TOPIC - Exploring the World

Kingfishers have had a great start to the year and we have been so impressed with how well the children  have come back to school keen and ready to learn.  We have started our new half termly topic 'Exploring the World' and have been looking at the book 'Beegu' by Alexis Deacon. This is a lovely book about an alien who lands on Earth and doesn't quite understand how everything works. The children have engaged brilliantly with the book and have written postcards home as if they were Beegu using lots of adjectives and practising using exclamation marks.  Continuing the theme of exploring, we have been looking at explorers in our history lessons and the children have been learning about contemporary explorers such as Dame Ellen MacArthur as well as those from the past such as Matthew Henson and Christopher Columbus.  We have been thinking about the difference between the recent past and hundreds of years ago using timelines to help the children's understanding. The children have been great at discussing what is the same and what is different about the past and present and are always ready to contribute their ideas and ask lots of questions. 

In Maths we have been looking at addition and subtraction and the children have been busy using practical resources as well as practising setting out calculations more formally.   In Science we have started our new topic, 'Animals Including Humans', and have been naming parts of the human body. We have also been looking at our senses and the children had great fun taste testing different types of food to decide whether they were salty, sweet, sour or bitter. 

In other subjects the children have started doing gymnastics in PE, they have been looking at beats and rhythm in music and started to learn a football chant (it's quite catchy so apologies in advance) and in Art we have started to look at print making. The children created a beautiful artwork made up of all their individual hand prints which was messy but looks fantastic in our classroom.  In PSHE we have been thinking about some of our successes and our future goals, and how to achieve these. 

We also had a very exciting visit earlier this week from Henry the hedgehog! The children learnt a bit about hedgehogs' habits and habitats and were able see Henry up close, except when he was curled up in a ball! We were very proud of how amazingly they behaved during the visit as they stayed quiet the whole time so as not to scare Henry. 

Overall, it has been a busy couple of weeks and we have fitted a lot in. Well done Kingfishers!