Blog Author: Amy Curtis

We celebrated Christmas Jumper Day by coming to school in our Christmas/winter jumpers. We raised money for Save the Children - we discussed what this charity does and how our donations help others. As part of our Christmas Jumper Day celebrations, we designed our own Christmas jumpers, using a…

We discussed the features of fiction and non-fiction texts. We found out that fiction books are made up stories containing fictional characters, whereas non-fiction books provide information and contain lots of facts about real things. After looking at some examples together, we worked in…

We represented the numbers 4 and 5 using different objects in a five frame. Using the five frame to support our understanding, we were able to explain that if the frame is full there must be 5 objects and if the five frame is missing one, there must be 4 . 

We used our hands and sponges to create menorah art, as part of our learning about the festival of Hanukkah. We carefully positioned our fingers to create nine candles before adding the flames to the candles using a sponge. We discussed the significance of the menorah to Hanukkah. 

We learnt that we can use positional language (e.g. in, on, behind, in front) to describe the position of objects. We followed instructions to demonstrate our understanding of this vocabulary. We then used the vocabulary ourselves to describe the position of the teddy bear.

We used our phonics to identify the initial sound in different words, before writing the corresponding grapheme. Some of us challenged ourselves to write CVC words by segmenting. We are becoming more confident when applying our phonics knowledge to spell!

We created leaf rubbings using leaves from our environment and wax crayons. We discussed what colours the leaves of deciduous trees change to in autumn and chose appropriate colours to complete our art. 

We went on a shape hunt in our outdoor environment, searching for circles and triangles. We discussed the properties of these shapes, including the number of sides and corners. We managed to find lots in our environment, working as a team!

We arranged harvest vegetables to create still life art. We worked together as a team to place the vegetables in position before using an iPad to take our own photographs of our art work. 

We went on a walk around our school environment to observe signs of autumn. We discussed the weather, the changes we could see to the trees and we also discussed the warm clothes we were wearing. We noticed lots of the trees in our school grounds had started to change colour, and the leaves had…

We looked at images of Hanley in the past and present and compared the similarities and differences. We then sorted the images into groups based on our knowledge of how Hanley has changed over time.

We made careful observations of a range of natural objects, including shells, pebbles, sticks and leaves. We discussed the different shapes, textures and colours that we could see. After this, we selected which resource we wanted to draw with, before carefully drawing our chosen objects. This was…