This week in Forest School we worked on our fine motor skills… threading, pushing and pulling natural materials and making our very own nature boards. We went on a nature hunt around the grounds looking for different colours and textures of natural items. We loved discussing the textures, colours and smells of our collections and tried to identify everything we collected…
Foundation Stage look forward to their Forest School Tuesday’s! And today we had great fun making our own perfumes…
We have been noticing the weather changing this week as the seasons begin to change and the world around us starts to grow again, the flowers, the bee’s, the tree’s! It’s all coming to life, the buds appearing and the shoots in the ground beginning to bloom. It’s the little things that you notice when you stop and take time to watch and listen… but these little things make a big picture of what’s happening in the world all around us.
We decided to go on a nature walk around school, looking for things that we could use to make our own perfumes and scents of spring. We talked about different flowers and weeds and collected bits from the ground and around us, using our senses…touch and smell. We talked about textures and scent and made observations of everything we saw.
We collected our findings and brought them back to our Forest School kitchen where we got stuck-in cutting, pulling, mixing, chopping, squashing, picking, stirring, pouring and sieving our very own Spring scents! We added a touch of colour, a splash of glittery magic and a lot of care and love into our recipes!
We compared scents with our friends, some smelt very strong! We discussed what we could smell and which ones we preferred…
What a fantastic day Foundation Stage had becoming scientists and taking part in our very own Science experiments!
In the morning we had a visit from Sublime Science, this was lots of fun and we got to take part in lots of different experiments learning all about chemicals mixing to create reactions and how different elements, like H20, react in different situations!
In the afternoon we carried on the Science fun with some of our parents! We had a carousel of experiments to explore!
We read the ‘Gingerbread Man’ together and the decided to look at what would actually happen if a gingerbread man hit the water? We decided to dunk our gingerbread men and count how many dunks it took before something happened! We estimated the number of dunks we thought it might take and recorded these on a tally chart. We then carefully observed and watched!
We loved planting beans together with our parents! We thought about what beans and seeds need to grow and what would happen if one of these things was substituted. We decided to take away the soil and just give our beans light and water. We placed them in a bag with some wet kitchen towel and stuck them to our classroom windows. We made our predictions and can’t wait to observe them over the next few weeks!
Our favourite experiment of all, was probably making rainbows! This involved a lot of Skittles, so we loved eating some of the rainbow! we placed them next to each other on a plate and added water. We loved seeing the colours run and mix together! We watched very closely as the ‘S’ on the Skittles slowly faded! We thought about what would happen if the water we added was colder or hotter and if this would effect our experiment!
The sun shone for ‘Forest School’ this week as we had great fun in our first session back!
We loved getting our hands dirty and muddy planting and sowing seeds in our outdoor area! We talked about good places to plant seeds and the things they needed to grow. We looked at lots of different texts about Spring and looked out for signs all around us as we planted ready for Summer. This week in Literacy we have been reading ‘Oliver’s Vegetables‘ so we used our knowledge to plant our very own carrots, peas, broad-beans, beetroot and sunflowers! We discussed what we thought might happen to them over the coming weeks and how we would care for them. We had a go at pretending to be sunflowers ourselves, starting as a small seed and shooting up tall with our hands as wide as leaves!
We also had great fun planting some trees, ready to expand our outdoor forest area! We loved finding out about different types of trees, Birch and Oak, and talked about the roots and the very important job they do!
We loved getting physical using trowels, spades and rakes and loved coming together to work as a team!
Year 1 have worked so hard over the past few weeks with their parents to complete all of their online work and live lessons that this week we thought we would do something a little different and more fun!!! So to welcome the February half term in we have been setting daily ‘Home Learning Challenges‘ alongside our live lessons to give our children the opportunity to explore their Literacy, Mathematical and Design talents freely and independently! Mondays challenge was to create their very own ‘Breakfast Masterpiece’ designing their own recipe with their own ingredients and making it independently! Tuesdays Challenge was to ‘up-cycle‘ some of their recycled and using their imagination create and design something unique and special to them so they could express themselves! We can’t wait for Wednesdays ‘Build a Den Day’ and Thursdays ‘Sandwich Artist’ challenge! To celebrate how fantastically our children have done this half term, on Friday we are hosting our very own online ‘Talent Show!!!‘ WATCH THIS SPACE!
Here are a few pictures of our amazing children and their super ‘Home Learning Challenge‘ masterpieces… (Oh and some fun in the snow too!)
After lots of discussions about internet safety and the importance of keeping our personal details and passwords safe, Year 1 have been using their own login details and passwords to access activities and home-learning via Purple Mash. It has taken a bit of practice for us to log on independently but we are getting the hang of it! We have even started to save our own work in our own files. Successfully logging on, accessing learning and saving all independently!
This morning the children in Year 1 created some magnificent ‘Wanted’ posters to find the frightful Snow Queen who captured Kay and Gerda in the story ‘The Snow Queen’.
She had a magical frozen wand and a terrible pointy crown! We discussed and used our fred talk to write down some adjectives to describe her and then put these adjectives into sentences, not forgetting our capital letters, finger spaces and full stops!
Year 1 had so much fun in art this afternoon looking at Icebergs and continuing our research into the Antarctica! We had previously looked at hot and cold colours and explored different tints and tones. Today we followed that up by sketching some icebergs and then creating our very own ICE SCULPTURE! This was so much fun and we explored how to manipulate the light to create dark and light parts and shadows. We also had a very in depth conversation about how ice melts and this lead to a great discussion about the icebergs melting in the Antarctica and we thought about the impact this would have on our planet…
Following on from our ice sculpture…we then used chalk and charcoal to create light and dark highlights and enjoyed smudging both to create different effects…
Year 1 had a fantastic afternoon at Pickering Park looking for signs of Autumn and exploring the great outdoors! We had our very own scavenger hunt and ticked our check list for all the different animals and tree/leaf species we could see and identify! We talked about different types of trees and the size of different leaves. We sketched and observed a variety of different species of tree and talked about why some were bare and some were still ‘evergreen’! We loved joining in with some Forest School games and chants! We took our learning back to the classroom to carry on our tree identification and inspire our very own Autumnal nature area, using all our goodies we had collected on the way!
Hot Seating!!!
Year one had a fantastic time hot seating Geronimo the character from our story by David Walliams! We asked him lots of questions about how it felt to not be able to fly and what it’s like living in the Antarctica. Our Geronimo was a super actor and our audience were spectacular! We followed up our hot seating session by using some brilliant adjectives in our work!
