writing and working in their new exercise books. They have been busy writing about their summer holidays, doing some RSHE work on feelings and hygiene and have had fun learning their new spellings in their spelling books. We are all amazed at how much they have produced this week so a big well done to them all!

A big thank you to all the new parents for being so patient at the gate as we learn all of your names and faces and also for ensuring that all school uniform is clearly named. This has made things much easier for us all this week and is very much appreciated, especially with 3 PE lessons already this week!  Our PE days in Class One will be on a Tuesday and Wednesday this year where the children will change into their full kits and on Thursday we will have a short 'fine and gross motor-skills session' which the children can stay in their uniforms for.  We do ask however that children keep their kits in school all week; if you would like them to bring it home for a wash at weekends, just let us know and we will make sure they bring it home to you on a Friday.

Reminders.

• A reminder to all parents that children’s reading books will be changed each Monday, Wednesday and Friday if your child is in Reception. Your child will be heard read by the class adults throughout the week so please ensure these come into school each day in book-bags. Year One children are encouraged to change their book daily (only if they have read at home).
• Water bottles should contain still, unflavoured water only. Your child may also bring in one fruit or vegetable item each day to eat at their snack-time. We ask that you do not send in cereal bars/ crackers/ yoghurt covered fruit/ cheeses or other similar items please. We are also kindly asking at the moment that children bring their snack either as a loose piece of fruit/ veg OR in a disposable bag only please (no snack-pots or tubs).
• As part of the Early Years Curriculum, children are encouraged to work and learn outside as part of an ‘extended classroom’ in out outside area. We have a saying in Reception that there is no such thing as bad weather, only wrong clothing! You may therefore like your children to bring in some wellington boots to keep in class each day, so that they are suitably dressed for all weathers. Some of our best learning and experimenting comes from playing in the rain and with puddles!
• Lastly, all children are expected to change for PE at school with a level of independence. Whilst we will always help those who need it, we encourage children to ‘have a go’ at doing up/ undoing buttons and ties, before seeking help from a grown up. We therefore ask that you practice this at home with your child over the next half term or so, so that they can get used to dressing and undressing with confidence. You may also wish to support your child to recognise their belongings by ensuring they can read their name themselves.
• Last of all, a big thank you to parents for being so prompt with morning drop-offs and afternoon pick-ups at the gate. Due to our COVID staggered timetable at school, all teachers are aiming to get children in/out as quickly as possible/ within 5 minutes and so we ask kindly that you only stop to chat to a member of staff if you have a pressing or urgent notice.

Thank you to all for a great first week, it has been lovely chatting to some of you at the gate and I look forward to getting to know you and the children more over the coming year!

Miss Ingle and the Class One team

Hi everyone, here we are at the end of another busy week in Class One.

In maths we have been learning to tell the time this week; the children have been working on reading analogue clocks and in year One, we are even starting to read the time digitally! We had lots of practice making o’clock times this week and began to move on to half past times, making sure that our hour hand went past the correct number. No lesson on time would be complete without a game of ‘what’s the time Mr Wolf?’ and the children had great fun taking it in turns to create the time on our school clocks.

We have continuing our theme of animals this term, by learning all about nocturnal creatures this week. We learnt all about non-fiction book and visited our library, to spot lots of information texts. We had to look hard to sot photographs, contents pages, glossaries and labels on the pictures, to identify it correctly as a non-fiction book. Later in the week, we wrote our own non-fiction reports about night-time creatures. Ask us at home what we remember about bats, hedgehogs, foxes and owls!

A big thank you for your donations to sports relief, we had a wonderful PE session on Friday put on by Mr Smith and Mr Jefferies. The children took part in our usual daily mile, but this time to music! Have a look on the gallery page to see us all in action.

Reminders:

We seem to be having a little trouble at the moment with book-bag storage in Class One! Whilst we love the fact the children enjoy identifying their book bags with key rings, we ask kindly that children limit their keyrings down to one (small size) keyring per book-bag please. Thank you in advance!

Welcome back from half term everyone and here we are, half way through the academic year already!

We were greeted back from half term with a rather unusual sight in class one: a giant egg and a trail of sandy dinosaur footprints! We decided to create some posters to warn everyone away from the egg, just in case there is a T-rex inside and we also created our own dinosaur inspired clue books. We had to think carefully about using lots of interesting adjectives and in Year One, we were also encouraged to use lots of commas too!

In maths, we have been busy doing lots of counting with coins, including using three coins to create a total. It has been very tricky to remember to write the ‘p’ sign after our answers and we have enjoyed looking at all the different coins too.

In Science, we started to look at the needs of pets and animals and we watched a great video on the RSPCA website about what pets need to thrive. We talked about our own animals at home and Class One have promised to help out with their pets at home; you will have to let us know if they fulfil their promise!

Lastly, in RE, we have begun our Easter topic by thinking about Heaven in the Christian faith. We talked a little about what Heaven is and the children drew what they thought it may look like. Next week, we will begin to think about the story of Palm Sunday.

Reminders/ Other

A big THANK YOU for all of your amazing cakes and donations today for our Australia fundraising day! The children loved all the activities after school and of course all the cakes at break time!

Happy Wellbeing week everyone! We have had the most fantastic week, thinking all about how to look after our wellbeing and keep happy and healthy. We started the week by reading a book called ‘I am Love’ and we talked about what love meant to us and how everyone in class loves different things. It was lovely to hear the children give such personal responses and think about what makes them unique. On Tuesday, we took part in national Safer Internet Day by reading the book, ‘Smartie the Penguin’, all about a little penguin who gets an IPad for his birthday. Sadly, popups keep coming up on his screen, however he does the right thing and shows a grown-up who can help make sure they go away. We then showed we could be safe on the internet, by using the beebot app and the jit5 website to do some computer coding!

On Wednesday, we thought about being present in the moment and how we could be mindful when we eat. We had a fruit-tasting workshop to think about how we can smell, feel and taste fruit we eat and we even created our own fruit smoothies using some special bicycles with blenders attached to them! Thursday was all about our aspirations and we read a book about unusual jobs that we may like to do when we are older; we learnt about toy-makers and toy-breakers, submarine chefs and elephant dressers and the children had great fun drawing themselves when they grow up! We ended the day with a brilliant Ballet class run my Mrs Hegarty. The children watched a video of both male and female ballet dancers and it was so lovely to watch them all take part and see them all learn some different ballet moves; a big thank you to Mrs Hegarty for kindly giving up her afternoon to come in!

Lastly, today we have been thinking about being active and we had a boot-camp session run by ‘FitKidz’. The children got to use kettlebells, Bosu balls, medicine balls and even battle ropes, it was so much fun!

Enjoy your half term everyone and see you all in a week’s time!

This week in Class One we have been thinking all about instructions! We have been very busy making toast for Hansel and Gretel and porridge for the 3 bears, making sure we number each step and also use lots of bossy verbs! The children had to be very specific with their instructions to make sure the teachers didn’t go wrong and they have written some fantastic instructions in class! In number work, we have been counting up in jumps of 2 and 10 and have been using our detective skills to see what patterns we can spot on our 100 squares. Test us at home to see how good we are!

In physical development, we have been creating a fairy-tale dance to ‘I need a hero’ from Shrek 2; we had to listen carefully to see how the music got faster and slower and work well with a partner to coordinate our moves. We also carried on our theme of ‘instructions’ into some technology activities and we learnt all about algorithms! Despite being a very big word, we learnt that this simply means ‘giving an instruction’ and we have been using our little class bee-bots to code some real devices and navigate them around mazes. We also used the ‘beebot’ app on the IPads which is free to download, if you would like to add it to your IPads at home.

Next week is our school’s ‘Wellbeing Week’ so we have lots of fun things planned and visitors coming in to teach the children.  The themes for each day are as follows:

Monday is all about friendships with others,

Tuesday is about using computers and IPads safely and ignoring pop-ups,

Wednesday is about being mindful and present in the moment,

Thursday is for thinking of our aspirations and goals and

Friday is about being active and healthy!

Information will be coming out next week each day as to exactly what we have been learning about and it will give you some ideas for activities you can do with us at home.

Enjoy your weekend!

Miss Ingle and all of Class One!

This week in Class One, we have been learning the story of Anansi and the turtle, a traditional tale from Africa! The story tells of a greedy spider called Anansi, who refuses to share his food with a hungry turtle. Later in the story, turtle gets his revenge by inviting Anansi to join him for an underwater meal, only for Anansi to float back up to the surface! The children loved the story and have been very busy writing their own versions, creating playdough spiders and turtles, investigating floating and sinking and writing speech bubbles for the different characters. If you would like to hear the story yourself, you can view it at: https://vimeo.com/4076703

In number work, we continued with our theme of halving numbers and had great fun sharing lots of toy food fairly with our friends. We talked about what ‘half’ meant and how when we cut a shape in half, both pieces have to be the same size to make it fair. The children are getting very good at sharing and dividing by 2 now so test us at home to see how good we are! Other things we have been up to this week include: using a giant slide of sandpaper, smooth rubber, wood and carpet to see which was the most slippery surface and which had the most friction, creating wanted posters to catch Anansi the spider, looking at toys from the 1990s and even playing with some (tamagotchis and he-man toys seemed to be the favourites!) and learning about style of music including bhangra, irish folk music and latin!

Have a lovely weekend everyone and enjou your weekend, from all of Class One.

Happy Arts Week and Happy Chinese New Year to you all (or should we say… gong hei fat choy!)

Class one have had some very busy arty crafty days this week. We have looked at and celebrated Japan, looking at modern and traditional and creating new ways to learn. If you haven’t already then make sure you check out the gallery page above, to see some of the amazing Japanese inspired art we have been doing! Over the course of the two days the children have painted, drawn and even built robots working alone and as a collaborative team to celebrate all things Japan! We even had a go at some Japanese dancing, wearing some authentic children’s kimonos!

Thursday was a particularly good day as we were treated to a typical Japanese meal which was delicious so a big thank you to Mrs Harrington Smith and all the kitchen staff for that.

The children and staff have worked tirelessly and had a wonderful fun filled learning week. A massive thankyou to all parent helpers and everyone who brought in recyclable tins to help us and to those who helped out in school.

In other news this week we have also managed to squeeze in some phonics learning, we are now on two letters that make one sound also known as digraphs. In RE we have been looking at compassion, our value for this half term. The children have been learning about Jesus being a friend to the friendless and how sometimes being a friend to those seemingly undeserving is the noble thing to do.

Wishing you all a restful weekend and see you all on Monday!

This week in class one, we began our mini topic of fairy tales.  We all had a bit of a shock when on Monday, a beanstalk mysteriously grew in the middle of our classroom. After some investigation work, we learnt the story of Jack and the beanstalk and decided that Jack must have visited our classroom over the weekend.  We used the story to generate lots of amazing child initiated activities such as making our own paper stick figures to re-enact the story, creating our own Jack and the Beanstalk puppet show and acting out the story. 

As well as Jack and the beanstalk, we have also looked at many other fairy tales this week including Snow White, The Gingerbread Man, Rumpelstiltskin and The Three Bears.  We learnt that most traditional tales have a lesson/moral in them to teach us and we thought hard about what these might be.  We also listened carefully for things which happen 3 times as we learnt this is another common feature of traditional tales.  Next week, we will learn some more fairy tales and of course we have our amazing school arts days to look forward to!

Enjoy your weekend everybody!

Miss Ingle, Mrs Holmes and Mrs Sabri

Hi everyone!  A slightly later blog than usual due to a technical issue but here is a run down of last week...

 

Welcome back everyone! We hope you have all had a lovely Christmas and New Year, happy 2020 to you all!

This week in class, we have been learning all about rhyming words, using the books ‘OI Frog!’, ‘OI dog!’ and ‘OI Cat!’ all by the Author Kes Gray. We have had great fun thinking of things that rhyme with animal names; poodles and noodles, larks and sharks and leopards and shepherds! Ask us at home if we can remember any!

We have also been beginning to think lots about fairy tales this week in class. Our role play area has transformed into a sweetie house straight out of Hansel and Gretel, we found some magic beans in class which we think might belong to Jack, from Jack in the beanstalk and we have also started to design our own fairy tale puppets, which we will be making throughout this half term.

In number work, we learnt about subtracting this week and we had lots of fun taking numbers away from Miss Ingle to see how the number gets smaller. We used lots of practical objects to take away and were very good at this skill…. You may even want to ask us some take-away questions at home to test us!

Other

School arts days are coming up soon and we are in desperate need of some junk modelling bits! If anyone can donate any of the following to Class One, we would be so appreciative! We are in need of…

• Empty tin cans
• Bottle caps and plastic lids from things (coffee jars etc)
• Egg Cartons
• Small square tins (sweet and mint tins etc)
• Small boxes (smaller than a cereal box)
• Any old circuit boards, wire, metal nuts, and flexi-tube.

The more, the better! Thank you so much in advance!

Enjoy your weekend everyone and see you all on Monday!

We have been getting VERY Christmassy in Class One over the last two weeks with lots of festive crafts and lessons! We have been making Christmas cards (these will come home at the end of term for you!), decorations for our class and of course have been very busy rehearsing for our nativity next week. We cannot wait for you to see it and have tried so hard to learn all of the words and actions. Our challenge at the moment is to use a big voice so that we can be heard so you may like to help us practice this over the weekend!

In other news, we have been learning about hot and cold places recently, including looking at the challenges which face our planet. We watched a short clip about polar ice melting and were very enthusiastic when writing our own ‘save the polar bears’ posters! We thought about ways we could help the environment and it was lovely to hear some of the children’s responses, they had lots to say on the issue!

Next week is a very busy week with Christingle making on Tuesday, a dress rehearsal to the school on Wednesday, our nativity to parents on Thursday at 2pm for parents and then a Christmas Fair on Friday; we can’t wait!

Notices.

PARTY FOOD: At the end of Christmas term, each class holds a party for the children within class after lunchtime; this year’s will be on Thursday 19^th December. At home-time today, there will be a ‘sign-up’ sheet hanging from our school gate, so that parents can decide which item of party food they would like to contribute to the party. In the older classes, the children are given the choice as to what they would like to bring, however in Class One we let the parents choose. Options include everything from providing a bottle of squash or pack of paper plates, to providing some cooked chicken nuggets! Be sure to get in quick as the sign-up sheet tends to fill up quickly! We ask that parents bring their food item in on the morning of Thurs 19^th please. Cooked food options (e.g. mini party pizzas/ chicken nuggets etc) need to be cooked at home please and we will store them in the fridge in school until party time. A big thank you in advance!

NATIVITY TICKETS: We still have a few children in class who have not yet ordered tickets for ‘Whoops-a-Daisy Angel’ next Thursday. If you would like to watch your child perform in our nativity at 2pm, please book at the school office so that we know how many seats to provide.

We have been busy in maths this week learning all about time. We have had many an exciting game of “what’s the time Mr Wolf?”

We started the week by thinking about ways in which we measure time and we tried to guess how long one minute was by shutting our eyes and counting to 60 in our heads.   We also had lots of ‘1 minute challenges’ to see what we could get done in a minute and soon realised that this is not a great deal of time at all! Later in the week, we began working on o’clock times and had lots of fun in groups playing ‘what’s the time Mr Wolf?’

In geography we have been learning all about animals and habitats creating columns and sorting animals into hot and cold habitats.

PE has challenged all of us this week, we are spending from now until Christmas learning choreography for a special dance we will perform to the older children. Rockin’ Robin is now in all of our heads and the children have created some bird inspired wonderful moves to the song!

Our Christmas nativity is now under way and we started rehearsals today. All Reception have chosen their parts for their acting and the Year Ones will be the narrators to tell the story. Most costumes are provided by school, however we will send out letters next week if your child needs tights or additional items for their role. We will also send out lines for children if they have lots to learn.

If you were not able to attend our book fair this Friday, never fear, you will have another opportunity on Monday both before and after school!

A big thank you also to all children who have been awarded badges and have brought them back!

We wish you a peaceful and joyful weekend and look forward to Monday.

Hi everyone, this week we have had lots of fun thinking about hot and cold things. In science we have been busy making predictions and conducting investigations to find out what happens when things get cold. We experimented with water, fairy washing up liquid, bubble bath, oil and vinegar, to discover which might make a good ice skating rink for our class Lego men.  The ice rink had to be strong and very solid and so we made predictions about which would be best.  We had great fun checking out our results from the freezer and then thought about the four seasons and how the temperature around our school might change.  

In RE, we have been thinking about how we can use our value of generosity to help others and have also been reading some Bible stories about how Jesus showed generosity.

In Year One, we have been very busy taking part in lots of ‘learning quizzes’ so we look forward to sharing their results with the year one parents at parents evening.  All children should be coming home today with a yellow sheet, informing you of when your parents evening is.  As teachers, we always endeavour to give all parents their preferred time slot, however this is not always possible.  Should you lose your slot, the lovely ladies in the school office also have a copy of the time slots so you can also ask them.

Have a lovely weekend everyone and thank you all very much for your generous children in need donations.  Be sure to check your school news-letter and school website soon, to see how much we managed to raise this year!