This week, Year One designed their very own Super Veggie Superheroes! From lightning-fast carrots to broccoli defenders of the planet, the imagination on display was truly inspiring.
Each child created a unique veggie-themed superhero and after completing their masterpieces, the children took part in a gallery walk, proudly showcasing their artwork and admiring their classmates’ creations.
Today we were lucky enough to welcome our very first expert visitor of the expedition – the brilliant author and illustrator Phil Sheppard!
Phil shared some of his fantastic stories with us, and we especially loved The Worm Book. There were plenty of laughs and lots of fun as he brought the story to life while reading aloud.
Afterwards, we took part in a draw along where we learned how to create our very own superheroes. The children did an amazing job and showed off some fantastic creativity!
To make the day even more special, we had the opportunity to buy our very own signed book by Phil – a real treasure to keep.
We all agreed that Phil truly deserved one of our special Community Hero awards for his craftsmanship and the quality of his work. What an inspiring start to our expedition!
As part of our exciting Hook Week, the children dived into the story of Supertato! We had so much fun meeting the brave superhero potato and the mischievous Evil Pea. The children loved joining in with the story, spotting the clues, and talking about what makes a superhero.
Inspired by Supertato’s adventures, we then got creative and designed our very own super veggies! From carrots with capes to broccoli with superpowers, the children let their imaginations run wild. Each creation was unique and showed off their brilliant ideas.
It was a fantastic way to kick-start our new topic and get everyone excited about the learning ahead. The classroom is now full of colourful, heroic vegetables keeping an eye out for any pesky peas!
In Class Three we have been studying and taking inspiration from the American artist Deborah Shapiro. She uses newspapers and magazines to create wildlife collage artwork. It was so much fun spotting the hidden words and images within the artwork during our gallery walk in the classroom.
We worked together to create our class collage.
We are incredibly proud of our beautiful work!
Last week, our story ‘The Little Mermaid’ took us under the sea. We decided to create some beautiful paintings of the sea. We used powder paints and took our time to mix different shades of blue. The children enjoyed completing this task and they worked conscientiously, taking their time, which resulted in work to be proud of!
Thinking back to last week as we continue with our current case study; “Where in the world will this story take you?” The week began with a visit from a special owl, who dropped by with some postcard clues, which had photos of various castles and palaces from around the world on the front, where our mystery key character “C” may have visited? This helped to hook the children in to our next text Cinderella.
To excite and engage the children further they created beautiful crowns using creative materials during our “Tranquil Tuesday” Crew and off we went on an adventure to a castle to enjoy and immerse ourselves in our new key text, it was very exciting!
The children carefully observed the illustrations in the story and other texts about castles and used the inspiration to shape another piece of beautiful artwork for our final product. They also drew their own castles outdoors in their play and experimented with fairytale castle themed stampers indoors in our painting provision.
In our Maths learning the children explored 2d shapes, thinking about how they look and using words to describe their shape and properties during a dice game. I modelled to the children how they could use the shapes to build/ create a castle. Some of the children copied the examples or my model but most created the most beautiful 2d shape castles and named the shapes they had used, thinking about why they would be useful for certain parts of the building. Here are some examples; “The drawbridge is a rectangle because it’s long and can go up and down” or “These are my pointy roofs, they’re three triangles” and “My windows are circles”. Just look at some of our beautiful work.
This week Class Six have been working as artists and creating rocket and space art inspired by Peter Thorpe. We worked with the tricky medium of chalk on black paper to create some stunning artwork!
We think the children have outdone themselves and the art is incredible!
This week began with Nursery taking a trip into the woods (within school grounds) to explore and experience what it would be like to be inside a forest as part of our first case study; Where in the world will this story take you? Our first anchor text of this case study is the classic fairytale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The children were so excited to go on an adventure and were also a little bit nervous about who or what they would find in the woods, as they explored using their senses.
Once inside the woods the children were relieved to find there weren’t any wolves, bears or Gruffalo’s! We used our senses to think about what we could see, hear, smell and feel with both our hands and feet. The children were read the story inside the woods to set the scene and bring the story to life. They really enjoyed it and listened attentively whilst holding their sticks, leaves, flowers and ferns.
Once back in the classroom the children shared thoughts of their experience and completed a class sense map, noting down ideas of what they could see, hear, smell and feel. There were some beautiful thoughts and sentences that were communicated from the adventure which really helped the children to understand what a forest is. We have used this knowledge and experience to inspire large scale pieces of artwork, which will be part of our final product in terms of creating a story setting. The children also watched a short video of a virtual tour through Sherwood Forest, in Nottingham, where they tried to spot Robin Hood! They then compared that to the experience of our school woods in Norton and talked about what was the same and what was different? They soon realised that forests were much bigger with larger trees, thicker bushes and more undergrowth. They also learnt that not only animals but people could also possibly live in a forest like in olden times. You have been great geographers Nursery! Here’s a sneak peak of our artwork…
To immerse and hook our Nursery children into our latest learning expedition “Once upon a time- who is hiding in the pages of this book?” We hosted a Fairytale Tea Party, with real china tea cups and where everyone came in their finest party clothes! The sun shone for us and the children really enjoyed spending special time together experiencing new things. To help the children understand what happens and how people behave at these splendid events, we first learnt a tea party song to the tune of “If you’re happy and you know it”. Why don’t you ask them to sing it to you?
In every good fairytale plot there is a mystery object that helps the hero or villain to succeed or cause mayhem! The children took part in a mystery object hunt, finding and naming the objects as they found them.
To embed the children’s understanding of these objects further and bring them to life we played a game of Pass the Parcel with the real objects hidden inside. This time the children discussed what the object was, how it feels and what it could be used for? The children had lots of fun and were really respectful and kind to each other by passing the parcel quickly and carefully to their friends.
As the week drew to a close the children work independently or in pairs as they wished, to decorate mystery objects using a variety of mediums such as felt tips, collage and special watercolour pencils. The importance of staying within the lines of the pictures was modelled to the children to help keep the shape of the mystery object, meaning that we would really need to be “Concentrating Crocodiles”. It was lovely to see the children who wanted to work in pairs, working out what they would like to create and choosing different children to work with, who wanted to create the same thing – being “Teamwork Tigers”. This beautiful artwork will be used to help create our final product. Well done Nursery, you were very pleased and proud of your beautiful work, as was I!
