PIET MONDRIAN

By Jodie Buss21st January 2024

We have been busy this week learning all about our focus artist of the term Piet Mondrian! Born in 1872 (a long long time ago!) and a pioneer of abstract art Piet styled his artwork around bold colours using block prints to create art! The children loved researching his style and looking at various pieces he has created! This inspired our children to create some of their own pieces of art in a similar style! The children enjoyed mixing and making their own colours on a painting palette and worked together to produce some masterpieces!

 

THIS WEEK IN F2…

By Jodie Buss21st January 2024

A few snippets of a week in F2… we have been exploring numbers to 5 using Numicon, mark making and name writing, exploring ice and the changing of the seasons outside, designing and creating our own houses, making cement mixers, constructing bungalows, flats and caravans and most of all having lots of fun and laughter with our friends! We have also been learning the story of ‘The Three Little Pigs’ using our talk for writing signifiers, retelling the story to each other and learning all about our focus artist…Piet Mondrain and the mastery of block painting! (see next post!)

 

HUFF PUFF EXPERIMENT!

By Jodie Buss21st January 2024

This afternoon F2 decided to test the best materials to use for building a house! After reading the story of ‘The Three Little Pigs’ in literacy, the children had a few questions about house building. If we were going to build our own house would we use straw? And if not, why not? Would we use sticks? or bricks? Lego? We decided to test a house made from each material that we had built and see if it was strong or weak. In order to test the house we wanted to see if it would withstand a big blow… from perhaps a BIG BAD WOLF! Using a hair dryer we made a strong ‘blow’ from the wolf and tested out our theories of strong or weak materials. We made a table of our predications and started our experiment! We reached the conclusion that the strongest materials to use would be either brick or Lego, as they did not move after the big windy blow! Straw, paper and sticks however, did not hold out so well! What a fun afternoon, with lots of giggles and mess!!!

 

F2 Builder Day!

By Jodie Buss21st January 2024

A few snaps from our builder ‘WOW’ day! The children had great fun learning all about the roles involved in house development, from designing houses to building them! We became architects and thought about what our house would have and the materials we could use. We got to work building as a team and made a fabulous house with windows, walls, a roof, chimney and a garden! Unfortunately whilst we were out having our lunch over dinner someone came into the classroom and blew our house down!!! The children were quite puzzled by who could have done this!? This led to an investigation… and we soon found the culprit! The BIG BAD WOLF! The children decided they wanted to question the wolf and find out why he had blown down our house… The wolf was taken in for hot-seating and the children thought of some fantastic questions! The children came to the conclusion themselves that really the wolf wasn’t all that bad and in actual fact was just quite lonely and needed a friend. The children helped the wolf make his own house as he promised to not blow anymore houses down! The children all looked fabulous in their builder costumes!

Foundation Stage Hub

By Jodie Buss5th December 2023

The children had lots of fun today making lots of designs on their gingerbread man.

They used their fine motor skills to carefully ice and put on decorations in all different colours. They could even eat them at the end which they all enjoyed.

   

Jack Frost!

By Jodie Buss29th November 2023

The first thing our children noticed upon arriving at school this morning was the icy white frost that had covered our outdoor area! One child announced as he walked in “Jack Frost is here!”

This inspired us to get our coats on and go on a season walk, seeing if we could spot anymore signs of the arrival of Jack Frost! We got wrapped up and discussed the clothing we needed to wear at this time of year and headed out on our season walk! We loved exploring the frost with our senses, the touch of the cold, the smell of the fresh chilly air… some of us even enjoyed the taste of the cold ice!!! We noticed how the frost had left sparkly patterns on the floor, the leaves and on all our outdoor toys! We headed out around the school grounds and felt how hard the ground was and listened to the crunching of the grass under out feet!

This walk led to lots of discussions about what frost is and what happens to puddles and water outside when the frost comes! We discussed when we have seen frost before, lots of us have seen it on our windows or cars! And how we can get rid of it from cars! We talked about its glittery shiny appearance but how it also can be slippery and we must tread more carefully!

We loved exploring nature in the frost and finding leaves with beautifully sparkly patterns! Mrs Buss played a warm up leaf game with us… this was lots of fun as we got to find as many leaves as we could and warm them up with our hands watching the frost melt!

You must bring a hat!

By Jodie Buss23rd November 2023

This week Foundation Stage have started their new text, ‘You must bring a hat!’ by Simon Phillip and we have loved reading this text!

The children have been exploring hats, hats and more hats! And have loved looking into hats from all around the world and the many different purposes and occasions for a hat!

We have looked at describing some of the hats we have at home and how they are special to us, using our phonic knowledge to begin to write some cvc words to describe them!

We had the most fun this afternoon when we got to show off our hats on our HAT-WALK and strut our stuff modelling our very own favourite hat!

Keep your eyes posted for our upcoming ‘mad-hatters’ tea party! Invitations and lists to be written…

Art Inspiration…Jackson Pollock!

By Jodie Buss23rd November 2023

Sometimes inspiration hits you and this leads to taking your shoes and socks off and getting a bit messy!

What great fun some of our budding little artists had this morning exploring Jackson Pollocks famous art style ‘drip painting!’ We had talked about some of Pollock’s famous work in in class and looked at how he painted with the music to express his feelings. We looked at how he decided to paint on the floor more freely rather than at tables or on an easel and this appealed to some of our children greatly! They couldn’t wait to create their own Pollock-style masterpieces and had so much fun splatting, pouring, dripping and flicking! The outcomes were quite marvelous and inspired us to all do a bit of Pollock drip painting for our upcoming Christmas cards! We can’t wait to show you!!!

 

F2 Festival of Light!

By Jodie Buss15th November 2023

Wow! What a busy week F2 have had learning all about and celebrating all things Diwali… The Festival of Lights! We have had so much fun exploring our classroom this week, learning all about the story of the first Diwali ‘Rama and Sita’ and immersing ourselves in typical Diwali traditions and celebrations. We have created our own Mendhi hands, Diva pots, explored traditional spices and their smells! Created Rangoli patterns, dressed in special clothes and jewellery, practised our mark making skills and even had a visit to the library to find out more amazing facts on Diwali traditions and ceremonies!

It has been a very colourful and fun week, and as usual the children have all loved getting stuck in with our fantastic activities and topic! Next week it’s the start of our new book…’You Must Bring a Hat‘ and don’t forget to bring one in…(a hat that is!)

Goldilocks and The Three Bears!

By Jodie Buss24th October 2023

Following on from introducing our story last week, ‘Goldilocks and The Three Bears’ , this week we have been learning more signifiers in our Talk for Writing sessions and worked together to create our own story maps!

We talked about the main events and characters and sequenced what happened in order together. We loved creating these story maps as groups, discussing the story and helping each other along the way. We showed good pencil control and did some fabulous annotations of Goldilocks and her curly hair!

This week we will be using these story maps to retell and perform the story to the class and begin to write some initial sounds of words!