Holly Class - w/b 17th October 2022

We have been celebrating all things autumn in Holly class this week. We have read the story Leaf Man, which showed us how to find leaf people and creatures hiding amongst piles of leaves!! We really enjoyed spending time outside on Monday, admiring the beautiful autumn colours and collecting leaves of all shapes and sizes to make into our own leaf people and creatures that would help us retell the story and explain what happened to Leaf Man in the story. Amongst our piles of autumn goodies we found and made leaf princesses, leaf sharks, leaf lions and even a leaf unicorn! 

In our literacy lessons we have been thinking about what to do with all the lovely apples we picked last week. I challenged the children to come up with ideas themselves and make some posters showing what they would like to make - you will see some of the ideas in our photos - apple crumble was a popular choice! The Year 1 children have also been consolidating their work on recounts. After writing a recount together earlier in the week, the children independently recounted our trip to pick apples in a thank you letter. They had to think carefully about using capital letters, full stops and finger spaces in their sentences, as well as extending sentences using 'and' to join ideas. They all did a brilliant job, and we will be delivering the lovely letters soon. 

In phonics this week, the Year 1 children have been learning the alternative graphemes for the 'oa' phoneme - ow, o_e and oe. The Reception children have worked on reading and writing g, o, c and k. 

In our maths lessons this week the Year 1 children have been working on their number bonds to 10 and adding skills. They have used a range of pictorial representations such as part part whole diagrams, bar models and tens frames and also started looking at some word problems. The Reception children have been subitising numbers to 4 and this week we learnt that you can subitise numbers that you hear as well as numbers that you see!

This week we also made the lamps we designed last week, inspired by Florence Nightingale. The children thought carefully about their design criteria and how they could use the materials available to make their lamp sturdy and stand up, as well as giving it a handle. Afterwards the Year 1 children evaluated their work to see if they had done everything on the design criteria and if there was anything they could improve, they were all very pleased with their creations! 

We finished our week with a very wet but fun filled forest school!  We stayed at school because of all the rain and the children had a wonderful afternoon collecting and carrying water and playing with all the tunnels and drain pipes to transport it in different ways. We finished the afternoon by warming up with our apple crumble which we had made earlier in the day - it was delicious! 

Have a wonderful half term everyone!