This week in class we have been celebrating Christmas all week! On Monday the children were treated to a fantastic Panto in the school Hall which they thoroughly enjoyed! They also finished off their Christmas Crafts and sang some carols.  On Tuesday we had a lovely Christmas Dinner together and then some nice Christmas songs with the staff band in the adventure playground. Wednesday was our Christmas party day, the children had party games in the morning, sang carols in the afternoon and had a visit from Santa and a disco. Today has been our Sponsored Elf Run day. We all dressed up as Elves and danced the day away to raise money for our new Hydrotherapy Pool. The children have had such a lovely week! Tomorrow marks the end of our term and we will be celebrating with our usual Christmas Nativity in the afternoon. Have a lovely holiday everyone! Merry Christmas!

This week the highlight of our week this week was our class Christmas Panto. For months now we have been practicing for our class Panto with our friends from Grace’s Class and it finally happened on Tuesday. The performance was in honor of Mrs Stokle and Miss Lambert, who are both retiring next week. We will miss them both and wanted to mark their Retirement with a special version of Jack and the Beanstalk.

The children have practiced weekly since September – learning songs, lines, making props and thinking of additions to the script. We even did some outside filming in special places to add in. And we have to say, they were FANTASTIC! Well done everyone – we are very proud of all your hard work and you performed excellently! West End here we come!

 

This week we have been really busy practising for our Christmas Panto ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. We have been rehearsing most days and will perform for a small audience next week. We will let you know how it goes!

The children have also been getting messy exploring some different textures this week. We love to get messy and explore. It helps us to concentrate better when we can have sensory breaks. Then we can focus on our other learning.

We have learned how to write a,s,m and this week: d. In class we use the Read, Write Inc rhymes to help us remember how to form the letters. We used the Smartboard, chalk and whiteboards to practice writing the letter d. In class the children are also working on sorting initial letter sounds of the same letters we have learned to write.

We also had our Advent Assembly on Wednesday this week. The children loved the music and of course the turning on of the main BIG Christmas Tree lights in the school hall!

This week in our class the children have been participating in an exciting Maths Week! Our Maths topic was shapes and we had such fun learning about them. The children were making shapes with lolly sticks, shaving foam and finding them in the foam. They played competitive games and learned some new shapes with really difficult names like pentagon and hexagon! The children enjoyed colouring shape pizzas and using playdough to make shapes using playdough shape mats. Some of the children have been enjoying using tracing paper, it’s like magic!

We decided to put on a Christmas Panto for our friends in another class. The children have been practicing this week learning songs and dances with Grace’s class. They are thoroughly enjoying dressing up and performing.

 

This week we have had another very spooky week in class celebrating Halloween in and around school. On Monday we had a trip to our School Yurt and pinned the nose on the very silly witch, then we enjoyed hot chocolate and toasted marshmallows by the fire.

We have also carried on with our Halloween crafts, collecting and painting leaves to make into ghosts and we have carved our pumpkins and made some fantastic faces on them to go outside along with our spooky door. We are very excited in the hope that our door will win the ‘best dressed door’ competition – fingers crossed!

Our lovely Zack received our class certificate this week for exceptional behavior in class. Zack is maturing into a lovely boy and we are so proud of him for always giving his best, even though it is sometimes tricky for him. Well Done Zack, keep up the good work.

Next week is half term and we will return to school on Monday the 1st of November.

We all hope you have a lovely, restful half term and look forward to seeing you all when we return to school.

Apologies for our late Blog! We have been so busy as you can see!

Last week we celebrated World Animal Day on Monday by learning all about animals in the African Jungle and cutting and sticking some on our own jungle scene. Some children even tried drawing their own. We themed our Maths games this week around African animals and the other big theme we had which was Harvest!

On Wednesday we celebrated Harvest Festival with a Special Bake Off Assembly where each class chose a country to make a special Harvest food item to be judged by Mrs Stokle and Mr Rollings. Our class made Potato Farls from Ireland. The children had a fabulous time hand mashing the potatoes and cooking the special bread.

We also had a visit from an Army Truck this week and the children got to sit in it! They were very excited!

In Science the children experimented trying to melt the fruit from Handa’s Surpise out of the ice it had been frozen in. They used warm water, syringes, and some even resorted to rubbing it! The children also did some lovely fruit printing as well.

We have also started work on our Halloween themed door for next week’s Halloween celebrations by making some ghosts, pumpkins and scary spiders.

Finally we took some lovely ‘jailbird’ themed photos for our class birthday board. We think you’ll agree we have the cutest prisoners around!

This week in our class we have been working on our Africa topic. The children have been learning about lions and making lion faces for our class display by painting paper plates and tearing and cutting different materials to stick on as a mane. They have produced some beautiful work!

We have also been painting circles on old scrap paper and plastic bottle ends to make recycled flowers for our recycled art display. Our children are getting much better at apinting with brushes.

In Maths the children have been learning to play Tic Tac Toe and Snakes and Ladders. They have been doing some fabulous counting!

The children have enjoyed some Sensory Fun based on their English text Handa’s Surprise. They explored fruit and playdough as well as making tracks with some safari animals. We also practiced cutting and matching the animals from the story to the fruit they stole.

It has been another very busy week in class, never a dull moment!

What a great week we have had in our class learning all about recycling for World Recycling Week. We have learned all about the things we can recycle and what we can’t. We know now why we recycle and we have our own class recycling box!

The children have been doing lots of fine motor activities this week like colouring recycling symbols, writing skills and even using fine brushes to paint some fruit from our story Handa’s Surprise. We have some very skilled painters in our class. They have also been practicing their chopping and grating skills in Food Technology to make some Jollof Rice, which is an African Dish with tomatoes, onion, spices and rice. As our topic is Africa, we made this this week and it was delicious! Very spicy!

The children have made their own paper this week and had a lovely sensory experience in the process. They ripped up the recycling paper in class that they would’ve binned and soaked in water overnight. They then used the blender to make something called paper pulp! It was very slimy! Then the children had to drain all the water from the pulp using screens and by squishing it. They then mixed in some glue and rolled it out into sheets of paper. It’s still drying!

Also this week the whole school was lucky enough to have a visit from La Sonora, a Columbian Band. They LOVED this and thoroughly enjoyed dancing and playing along with the music.

Finally today they ate cake to support The World’s Biggest Coffee Morning and had some tea and coffee (decaf!) as well as enjoying the Mud Kitchen and Sea Shanty Shack this afternoon for some singing.

Very busy and exciting week!