Spring Term 2022

W/C 21st March 2022

We have continued to enjoy our book about The Tiny Seed, making predictions about where the seeds might travel to and whether the tiny seed will manage to survive. We have used our knowledge of what a plant needs to grow to help us understand why some of the seeds in the story will not be able to grow - they have landed somewhere too hot, too cold, too dry and too wet.

The peas we have been growing in class are now nice green shoots and will be collected on Monday by The Farm Kitchen hot meals provider to be included in the children's lunches next week. It will be exciting to see them on our plates.

The tractor came to see us on Tuesday morning from Dyson Farming.
The children were very excited to see it and learn all about what a tractor does. They each got to sit in the cab and learn about the controls. Photos to follow on Monday.

We continued to make and use play dough in the art area and our practise with this certainly gave us the necessary skills for our baking. On Thursday, to tie in with our farming topic and to link in with our reading of The Little Red Hen, we all made bread rolls and ate them. They were delicious. We carried out an experiment to find out why we add yeast to our bread - by putting a small amount of warm water in a bottle with yeast and sugar and putting a balloon over the neck of the bottle. The children ate their bread rolls and watched as the yeast started to ferment, releasing carbon dioxide and inflating the balloon.

In Maths, we have been exploring doubles. We have been trying to match patterns on butterfly wings, spots on ladybirds and rolling dice to try and make doubles. We learned that some numbers are made of doubles and some (like 1,3 and 5) aren't.

The tadpoles are continuing to grow at a rapid pace and the children have been doing some lovely independent writing about them to go in our very own class tadpole book. Now that their phonics knowledge is getting so good, we will be encouraging them to do as much independent writing as possible.

W/C 14th March 2022

In preparation for our new book which we started reading today (The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle) we have been comparing different seeds, learning how a plant germinates and what we need to do to plant a seed. We have also been looking at seed dispersal - finding out the different ways that seeds are spread around - by wind, water and animals (sticking to their fur and also in their poo when they have eaten the fruit).
We have planted runner beans and sunflowers and will be planting our very own tiny seeds next week - cress.

We are very excited that a tractor is going to visit us at school on Tuesday next week (March 22nd).

In our art area, we have been making and using play dough to create sculptures - I have seen some weird and wonderful creations this week - the children have really been enjoying it so we will continue with this next week.

In Maths, we have been exploring number 7. We have been making towers of 7 cubes, using red and white cubes to show and record that there are lots of different ways to make 7.

In P.E. we are continuing to practise our throwing and catching skills using large balls. It was lovely to be able to do this outside in the sunshine today.

I brought some frogspawn into the classroom on Monday and the children have loved watching it change - from tiny dots, to bigger dots to dots with tiny tails and... this morning when we arrived at school... tadpoles!!!

W/C 7th March 2022

This week we have been continuing our farming topic:
We used Google maps to see where Sleaford is and how many farms there are nearby. The children were fascinated to see the aerial and street view pictures of their school.
We have looked at different farm vehicles - tractor, combine harvester and asparagus picker and compared them to old farming methods like using shire horses to pull ploughs.
We are very excited that a tractor is going to visit us at school on March 22nd.

In our art area, we have been using vegetables and paint to print pictures. The children have loved experimenting with the different patterns and shapes the vegetables made.

In Maths, we have been exploring more and less. The children used pizza toppings to help them - seeing if they had more or less than their friends.

Having finished reading our book "I will not ever, never eat a tomato", the children tried to trick the main character Lola into eating broccoli and lemons by creating their own great names and descriptions for these foods. Lemons are now known as Sundrops - these fall from the sky, are caught by a man with a net who puts them into a box and delivers them to your home in a Tesco van and broccoli is a whole variety of different kinds of trees from exciting places. What great imaginations they have!

Tuesday afternoon saw a visit to school from a fire engine. We all took turns going outside to learn about all the different things that are kept on the fire engine.

In P.E. we are continuing to practise our throwing and catching skills using large balls.

As part of our Spring topic, last week we talked about different kinds of eggs, including frogspawn. The children are very excited about the frogspawn that I will be bringing into school on Monday. We are hoping to watch it transform into tadpoles and then into froglets.

W/C 28th February 2022

This week, we have been continuing to look at Spring. We have been closely watching the plants growing in our class - and were very excited to see that the daffodil flowers have now opened. We have been drawing and painting tulips.
We have learned the names of some baby farm animals (calf, foal, lamb, piglet, kid, chick and duckling). We have been understanding where our milk comes from and looking at different kinds of eggs.

To reflect our new learning, our classroom farm shop now stocks eggs as well as fruit and vegetables.

In Maths, we have been exploring ordinality - using our staircase patterns to understand that each number is one more than the previous one, and one less than the next number. eg: 5 is one more than 4 and 4 is one less than 5.

We have continued to read our book "I will not ever never eat a tomato" which led to a surprise discovery for some of the children that 'mash' is made from potatoes. The children had a go at mashing potatoes themselves.
The book describes how Lola's big brother Charlie tricks her into eating food she doesn't like by giving them different names. Your children will now know that carrots are actually orange twiglets from Jupiter, peas are green drops from Greenland, mashed potato is cloud fluff, fish fingers are ocean nibbles eaten by mermaids and tomatoes are actually called moon squirters.

It was great to see the children dressed up for World Book Day on Friday and they had a lovely afternoon sharing stories with children from our Year 6 class.

W/C 21st February 2022

It was lovely to see everyone back after Half-term.
This term we are focussing on Spring and this week we began to look at the first signs of Spring - animals coming out of hibernation, new animals and birds being born, trees starting to grow new leaves as well as the first flowering plants.

In Maths, we looked at quantity - comparing 2 sets of objects to see whether they were equal or if one group had more or fewer than the other. We learned that the colour, size and type of object is irrelevant when comparing quantity.

We began our new book this week by tasting some different fruits and vegetables. We talked about which ones we liked and which ones we did not like. This led us on to our new book: I Will Not Ever Never Eat A Tomato - about a little girl who is a very fussy eater. The children were very enthusiastic tasters and were all prepared to try everything - mushroom, carrot, cucumber, courgette and pineapple.

To build on our Literacy and Topic work, we have created our very own farm shop in the classroom, where the children have been busy buying and selling fruit and vegetables.

W/C 7th February 2022

In Literacy, we finished reading our story and discovered how Little Red defeated the wolf using ginger beer! The children were fantastic at sequencing and retelling the story - we have some very dramatic storytellers in our class.

This week in Maths, we have taken a break from our number work to focus on weight and capacity. The children have been using small and large sets of scales both inside and outdoors to compare the weight of objects using the language light, lighter, lightest and heavy, heavier, heaviest. We have also been talking about whether containers are full, half-full, nearly full, empty, nearly empty or half-empty. We have been using containers of rice or water to demonstrate our capacity knowledge.

Following on from our work on the Antarctic, we switched our attention to the Arctic Circle, and were able to make comparisons between the two Poles - looking at the diferent types of animals in each .

W/C 31st January 2022

We have continued reading our story 'Little Red'. We made predictions about what might happen - thinking about the advice we would give to Little Red if we were one of the talking trees.  We learned about wolves and worked together to write a description of a wolf. The part of the story where Little Red talked to Grandma about "what big ears you have" made us think about our 5 senses and to finish the week off, we came up with our own cunning plans to stop the wolf from eating Little Red. We can't wait to find out what happens in our story next week - will Little Red get eaten or will he be able to stop the wolf?

In Maths, we have been developing our understanding of numbers beyond 5 - how they are 5 and 'a bit more '. We looked at 6 and 7 - using our 'fast fingers' to see who could show the numbers the quickest way. We used the song 5 Little Men in a Flying Saucer to start us off but soon found we had too many aliens to fit in one 5-seater spaceship.

We have continued our learning about Antarctica and penguins and have been experimenting with how to make ice. Next week we will be travelling to the North Pole to see how the Arctic is different to the Antarctic. Our focus will be on polar bears.

We finished our week by celebrating Chinese New Year - we made dragon masks and did some dragon dancing, tried using chopsticks, tried on some traditional Chinese clothes and even helped Nursery to chop some vegetables to make a stir fry.

W/C 24th January 2022

 We have started our week with revealing our new story 'Little Red.' This story is based on the traditional tale 'Little Red Riding Hood' but has lots of twists throughout. We discovered that one of the main characters is Little Red. He is a boy called Thomas but people call him Little Red because his bedroom is full of red items. The children really enjoyed finding this out and started to draw their own bedrooms with red items inside. To extend this interest we have set up our book corner as Little Red's bedroom (see photos). The children have only enjoyed listening to the beginning of the story and we look forward to reading the rest next week.

In Maths, we have been developing our understanding of number bonds to 5. We used the rhyme '5 Little Speckled Frogs' to help us with this.

We have started learning about Antarctica. We have located Antarctica on our huge map and on the globe. Next week, we will continue learning about Antarctica, including penguins!

W/C 17th January 2022

We have had a very busy week. We continued talking about families and how every family is unique, using paint to draw ourselves. We also investigated how we change as we grow up and what is needed for our body to grow in a healthy way.
We explored a variety of vegetables, discussing their properties and how they are healthy.
Following a number of interests we have also made cakes with play dough, using rolling pins and cutters for our creations.
Towards the end of the week we explored and discussed ice and how it forms, whilst using the hammers to save our frozen bears.
On Friday we went for a walk to see seasonal changes, discussing why we needed to wear clothes to keep warm. And to our surprise we returned to find superheroes had taken over the hall. The children thoroughly enjoyed dancing with Spiderman, the Flash and Wonder Woman.

W/C 10th January 2022

Another superhero crazy week!

This week we have created our own superhero capes using fabric and fabric pens. We also had to use our superpowers to rescue some Lego characters from ice. We demonstrated some fantastic sharing during this activity as we did not have enough ice blocks for every child to have one each.

We have also been learning about old and new toys. We started the week by exploring and discussing the toys that each child brought in from home. We explored the materials of each one, discovering materials such as plastic and fabric. We also explored why some toys need batteries. We then read 'Lost in the Toy Museum' which introduced us to old toys. We also discovered what a Museum is, followed by Mark Bamford visiting us from Sleaford Museum. We loved learning about some of the toys that our great-grandparents may have played with. We enjoyed playing with some of these toys and had a fun and educational afternoon!

 In Maths, we have been exploring different arrangements of dot patterns. We have been using our spatial language to describe each dot pattern. We have learnt some new vocabulary such as, diagonal and straight.

 Next week, we will be finishing our superhero work and on Friday we have a very special visitor visiting us... it is TOP SECRET!

W/C 4th January 2022

Happy New Year and welcome back!

The children have settled back really well and have enjoyed sharing their experiences of Christmas. Thank you to those who sent us in photos as this really supported our discussions.

This week has been all about superheroes! Our new story is about a little girl called Super Milly and she wants to be Superhero but has no superpowers. However, she eventually finds out that she has the best superpower of all... her super-kindness! We hooked the children into this story by receiving a suitcase full of superhero costumes. We have not even read the story yet but we have taken part in lots of superhero activities to spark our imaginations. Some of the activities have included:
- mask making
-drawing superheroes
-building base camps
-lots of superhero role-play

In Maths, we have reviewed the word 'equal' and practised finding equal quantities. We now really understand what this means and is now part of our everyday vocabulary!

Next week, we are excited to welcome Mark Bamford from Sleaford Museum. He will be brining in a variety of Elizabethan and Victorian toys for us to play with.

Reminders:

P. E days are now Wednesday and Friday