Holly Class w/b 31st October 2022

We have had a brilliant week back together in Holly Class. We have been exploring all things pumpkins and enjoyed looking at and playing with pumpkins of all shapes, sizes and colours. We generated some descriptive vocabulary together at the start of the week and tried to solve the mystery of the green and white pumpkin - why did it look so different?! Lots of interesting ideas were shared and the Year 1 children went on to use their descriptive vocabulary to write some fabulous poems. After reading the story Pumpkin Soup, our role play quickly became a very busy kitchen with lots of menus being written and orders being taken! 

In our phonics lessons this week Year 1 have learnt the tricky words 'thought' and 'through' as well as starting to learn the alternatives for the 'oo' phoneme - the children learnt 'ew' and 'ue' and will continue with this next week. The Reception children learnt the tricky words 'and' and 'to' this week and have been practising recognising and reading these around our classroom environment. They have also consolidated all the phonemes they have learnt so far and the digraph 'ck'. 

In maths Year 1 have been problem solving using their addition skills. They have worked on word problems and missing number problems and learnt different strategies to solve these. I have been very impressed with how they are using the part part whole and bar model methods to find solutions to the problems. The Reception children have been playing lots of practical addition games and working on finding 'how many altogether'. 

We have learnt about the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama in art this week. She is famous for adding spotty patterns to all of the sculptures and paintings she creates and some of the work focussed on pumpkins. Inspired by this, the children painted their own pumpkins and used different tools to create their own spotty pattern. We now have a wonderful pumpkin gallery hanging in the classroom! 

We have enjoyed lots of learning outside this week. On Wednesday we were busy gardeners and prepared the flower beds around school for planting bulbs. The children enjoyed working out which the weeds were that needed pulling up and digging the ground over. They were also excited to find some bulbs already planted in there and learnt how to spot if they were already growing. On Friday, Mrs Shiels treated us to a campfire in readiness for bonfire night this weekend. We heard the story of Francis the firefly and learnt all about how to stay safe around a fire, as well as being treated to a toasted marshmallow!