Wow! We have had a busy few weeks in class one this half term. I have been blown away with all of your hard work!
We enjoyed exploring our talk for writing text ‘At the end of the rainbow’, after discovering a pair of white sparkly wings, a half-eaten apple and some medical cream in our classroom. We wondered if this could be linked to our text and guess what? It did! In the story, the main character, Josie found a magical horse with a broken wing. The vet helped the horse by giving him an apple and applying some cream on his wing. We enjoyed innovating our text and came up with some brilliant new characters, including magical mermaids, Lego men, fluffy rainbow chicks and golden statues!
This week, we started to innovate our new text, a poem ‘Seaside Senses’ by Angela Yardy, which links to our ‘Seaside Rock!’ topic and describes the seaside using the five senses. We listened to sounds from the seaside and explored all of the things that we could see, feel, taste, smell and hear at the seaside and enjoyed linking this to our own happy and fun memories and experiences of going to the beach. We even have our own mini seaside in our classroom with some of the things that we thought about including sand, shells, a starfish and buckets and spades.
In our topic, we have really enjoyed learning all about the seaside and comparing what the beach is like now to what it was like for Victorian children in the past. We developed our collaging skills and created seaside collages using a range of materials.
In addition to using adjectives, similes and alliteration to improve our writing, we have also been working on using synonyms for ‘tired words’ with our synonym sticks for common words. We talked about how to use them appropriately and the difference in our writing has been fantastic!
Alongside our daily phonics sessions, we have also been really engaged with our sound of the day display, which recaps sounds we have learned so far to keep them fresh in our minds, as well as all of the alternative spellings for sounds e.g. i / igh/ ie/ i_e . Every day we add words to the wall – which we stick in our sound book. It is nearly full already!
We have had a real push on spotting and reading split digraphs and our split digraph sunglasses help us to enjoy and remember them!
Our key question in RE this term is ‘what do Christians believe God is like?’. As part of this we are looking at The Parable of the Lost Son. We enjoyed acting out the story using actions and participating in a ‘conscience alley’ in which we thought about what the son, after spending all of his father’s money and ending up poor, alone and hungry, should do.
In our class worship we have been thinking about thankfulness and all the things we have to be grateful for. Here are some of our ideas:
In our science lessons we have been learning all about plants and what they need to survive. We really enjoyed getting our hands dirty when planting cress (which lots of us have now eaten in egg sandwiches!), runner beans and sunflowers. Every morning we look forward to seeing how our plants have grown overnight and observing any changes that might have happened.
At the same time as planting our plants, we also set up an experiment to see what would happen to runner beans when planted differently. We planted our own beans in soil and make sure we water them each day, ensuring they have lots of sunlight. We also planted a bean in soil but have not given it water like the others. We have another bean which we did not plant in soil. Our final test condition is a bean that, unlike the others, receives water every day, but this one stays in the cupboard in the dark. We predicted what might happen to these beans and keep checking their progress.
We have made some fantastic flower artwork and labelled the different parts of plants and their functions including on our display sunflower.
