Ducklings

Ducklings have been celebrating the beginning of a new season this week, Spring. We started our celebration by learning all about Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day. Shrove Tuesday is a Christian festival which is celebrated in many different countries around the World. We made pancakes and added some traditional toppings to taste.

We also learnt about a celebration in Bulgaria called Baba Marta. This is celebrated on the 1st March and on this day, Bulgarian families welcome the new season of Spring and wish great health, good luck and happiness to family and friends.

We have been reading some of the Mr Men and Little Miss stories and are busy creating our own characters linked to our Learner Profile Attributes. We've got a Little Miss Caring, Mr Thinker, Little Miss Open-Minded and a Mr Inquirer. We loved using our imaginations to design our own characters. We have described them and are now busy planning our own stories to show how they show the attribute. We have made a list of things we need to include to make our writing the best it can be! There's so much for us to think about including using our phonics skills, tricky words, handwriting, finger spaces, capital letters, full stops and most importantly making sure our sentences make sense.

Curly caterpillars! Sparrow class are working hard to improve their handwriting and letter formation. We are focusing on letters in the curly caterpillar family (a, c, d, g, o, q) which are all made by starting with the letter 'c'. Look at how hard we are concentrating.

In maths we have been adding and have just started working on subtraction. We have been successful when we use our tens frames to help us. Some of us are starting to spot patterns and making links to help us!

'If we know 7 - 5 = 2 then 17 - 5 = 12'

'We don't need to count all of the counters on our tens frame. There are 10 at the top and 4 more so we have 14 altogether'

Blackbirds

This week Blackbirds have thoroughly enjoyed all of March's celebrations! We spent some time looking at Pancake Day & Shrove Tuesday, dressed up as our favourite characters for World Book Day and researched all about St David's Day! We even wrote our own recipe and made leek soup to celebrate!

This term we have dived straight into our inquiry: Significant events improve understanding of the natural world. We have already spent some time looking into the most recent event that has impacted us all in someway, Storm Eunice! We used our map reading skills to interpret the most and least affected areas of the UK, conducted an experiment to understand how heat is generated and even wrote our own story on how to tame the wind! We have all thoroughly enjoyed our inquiry so far and in teams designed a wind taming machine that we later wrote pitches for to present on Dragons Den!

Woodpeckers

Woodpecker Class have had a fantastic start to their new inquiry: Humans use their scientific understanding of forces to create inventions that impact everyday life. As part of this inquiry, we are reading The Iron Man by Ted Hughes and have spotted a lot of description language, including similes. We have also been drawing portraits of the Iron Man using different shades and tones.

This week, Woodpecker Class welcomed a scientist as part of their inquiry work and the upcoming Science Week. They experimented with magnets and used iron filings to make pictures and got to ask many questions about how magnets and other forces work.

Blue Jays

We have been preparing ourselves for Science week by looking at the water cycle! This links to our new inquiry 'Humans can use science and technology to improve access to energy, food and water'. We named our own water droplet and took them along the journey of the water cycle. This meant we could also use our English skills knowledge by including fronted adverbials. We also conducted an experiment whereby we chose four different types of liquids and observed which one would evaporate the quickest. This observation is still in process and vinegar is currently the quickest liquid to evaporate!

Over the past two weeks, we have also been learning how to swim, which we have thoroughly enjoyed and look forward to every week! We have learnt that it is great to be a risk taker whilst swimming and to just try your best.

Kingfishers

Kingfishers have had a very busy few weeks, finishing off our Central Idea, Geography can impact on the location of human settlement and have been enthralled by the book, Blood on the River. This book has inspired us to look at all of the major rivers of the world and to independently find out more about a river of our choice.

We are excited to start our new Central Idea, Life on Earth is regulated by forces, next week and we have already been asking multiple questions about where our learning journey can take us.

Alongside all of the amazing writing and Inquiry work we have done this week, we have also worked hard in Maths, tackling tricky word problems, using the bar model to help us and we have started to look into fractions.

World Book Day was a massive success and we all thoroughly enjoyed it!

Chaffinch

Forest School

This week during Forest School Woodpecker class have been introduced to some of the tools that are available during a Forest school session. We have been thinking about the safety aspects for each tool and the different types of materials they could use for each tool. Woodpeckers have also been working collaboratively to create their own dens. It was amazing to see them all working together as a team and displaying their learner profile attributes to adapt the structure of the den.